Search “hiking boots” once and darned if you’re not bombarded with ads for REI, LL Bean, and Dick’s for the next month everywhere you go online. That phenomenon is at the heart of Andrew Stein’s Disruption, a slick, bleeding-edge cautionary tale that explores how algorithms (and the tech behemoths behind them) have seeped into just about every aspect of our lives. But what if instead of boots we could hand our biggest life decisions over to the digital gods? What if Claude became the guru on the mountaintop in those old New Yorker cartoons?
The new program that tech bro Nick (John David Washington) and his brilliant young partner, Raven (Irene Sofia Lucio), have devised aims to tackle life’s most profound questions. Nick slyly recruits his old college buddies ostensibly as early-round investors but really as guinea pigs for his new technology. Should surgeon Barry (Jason Ralph) and his photographer wife Mia (Emma Kikue), overextended despite his sizable income, buy a brownstone? Should college professor Ben (Conrad Ricamora) and his psychoanalyst wife Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson) have a child? And should print magazine guy Paul (Joe Tippett) and his lawyer wife Jill (Elizabeth Stanley), stuck in a marital rut in the suburbs with two young sons, stay together at all?
Nick and Mia think they have the answers — apparently after hacking Nick’s buddies’ passwords and feeding a whole lot of data into their program. The clues are all there. The multiple searches of Paul’s hot, much younger female colleague. The incriminating emails Ben exchanged with a grad student. The mysterious appearance of a book titled The Opportunity of a Lifetime on Barry’s Kindle as he considers sinking $500,000 into Nick’s company instead of a brownstone. Before long, the algo isn’t just gathering evidence and clues, it’s planting seeds for future outcomes. You see enough ads for hiking boots, you might eventually tap “buy.”
The goal, as Raven describes it is to “curate coincidence.” If the algo thinks you’d be happier with your high school sweetheart instead of your husband, why not orchestrate it so that you’re placed next to each other on the same long flight? (And take a cut from the airline while you’re at it?) Stein charts a near-future where we cede not only our privacy but also a good deal of our free will — with only onstage Luddite Suzie sounding the alarm about the dangers. “I hate how technology has made us so connected to everything except ourselves,” she says at one point, while scrolling through her tablet. “I don’t think we have any idea how much we’re being manipulated.”
I wish the same was true of Stein’s script, which seems to take a bright neon-yellow highlighter to its key points so there’s no danger we’ll miss them. But there’s a muddiness to the characterizations and a tendency toward the cliché that frustrates our efforts to connect with his individual stories. The women in particular come off as a status-conscious ciphers, sisters Jill and Mia especially. (Stanley and Kikue make the most of these underwritten roles.) Nick and Raven have an odd push-me-pull-you dynamic until one takes a firm conscientious stand that comes completely out of nowhere. And for some reason, the algo (or Stein) never considers that destined-to-be-a-great-dad Ben might be happier having a kid with the male grad student he quietly dumped instead of the hyper-tolerant wife who seems genuinely ambivalent about bringing children into a messed-up world.
Director Hersh Ellis brings a level of slickness to the production that disguises many of the script’s shortcomings. Zoë Hurwitz’s lavish, high-tech set, with the audience on either side as if staring into mirrored smartphone screens, provides a slick surface for the proceedings. Yana Biryükova’s video projections on the floor and side walls underscore moments of connection, dropped pebbles creating circular wavelets of recognition enhanced by Caroline Eng’s sound design. The visuals allow us to “see” the algorithm operating in real time, picking up clues for future exploitation and dropping seeds that might pay off in the future.
Washington, who made a memorable Broadway debut as Boy Willie in the 2022 revival of The Piano Lesson, brings a similar sly hustler’s energy to Nick, a quick-witted salesman for his new project whose biggest hook is his own armor of success and invincibility. He’s initially well-matched by Lucio, who brings a spiky energy and dagger tongue to a digital-age femme fatale with a PhD in applied math and artificial intelligence. Disruption touches on some timely themes about the ways that technology is reshaping our lives, but too often the aura of intelligence here feels entirely artificial. ★★★☆☆
DISRUPTION
Pershing Square Signature Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through Sept. 27 for $69 to $176