How Do You Stage AI? Disruption Has an Answer.
Artificial intelligence has become the defining obsession of the moment, so it's no surprise it's made its way to the stage. But few productions tackle it with the confidence, or theatrical imagination, of Disruption, a thriller that proves the most unsettling thing about AI isn't what it can do. It's how quickly we've accepted living with it.
I recently wrote a play called Whatever, and we took her for a test drive at the Midtown Theatre Festival. Whatever is about two married couples grappling with their personal struggles whose lives are turned upside down when a rogue AI computer may be about to cause mankind some real problems, and one of them flies the private jet of the man who started it all.
So, I thought, for a kind of palate cleanser, I would check out Disruption at the Signature Theatre, which is about three married couples and their hair-raising run-in with AI.
Kidding aside, one of the motivators for my rushing to the Pershing Square Signature Theatre to catch Disruption was absolutely to check in on something so thematically close to my play. It's also why I went to see Data last winter, which I did not review here but which was also excellent.
Oh, Disruption is fucking excellent.
The elephant in the literal room, the star of the show, not to take anything away from the brilliant cast, is the set. The audience sits on either side of a glowy, shiny rectangle bedazzled with lights and projections of everything from lines of dialogue to illuminated pathways between the actors, and it is mesmerizing. It is as though the characters are inside a giant horizontally held smartphone where we watch them bounce off the walls as well as slide down them, as if they are trapped in a padded cell.
Equally mesmerizing is Hersh Ellis' direction of these eight characters, whom he moves about the stage in a constant, dream-like flow between times and locations, which is probably a good thing because many of Andrew Stein's scenes are short, and a lights-up, lights-down staging would make for a clunky journey. What happens is that John David Washington's Nick brings the chance to invest in a tech venture to his friends, but his colleague (the terrifying alpha girl played by Emme Kiku) uses the moment to the company's advantage.
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Playwright Stein's strength (one of them) is infusing this realistic, if not always likable, threesome of couples with humanity and humor (poor babies want a bigger brownstone). Of course, it's never really about the brownstone. The sleight of hand he displays when pulling twists and turns out of his sleeve in the final act caused a few gasps around me.
The dichotomy of our lives right now, which, for those of us who write plays with one-word titles about tech, seems to be the intersection of our everyday lives and the sci-fi surrealism of AI and its sudden ubiquity, which no one asked for, is fascinating. Be it a giant computer that is listening, watching, and anticipating what we may think before we think it, or, in the case of my play, whether a few people can build something they could easily lose control of, and what that would look like from our living rooms.
Disruption is very much of this moment. It crawled into my mind. (Did Disruption show up in my feed so much because I wrote a play about AI? And did I do exactly what they wanted by going to see it?) The remarkable production is also of a time when theatre makers rely on tech and its capabilities to keep the audience's attention with dazzling visuals. I don't necessarily think that's so bad. Screens and things that light up are part of every moment of our existence, and I think it's a kind of snobbery to suggest they be banished from the theatrical experience. I don't think any reasonable person would stage Shaw this way, and I remember old fogies being judgey about the falling chandeliers and helicopters back in the day, and we all got through that.
Now, how would Disruption play on a bare stage in a black box?
I wonder.
