Last week, when a friend and I were trying to settle on an after-work meeting spot, I asked Google Gemini for assistance: Find a restaurant in [insert neighborhood here] with happy-hour specials after 6 p.m. It instantly spit out the perfect choice, and we were on our way.
Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which just opened at off-Broadway’s Pershing Square Signature Center, focuses on something similar—but much more ambitious, and far more insidious. “What we’re doing,” explains tech entrepreneur Nick (The Piano Lesson’s John David Washington in a slick, extremely charismatic performance), “will fundamentally change the way we live our lives.”
Nick gathers his oldest friends and their respective wives—art director Paul (Joe Tippett) and corporate lawyer Jill (Jagged Little Pill’s Elizabeth Stanley), surgeon Barry (Jason Ralph) and photographer Mia (Liberation’s Irene Sofia Lucio), Columbia prof Ben (Oh, Mary! star Conrad Ricamora) and psychoanalyst Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson)—to seduce them into investing, monetarily and/or emotionally, in his latest high-profile venture: an algorithm designed to help people “make better decisions about the stuff that really matters.” His business partner, the younger and slightly predatory Raven (Emma Kikue), looks at what she calls “the perfect control group” and offers three specific examples, one from each couple’s lives: “Should I stay married? Buy a brownstone? Have a kid?” Nick compares it to the real-time navigational app Waze: “When you’re at a fork in the road, wondering which way to go, we’ll tell you.”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
There’s no doubt that Disruption—the latest entry in the fast-growing tech-theater genre (see also: James Graham’s Privacy, Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, and Matthew Libby’s Data)—is timely. Every day we’re faced with countless decisions, so wouldn’t it be a relief to possibly surrender the decision-making to an algorithm that might make a better, more informed choice than our own tired human brains could make? As Raven says, “the world creates almost nine hundred quintillion bytes of new data every day”—a program like this would be your filter. But using AI to pick a place with $3 oysters is one thing; trusting it to tell you to leave your wife, the mother of your kindergarten-bound twin boys, is entirely another. Are these men—all supposedly smart and highly educated—so malleable? It’s tough to get behind a couple of them. Seriously—if buying a $4 million brownstone is what’s keeping you up at night, well, to quote that great prime-time philosopher Kourtney Kardashian: “Kim, there’s people that are dying.”
Though it centers on trailblazing (and rather threatening) technology, Disruption is a pretty by-the-numbers play. You won’t need an algorithm to predict the play’s ending; from the first scene, it’s clear where nearly all the characters will end up. (Nick’s final moments teeter on the ridiculous, though Washington pulls them off.) Considering how insidious and all-consuming this imaginary algorithm is, the Hersh Ellis–directed drama should feel more menacing. Instead, it just feels a little shady.
Disruption opened Aug. 2, 2026, at the Pershing Square Signature Center and runs through Sept. 27. Tickets and information: disruptionplay.com
