Given the current existential anxiety over artificial intelligence, this zippy black comedy about online entrepreneurs could hardly be more timely.
Andrew Stein’s play sees successful tech bro Nick offer three couples, his oldest friends, the chance to get in on the ground floor of his latest venture: an algorithm that scans your data and makes life decisions for you.
“Get a divorce, buy a brownstone, have a baby,” says Nick’s business partner Raven, identifying the hot-button issues of these thirtysomething metropolitan elitists struggling to get by in New York. What follows is a shrewd, sharp portrait of the way disruptive innovation has unforeseen ramifications on private lives and relationships.
The marriage of journalist Paul and his wife Jill, who does something lucrative and unspecified, is crumbling under the weight of suspicion, a lack of fun and six-year-old twin boys. Jill’s aggressively competitive sister Mia, a photographer, wants that Brooklyn brownstone but her surgeon husband Barry yearns for the humanitarian work he did when young. Psychoanalyst Suzie and academic Ben are seemingly in synch, but there’s an unspoken secret at the heart of their relationship.
Back into their lives bounces Nick (Oliver Alvin-Wilson) a force of toxic, Mephistophelean persuasiveness, all wolfish grin and quarterback shoulders, promising riches. The younger Raven (Sasha Desouza-Willock), at his side, is a nerd’s fantasy: multiple degrees in applied maths and AI, dominatrix-level putdowns, killer abs and legs.
This duo has ulterior motives, of course. If they can prove the efficacy of the algorithm by influencing the lives of the people Nick knows best – using stuff scraped from online to supplant and twist what he knows of them already - investors like Google will shower them with cash.
One of Stein’s nice touches is that Nick is revealed to be merely a salesman while Raven is the brains of the operation – at least until the algorithm starts learning for itself. His writing has an identifiably American gloss and polish. Ideas planted in the first half flower neatly in the second, albeit with a few surprises. Quite a lot hinges on the fact that several of the protagonists have slept together (in exclusively heterosexual permutations) and the reasons why those that haven’t, haven’t. The narrative is skewed to a male perspective – especially the depiction of sisterly envy – although the female characters are stronger.
But Stein has thought deeply about the zeal of our new, data-harvesting overlords to “move fast and break things”, as Mark Zuckerberg put it. And about the inevitable endgame of apps strip-mining our thoughts. It’s great to see a play engage so aggressively with contemporary technology. Particularly as live theatre has weathered the disruptive onslaughts of radio, film, TV and online streaming, and is now presumably braced for the digital offspring of the ABBA Voyage avatars.
The acting in Hersh Ellis’s pacy production is not uniformly good. But Debbie Korley stands out as the aloof and critical Suzie, who unbends in spectacular fashion. Rosanna Hyland also impresses as the abstracted Mia.
It’s simply staged. Projections of circuit boards and binary code spill out from a central screen onto the sloped back wall and the apron stage. A pulsating ovum, overlaid on a discussion of parenthood, is overegging things, though. And I know it shouldn’t irk me that the props and costumes look cheap in a play about the well-off and the super-wealthy; but it does.
These are minor quibbles, though, with a witty, incisive piece of work that highlights the problems of “disruptive” advances. “We’re the lighthouse, not the iceberg,” Nick shouts to Raven. Actually, they’re both.
Park Theatre, to Aug 5; parktheatre.co.uk
