What’s more destructive to the human race – the threat of AI, or the reality of marriage? On the one hand, artificial intelligence seems fairly close to replacing the charmingly antiquated notion of “thinking for ourselves.” But marriage has been inimical to human happiness since the first Canaanite got married in a small, intimate ceremony, which nevertheless required guests to take two days off work. In Disruption, a new play by Andrew Stein at the Signature Center's Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, John David Washington stars as Nick, a tech entrepreneur who tries to rope his closest married friends into investing in an artificial intelligence program that can tell them how to decide on the most pressing questions of human existence, like when to buy property in Brooklyn. Disruption’s warnings about the creeping paternalism of artificial intelligence are certainly true and well said, if a little obvious, but Disruption has far more interesting things to say about how married couples interact, and how they fight and struggle and claw for power within their sacred unions. 

The texture and humor of Disruption, directed deftly by Hersh Ellis, come from the dynamics between three married couples, who have all been friends with each other – and with Nick – since college. Ben (Conrad Ricamora) and Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson) are well-educated (he’s a Columbia professor; she’s a psychiatrist); Ben is affable and meek, whereas Suzie is intense and razor-sharp. Their problem is that Ben wants a baby and Suzie doesn’t. The most fraught relationship is that of Jill (Elizabeth Stanley) and Paul (Joe Tippett), who I recognized from his memorably good performance in Mare of Easttown, where he played Julianne Nicholson’s disappointing husband, who at first seemed really sexy but then turned out to have covered up the fact that his tween child committed murder. (Men.) Paul just wants to chill, have fun, and possibly sleep with other women. Jill wants to get through the day, keep her (bread-winning) job and put food inside their children. Elizabeth Stanley captures the complicated layers of the put-upon wife: she loves her husband, resents him for reducing her to the role of the nagging spouse, and suspects she has become the fun-killing schoolmarm he sees her as. Barry (Jason Ralph) and Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio) seem to have the healthiest, happiest and best written marriage of the group, a push-and-pull relationship with the natural rhythms of real life. Irene Sofia Lucio is endearing as she drapes herself around Jason Ralph; she’s always touching him, throwing her arms around his neck, or playfully shoving him around. Barry and Mia’s problem isn’t each other; it’s that Mia wants a Brooklyn brownstone that they can’t afford. All the couples, in other words, are simultaneously comfortable and miserable, i.e., happily married. 

Into this simmering pot of undeclared tension and upper-middle-class striving plops Nick (John David Washington) and his younger girlfriend Raven (Emma Kikue). Nick is a boundary-busting, boisterous backslapper; his presence is like a shot of tequila that warms up the couples and gets everyone to start thinking about money, sex and success. Nick organizes a fancy dinner for his old friends, and offers them all a suspiciously vague investment opportunity: for half a million dollars each, they can get in at the ground floor of an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to “help people navigate their lives,” as Nick says. It’s basically an AI life coach, but one that knows things even we don’t know about ourselves. The couples don’t know whether to risk their reasonably happy, unhappy status – why isn’t what they have enough? What would be enough? Nick, like a Mephistophelian tempter, tries to convince them not only to invest in the algorithm but to start living their lives according to its advice. The initially clear-cut choice between relying on AI versus making your own decisions is complicated in the second half of the play, when Nick’s girlfriend Raven reveals that she has tweaked the algorithm to not only advise on decisions but to actively manipulate reality. Raven and the algorithm can control anything that gets texted, emailed, or pops up on your Amazon Recommended Products list. The algorithm’s main tactic is to dispatch Nick as the executor of its schemes. The algorithm thinks that Paul would be happier divorced, so Raven, like an AI Lady Macbeth, persuades Nick to talk to Paul and play up the appeal of bachelor life. This is one of the ironies of Disruption’s plot: for all the computer’s fancy data, what’s actually happening is that one guy is telling another guy that his wife is a total drag and he’s no fun anymore, a staple of many bro comedies of the 2010s. It’s kind of a back-handed compliment, I guess: Raven’s AI can correlate thousands of tiny data points, but our most advanced artificial intelligence requires a complicated, messy human being to accomplish its agenda.

The question of whether the couples should invest in Nick’s program becomes moot, though, because they’re already snared in the algorithm’s web: Raven uses them all as unwitting beta testers for Version 2.0 of her system. From there, we watch everyone’s lives start to change the way that the computer thinks will make them the happiest – which, as you might imagine, doesn’t always work out. As the saying goes: man plans, Claude laughs. The AI-domination plot is creepy, compelling, and effective, although it’s also a little funny that the world’s smartest algorithm is using all of its gigabytes to try to figure out how a bunch of upper-middle-class Brooklynites can best capitalize on the housing market. Could we please cure cancer first?

If you go to Disruption expecting the incredibly handsome and well-groomed protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, you’re in for a surprise – John David Washington’s character dresses with the studied carelessness of someone so rich, he looks poor: wrinkled, ill-fitting pants, a shirt that's not entirely buttoned, and truly horrible sneakers. His costumes throughout the play struck me as a few notches schlubbier than even the pared-down billionaire aesthetic the costume design team seemed to be aiming for. The couples can’t decide at first if Nick is a rich friend doing them a favor or a hustler conning them and neither can we; John David Washington has the rare ability to register as both an authentic hero and a believable villain. No matter what he does, he seems important doing it; Washington delivers an affecting performance as a man with one foot in the future and one in the human world. In an assured, creepy performance, as Nick’s young, hot, confident girlfriend – three qualities that seem to often accompany contemporary female AI evangelists – Emma Kikue subverts expectations as Raven, who initially seems like arm candy and turns out to be the cheerful, cynical mastermind of the entire play. “People are f***ked unless they embrace technology,” she cheerfully tells the couples.

Some pieces of the AI plot thread, especially in the second act, feel a little reminiscent of AI-doom narratives in recent years, like Black Mirror. We all – well, except for Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and HAL 9000 – agree that computers taking over our lives is bad, even though I did have to ask ChatGPT how to get to the Signature Center. Disruption is at its most disarming and original when it engages with its treatment of contemporary couples. Its sharply observed dialogue – the parries and lunges between long-married partners and couples whose relationships are on the rocks – shows playwright Andrew Stein’s granular understanding of the counterintuitive reality that the person you trust to spend your life with and the person standing in the way of all your ambitions are, unfortunately, sometimes the same person. There’s a great moment in a final scene where a divorced woman walks into an apartment that her ex-husband is standing in, stares at him, reads his body language and says “What?,” which got a huge laugh. Stein has a deep understanding of the spoken and unspoken languages of couples, even divorced ones. The fact that the human side of Disruption is consistently funny, engaging, and genuinely laugh-provoking, while the AI plot functions primarily as a dramatic conceit, ultimately reinforces the play's central argument: that human consciousness and human relationships still hold the edge in the great war between silicon and flesh. As the play’s denouement shows, it may be that humanity’s greatest accomplishment is that we’ve created such a screwed-up way to live our lives – i.e., with a spouse – that even the most intelligent computers could never possibly understand it.