Disruption<\/a>, now making its off-Broadway debut at Pershing Square Signature Center (the world premiere was at London\u2019s Park Theatre in 2023). The slick production from director Hersh Ellis and excellent performances from a cast of stage veterans do much to make this two-hour, 10-minute drama palatable. But they can only do so much to spruce up a script that is simultaneously too ambitious in scope and too timid in execution.<\/p>\nStein introduces us to three married couples in quick succession: Columbia professor Ben (Conrad Ricamora) enters the kitchen of his Upper West Side apartment to tell psychoanalyst Suzie (Shaunette Ren\u00e9e Wilson) that he has canceled their evening plans in favor of a sudden dinner reunion with their old friend Nick (John David Washington), a wildly successful tech entrepreneur. \u201cHe\u2019s kryptonite to marriage,\u201d Suzie remarks bitterly, fondling a box of pastries.<\/p>\n
All their friends will be there, including magazine art director Paul (Joe Tippett) and lawyer Jill (Elizabeth Stanley), even though they really should be focusing on their kid\u2019s upcoming interview with Fieldston. Also attending are surgeon Barry (Jason Ralph) and his wife, Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio), who will bravely rip herself away from perusing Brooklyn real estate porn to hear Nick and his beautiful young business associate Raven (Emma Kikue) pitch an offer none of them will want to refuse\u2014computer has foreseen it.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Irene-Sofia-Lucio-John-David-Washington-and-Jason-Ralph-in-the-2026-production-of-DISRUPTION-Photo-b.jpeg\" "\\"Irene")
Irene Sofia Lucio plays Raven, John David Washington plays Nick, and Jason Ralph plays Barry in Andrew Stein\u2019s Disruption, directed by Hersh Ellis, at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
(\u00a9 Emilio Madrid)<\/p>\n
Nick and Raven have developed an algorithm that not only predicts how people will behave, but can determine the way they should behave, offering the most optimal decision-making for lifemaxxing. Nick ostensibly wants to let them into the next investment round (minimum investment: $500,000), promising that this technology will make them all rich. What he\u2019s not telling them is that he and Raven are secretly using this racially diverse group of friends to beta-test their product, manipulating their personal lives in the name of science and commerce.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not like we don\u2019t willingly do this already, fracking our brains for value every time we fire up Instagram. Stein imagines the logical next step, in which we surrender independent decision-making to a being privy to trillions of data points and therefore theoretically more equipped to choose for us. This is also already happening: Friends with teenage children all report the ubiquity of AI companions that suggest media to consume, food to eat, and clothes to wear. \u201cWe\u2019re losing the ability to think for ourselves,\u201d Suzie ominously responds to Nick\u2019s Silicon Valley optimism.<\/p>\n
The problem is, Stein never really gives us a sense of the stakes of that outsourcing of thought. With one notable exception, all the decisions made are ones that these characters probably would have come around to on their own, that we the audience see coming from those first scenes. In lieu of disturbing questions about the cost of relinquishing control over our own lives, Disruption settles into the rhythm of something less dramatically satisfying: a soap opera.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1785776950_66_John-David-Washington-and-Conrad-Ricamora-in-the-2026-production-of-DISRUPTION-Photo-by-Emilio-Madri.jpeg\" "\\"John")
John David Washington and Conrad Ricamora appear in Andrew Stein\u2019s Disruption, directed by Hersh Ellis, at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
(\u00a9 Emilio Madrid)<\/p>\n
The performances keep us engaged. Wilson is especially fierce as Suzie, a powerful voice of dissent against a transformation that we\u2019ve all been told is inevitable. I was ready to send her to Congress. Ricamora sensitively navigates a series of frustratingly inconsequential plot twists for Ben, selling them with warmth and humanity. Stanley and Tippett gave me genuine agita as a middle-aged couple holding on by a thread. And Washington artfully walks his charisma right up to the border of sociopathy. Revealing the depth of his data-mining to Suzie, he hisses, \u201cWe\u2019re both genetically resistant to tooth decay,\u201d his voice dripping with menace.<\/p>\n
While certain beats necessarily give way to camp, Ellis directs an energetic staging that crams the hallmarks of an upper-middle-class issue play (so much drinking and fighting) into a sleek futuristic package. Zo\u00eb Hurwitz\u2019s set resembles a giant ovular iPhone, a digital canvas for Yana Biry\u00fckova\u2019s busy video design, which depicts the algorithm as a giant neural network, creates literal paths of light between characters as they connect, and bludgeons us with not-so-subliminal messaging (the word \u201cyes\u201d appears hundreds of times as Nick and his friends dance and do shots). It\u2019s a fair physical manifestation of the vulgarity of persuasion in the TikTok age, garishly augmented by Reza Behjat\u2019s aggressive lighting and Caroline Eng\u2019s dopamine-stimulating sound. This is your brain on tech.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Disruption is not the game-changing drama it wants to be. It\u2019s The Big Chill for millennials, mistaking the midlife crises of a bunch of overprivileged New York professionals for the wider travails of an entire generation standing on the threshold of techno-serfdom. It\u2019s true that those with significant investments in AI stand to hugely benefit\u2014but don\u2019t we hear from them enough? Disruption represents a missed opportunity to really examine what we\u2019re trashing in our zeal to move fast and break things. In many cases, once they\u2019re broken, they\u2019re gone for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The off-Broadway company of Andrew Stein\u2019s Disruption, directed by Hersh Ellis, at the Pershing Square Signature Center.(\u00a9 Emilio…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-312636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/The-company-of-the-2026-production-of-DISRUPTION-Photo-by-Emilio-Madrid.png\" "\\"The")
The off-Broadway company of Andrew Stein\u2019s Disruption, directed by Hersh Ellis, at the Pershing Square Signature Center.