Conventional wisdom says the theater is slow to react to current events, but dramatists like Ayad Akhtar (“McNeal”) have clamored lately to tell stories about artificial intelligence, sometimes using it to help with the writing.
Matthew Gasda’s new play “Doomers” is an addition to that pack. Inspired by the 2023 ouster of Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, it was written with the help of ChatGPT and Claude. The two chatbots share a dramaturgy credit in the program.
Alas, the hype around that technology does not correlate here with narrative cogency. Despite having a loathsome fictional ex-C.E.O. at its center, and numerous characters who joust over the peril and promise of A.I., “Doomers” possesses a peculiarly self-indulgent quality, as if it takes for granted that its audience is invested from the get-go.
This is a crisis-driven tale set on a single night in San Francisco, just after a tech company, MindMesh, has dismissed its leader, Seth (Sam Hyrkin). Holed up at home, he is plotting to get his job back, while the company’s panicked board tries to figure out how to move forward without him.
A sociopath who lacks the requisite charm, Seth tells his confidants: “I will not compromise; I will not admit fault. I was fired for creating miracles.”
That isn’t how the board would put it, but we don’t meet them until Act II. The first act, by far the stronger half of this meandering play, is all about Seth’s predicament.
Gasda, who also directs this production, has double cast it, with 10 actors appearing in each performance. The cast I saw at artXnyc in Manhattan was nicely polished. (Most of the play’s upcoming New York shows are at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research in Greenpoint.)
But the characters erupt in flagrantly unlikely monologues, as when Alina (Zsuzsa Magyar), the company’s scrupulous chief safety officer, tells her colleagues about disturbing recurring dreams, one of them vividly sexual.
More troublesome is that their ethical arguments about A.I. feel rehashed if you’ve followed the issue at all, and not credible as things these people would be saying to one another under these circumstances. There is the sense, too, that the play, whose New York run will overlap with a separate production in San Francisco in March, is trying both to mirror a culture and ingratiate itself with it.
An Act I line, in which Seth uses a slur for the intellectually disabled to describe some board members, got a nasty laugh at the performance I saw. Yes, that word is having a resurgence and is fair game for a playwright to use, but does someone else really need to utter it in Act II? Similarly, probably one polycule joke would have sufficed.
There are mentions throughout of Elon, no last name given, but there doesn’t need to be. (Seth, annoyed with Alina, snipes: “You shoulda just had Elon’s baby when he wanted to.”)
“Doomers” is marketed as “‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ for the A.I. age,” but I suspect that the HBO drama “Succession” bears some responsibility for the play’s misperception that board strategizing and corporate jargon make for riveting theater.
The second act is all about MindMesh’s board, but lines like “We’re here to oversee and reduce risk and potential malfeasance” are deadly without characters and situations to interest us in the stakes. For a play that takes place at such a fraught moment, it has a striking lack of tension.
Maybe it’s down to the dramaturgs, ChatGPT and Claude?
When I asked the publicist about that program credit, he told me it was “a tongue-in-cheek joke” — that Gasda had “played around with Claude and ChatGPT asking the A.I. questions, so he would understand the technology he was writing about.”
Human error, then. Ah well.
Doomers
Through April 19 at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, Brooklyn, and artXnyc, Manhattan; doomers.fyi. Running time: 2 hours.
