Review: MY FAVORITE SOCIOPATH at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Face it, people; we’re all in when it comes to dishing the dirt, all those nasty scandals that break out every time we open our phones or go online. Whatever our beliefs, whatever our politics, there’s always someone or something to outrage us. The Tech Bros of Silicon Valley have devoted years to building bigoted, partisan information silos, cramming us into them by the millions. And in the darkness of those silos, we feed on our curated dishes of outrage, content that we’re always in the right and everyone who disagrees with us is wrong, and not worth the time of day.

—Oh, and just to be clear: we are in our right minds, it’s everyone else who’s crazy.

How has it come to this, that we can’t even break bread with people who disagree with us, or consider facts that complicate our precious, narrow world view? Why do we always reach for the simplest, most ignorant version of current events? Why are we so gleeful when others suffer?

Playwright Aurin Squire has a very compelling answer, and his latest play, “My Favorite Sociopath,” now playing in the Marinoff Theater at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, lures us in like any good news feed, and confronts us with our own delusions. For Squire, the problem dates back to the 1990’s, and the need for print media to compete with a brand-new, 24-hour news cycle on cable television. The “attention economy” was born right then and there, distorting young journalist’s understanding of their jobs to the point where even the opening of a local private school becomes a pretext to demonize and enrage.

And if these same journalists run out of others to demonize, they can always count on the knives coming out among their colleagues.

“Sociopath” follows the early careers of three cub reporters, all working for a prestigious paper in Washington, D.C. (with a banner name and typeface that will definitely look familiar to local audiences). We first meet up with Miles, played to slick perfection by Nick Saxton, as he draws us in with the promise that he’s about to expose a true sociopath before our very eyes. Coming as he does from Florida, he name-drops a few local celebrities from down there (Carl Hiassen likely the most familiar to us), and he strikes up a romance with a fellow rookie reporter from Mississippi, Gina—played by Brooke Turner, whose earnest and innocent front hides plenty.

Last but by no means least we have Evan, the openly gay rookie who quickly targets Miles as his next conquest. Kennedy Kanagawa’s turn as Evan is by turns hilarious, sexy, and disturbing, as we see him try to charm the pants off of Miles, and then undermine the work of his colleagues. (Costume Designer Shahrzad Mazaheri, when not decking out Miles and Gina with good period pieces, has a field day with Evan’s flamboyant wardrobe, including a silk bathrobe put to very daring use.)

That each of these three – Miles, Gina and Evan—have secrets to hide is a given. That each of them deliberately refuses to check their facts, or worse cherry-picks facts to make them look good and grab a headline, becomes disturbingly clear. Miles wreaks devastation through a simple interview, horribly distorted in print with quotes taken out of context, and when confronted by the consequences of his actions he blithely walks away, threatening  to out his own colleagues.

Remember who told us he was going to expose a sociopath at the top? By the end of Squire’s play it occurs to us that Miles may be playing the most familiar card in American politics: every accusation is a confession. When it comes to finding the sociopath among these three, we are left with the queasy feeling that it could be all of them. Or, since we just wanted to see someone bleed, maybe it’s our own fault for demanding that kind of sacrificial goat to make our time worthwhile.

Scenic designer Afsaneh Aayani creates a modular set which transforms easily from office to apartment and back, and Anshuman Bhatia’s lighting guides us smoothly from one scene to the next. One of the more striking aspects of the set is Kelly Colburn’s stack of TV screens, which covers the entire upstage wall, and which transforms disturbingly toward the end of the show to reveal something far more sinister than your typical CNN anchor.

Historically, we’re in good company; the decadent, drug-addled French poet Charles Baudelaire, who always courted scandal, dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal, his volume of collected poems, to his ‘hypocrite readers’ who were always shocked, shocked, I tell you, at his depictions of modern life in all its sordid splendor.

Which is why we need plays like “My Favorite Psychopath” to remind us that when it comes to shameless, yellow journalism, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Squire offers us a finely-crafted portrait of digital-age journalism in all its messiness. Director Céline Rosenthal has created a truly riveting, disturbing evening of theatre which should trouble us all, long after we’ve headed home from Shepherdstown.

Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes, with one 10-minute intermission.

Production Photo: Brook Turner as Gina, and Nick Saxton as Miles.  Photo by Seth Freeman.

The 2026 Contemporary American Theater Festival will run through August 2, on the campus of Shepherd University in nearby Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

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