Review: DOOMERS, Rose Lipman Building

Like much science fiction, US playwright Matthew Gasda’s Doomers has to contend with one crucial issue – how do we make sure that the dramatic stakes remain high, when nobody yet knows the end result of the technology driving the story? Doomers is concerned with where the balance is between progress in and regulation of AI, vaguely positing this as an issue without coming to any firm conclusions.

Our setting is a San Francisco boardroom, late at night. In an incident superficially similar to Sam Altman’s brief ousting from OpenAI in November 2023, tech CEO Seth (Sam Hyrkin, draped in a dressing gown and drunk on power) is removed by his company’s board after withholding information about his AI chatbot Mindmesh’s capabilities, and scrambles with his inner circle – containing the full spectrum of the Bay Area tech elite, from pantsuited girlbosses to men in sweatpants aspiring to “human excellence” – to rescue the situation.

Both Gasda and director Zsuzsa Magyar have backgrounds in cinema, and it shows – the story is entirely based in one room, but never feels static, with actors moving in precise lines as though tracked by a camera. Magyar’s direction conjures constant motion, an endless rush of brainstorming and late-night food deliveries, of minds and ideas always in flux.

But the lack of specificity in the script is an issue – we never find out in detail what exactly led to Seth’s firing, nor do we get a sense of why Mindmesh has been so controversial. We might assume it’s a fictional cipher for ChatGPT, but one character tells us that the chatbot can’t yet do high school calculus, which surely would mean that all this ethical pontificating has been premature.

Without any real sense of what the stakes actually are, then, all we end up with is a passionate, extended philosophical debate. There are many pearls of wisdom in Gasda’s writing advocating both for and against AI, performed by a cast who make violent rages about rate limits seem entirely believable, but it’s never clear what any of the characters have to lose if the pendulum swings one way or another.

Still, Seth’s inner circle is an interesting motley crew, if occasionally not probed deeply enough. Chief Safety Officer Alina (Neetika Knight), for example, worries about humans losing their identities to AI while in a senior role at an AI company, and also having an implied sexual relationship with Musk-esque lead engineer Jeff (Aaron Lynn) – all of these inherent contradictions take something of a backseat. Where the problems really start, though, is in the second act.

It’s a curious decision for any play to bring in an entirely different cast of characters halfway through. We don’t see Seth and co again after the interval, and instead watch the board who fired him have their own meeting a day later, to reckon with the industry-wide outpouring of anger on Seth’s behalf.

This could have been a neat way to deconstruct how the public image of Seth and those like him can be manipulated behind the scenes. However, much of what Gasda articulated so sharply in the first act is now veiled in corporate jargon, and letting the board members ponder Seth’s motives without ever interacting with him feels like a missed opportunity.

There’s a welcome dose of humour in the generational clash between Richard (James Holmes), a veteran of the Internet’s 90s infancy, and Gen-Z startup co-founder Mei (Yui Minari). Like the earlier philosophising, this comes at the expense of any real character development. When we do hear about specific character motivations, it’s often rather stereotypical, a woman taking on a leadership role at work to compensate for not being a mother, or Mei wishing AI automation had been able to save the life of a dead family member.

Early on, Seth gets referred to as the Oppenheimer of AI. There may be a play yet to be written that does for AI what Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was for the atomic bomb, and what the myth of Prometheus was to fire. Without the necessary investment in its characters beyond their roles as vessels for the AI debate, though, Doomers is not that play.

Doomers plays at the Rose Lipman Building until 3 October