Bad Data

Karan Brar as Maneesh and Brandon Flynn as Jonah in Matthew Libby's Data, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, Lucille Lortel Theatre. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

At the risk of sounding smug, let me say: I have been yowling, since the early days of the internet, to anyone who would listen, about the dangers of relinquishing our personal data and privacy to tech companies. In all that time, the most demoralizing part of my campaign has been the generational divide in who would listen. The young people in my orbit mostly shrug, muttering helplessly about surveillance capitalism while shuffling away. Convenience and social media pseudo-connections are evidently irresistible to them, as they heedlessly post their most intimate feelings, misguided plans, and political brainfarts. They get their DNA sequenced, upload selfie porn, with nary a qualm about how it’s all collected, sold, and catalogued for use against them by industry and government. The effect of resenting and resisting this massive and indiscriminate violation of human rights, this dehumanizing reduction of people to marketable data, has essentially been to brand myself a geezer.

It’s a rare pleasure, then, to come across a 30-year-old playwright who actually cares, and who furthermore knows something about the tech field. Matthew Libby double-majored in Cognitive Science and Creative Writing at Stanford, then wrote the first draft of Data as an MFA student at NYU. In a recent interview, he spoke about his college buddies who now work at companies like Palantir, Alphabet and Meta. His fine perceptions about them are sharply evident in the granularity of this play’s disturbing portraits.

Data is about the type of person who does, and then sometimes abandons, this insidious work. The play won the prestigious Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition in 2020, and it would have premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta that year if not for the pandemic. In 2024, it was produced at Arena Stage in Washington and has now opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York in a terrific production directed by Tyne Rafaeli.

The story is vivid, very timely, and believable (with wrinkles). Its standout quality is that it’s refreshingly human-centered. Unlike many other recent tech-themed plays that foreground slick effects, AI nightmares, and the slipperiness of truth, Data focuses squarely on people—people caught in a perilous ethical trap. Its setting (designed by Marsha Ginsberg) is a plain, antiseptically spare metal room—the gleaming interior of a tech company that can read as a break room, office, conference room, what have you—which poignantly emphasizes the alienated nature of what this company does. There’s ping-pong, but no true sociality.

The protagonist Maneesh is a 22-year-old Indian-American prodigy who works at a company called Athena (clearly a proxy for Palantir). Karan Brar plays him touchingly as a boyish tangle of confidence and angst, naïve enough to be manipulable by those with more experience and sense of entitlement. Despite his talents, Maneesh has sidelined himself in a job beneath his abilities, but he is flagged by a smart, pretty, and oddly skittish colleague, Riley (Sophia Lillis), who knew him in college. Riley is aware that Maneesh’s honors thesis was an extraordinarily powerful predictive algorithm, which he patented, and when she tells the company’s chief about him—Alex, a Singaporean-American nice-guy villain silkily played by Justin H. Min—he’s instantly tapped for a special project.

Sophia Lillis (Riley), Karan Brar (Maneesh), and Justin H. Min (Alex). Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

This is where the plot gets tricky. Spoilers ahead here. Maneesh resents being flushed out of his hidey hole but he’s also too beholden to parental expectations to say no to Alex’s offer. His promotion to data analytics is everything those immigrant parents of his dreamed of, but can he square it with his conscience? Riley reveals—because it offends her conscience—that the special project is a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to develop immigration-enforcement software. DHS seeks a supercharged computer tool for determining who is and isn’t a desirable immigrant, and the tool being created—under extreme time pressure—will employ utterly arbitrary and opaque criteria (including social media posts). It will therefore generate unappealable decisions. In fact, it would have excluded Maneesh’s parents from the U.S., and probably Alex too.

The play’s climax turns on who Maneesh is at his core. Will he turn whistleblower along with Riley? Without Riley? Return to his hide? One glaring plausibility problem is how easily he bares his fears to a dim-witted, white colleague named Jonah (Brandon Flynn, perfectly snaky), his ping-pong partner. No one as smart as Maneesh would trust Jonah with a coffee order, let alone a life secret, regardless of how lonely and socially awkward he is. Another wrinkle is how easy it apparently is for Riley and Maneesh to huddle and confide privately around Athena, which is presumably obsessed with surveillance.

These are quibbles, though, about a strong and hard-hitting drama by a promising young author with a distinct and unusually sincere voice. With ICE occupying and terrorizing Minneapolis at the moment, murdering innocents in cold blood, trampling the Constitution, and covering up its crimes with impunity—all with the enthusiastic collusion of Palantir!—there is no better moment for Data to arrive in New York. I hope it runs as long as it takes to reach everyone whose head is still stuck in the sand, or more to the point, in the post-truth hellscape of the internet.

Data

By Matthew Libby

Directed by Tyne Rafaeli

Lucille Lortel Theatre