Data ★★★★

Data, Matthew Libby’s assured and auspicious Off-Broadway debut at the Lucille Lortel, begins not with a boardroom battle or a coding breakthrough but with ping pong. Two recent college graduates volley briskly in a break room at Athena, an elite tech company whose name is no accident. Athena was not only the goddess of wisdom but also of strategy and war, and everyone in this tightly constructed four-hander arrives armed with ambitions that are sharply, and sometimes ruthlessly, in opposition.

What makes Data especially bracing is its recognition that the architects of tomorrow’s systems are often idealistic twentysomethings who are barely out of school and are suddenly wielding a kind of power once reserved for heads of state. These young techies want to be ethical, and they want to do good, but they also want to succeed, and in the rapidly changing tech sector, those goals don’t always align.

At the center of this moral maelstrom is Maneesh (Karan Brar, quietly affecting), whose rare-event predictive model—developed as his college honors thesis—can forecast an individual’s likelihood of success with unnerving precision. The algorithm’s power is exactly why he has kept it under wraps; in the wrong hands, it could become less a tool of insight than an instrument of coercive control.

Those hands may belong to Alex (Justin H. Min, coolly magnetic), Athena’s head of Data Analytics, who needs that algorithm to keep his position. Only about a decade older than the young team he oversees, Alex is all smooth, friendly talk on the surface, masking a whirlpool of stress: “You’re here at Athena because you want to be. Own that, and I really think you’ll feel so much better.”

Hoping to get or stay in Alex’s good graces is Jonah (Brandon Flynn, puppyish and calculating), the self-aware tech bro who knows he’s the least brilliant person in the room and is quietly terrified of being asked to leave it. Jonah flirts but gets nowhere with Riley (Sophia Lillis, intelligent and restless), the lone woman in this bro world. She’s a former classmate of Maneesh’s who has drifted into a field she doesn’t love but doesn’t quite know how to leave.

Adult life, I guess. All this. I thought it’d be —

I thought if — I just did what I was supposed to do.

Got an education, got a job, worked hard, became secure…

I thought people did that because — it gives your life meaning.

I thought I was lucky. To be employed. And have meaning.

But instead, I’m here, and I’m just… being torn apart. You know?

As the stakes are raised for the quartet over the course of this intermission-less 100-minute play, Libby asks deceptively simple questions that have real-world urgency: How much of a person can technology measure? Can everything be quantified? And perhaps most unsettlingly—should it be?

The entire cast is crackerjack, and under Tyne Rafaeli’s strong, controlled direction, the tension never feels manufactured. Though the play’s second half grows slower and occasionally over-explanatory, and the characters could be drawn with greater specificity, it’s clear that Libby is a playwright to watch. If HBO’s Silicon Valley mined tech culture for absurdity, Data arrives in a moment when the consequences feel less comic and more existential. “We are our data,” the play suggests—a premise that is chilling onstage and even more so off.