How 'Data' off Broadway makes the technological tangible

The cast and creatives of the Silicon Valley-set thriller talk about turning its topical themes, like data harvesting and surveillance, into gripping stagecraft.

Summary

• Data is a thriller play about a programmer who faces an ethical dilemma when pulled into a secret data-harvesting project at work
• The cast and creatives discuss how the show physicalizes the play's timely but abstract themes of technology and surveillance
• The play includes multiple scenes of live ping-pong as a visual symbol of the characters' competing points of view

Keep your eye on the ball. Like every good, curvy thriller, Matthew Libby’s Data demands it. And, in a creative stroke, live rounds of ping-pong pop up periodically to underscore that notion in this zeitgeisty drama about digital footprints and the human toll of technology, hailed by New York Theatre Guide’s critic as “gripping.”

Set at a Silicon Valley software company called Athena, whose hush-hush data-harvesting initiative poses major ethical questions, the play hums with topicality. It assumes added resonance being told live on stage, the creatives and cast members agreed.

“One of the things I was interested in doing was to really explore a lot of questions in a very deep, detailed language-driven way,” said Libby, who starting writing the play in 2018 after getting a cognitive science degree at Stanford.

“Theatre is the medium where you can have characters discuss a complex philosophical issue through emotional circumstances for 10 minutes,” he continued. “People will go along on the ride with you.”

Some of that ride happens while two characters — predictive-programming whiz Maneesh (Karan Brar) and his coworker Jonah (Brandon Flynn) — serve and volley, often while discussing "pressing matters" so they won't draw attention, per Flynn. Libby said the competitive nature of ping-pong, a sport in which everything's on the table, fit what he was chasing thematically: “We’re trying to put the things that are most human and most analog on stage.”

The thorniest dilemma in Data arises when Maneesh gets pulled into Athena’s covert special project. It’s one that offers an unsettling reminder that information is power. And that power can be misused.

After all, every online search, click, like, and location tag adds another data point to be mined and used in every which way. Maneesh’s manager, Alex (Justin H. Min), spells it out to him and fellow team member Riley (Sophia Lillis) bluntly, and with a trace of ice: “We are our data.”

Director Tyne Rafaeli called Libby “kind of a prophet,” as the play preceded the current A.I. wave and predicted provocative conversations swirling in 2026. “How data harvesting is affecting decisions around immigration and insurance is what the play is dealing with,” she said.

While data and algorithms are invisible, the play puts them in a sort of accessible, hi-def focus. Watching the drama unfold live makes the human consequences visceral and moving, according to Rafaeli.

“It is a play wrestling with ideas through language,” she said. “It is us all sitting in a room together, asking these questions together, and understanding the consequences of the answers as a collective.”

Min echoed that sentiment, noting that the story told on stage deepens the bond between the audience and actors. “It creates a component where people can feel more connected to these things in a very concrete, tangible way,” he said.

Brar, reprising his role from a 2024 Washington, D.C. run, observed that the live performance ups the urgency. “The spontaneity, the adrenaline, the excitement of doing it live really reflects how we’re feeling as a society as a whole,” said Brar.

While technology looms large thematically, it's mostly visually represented in the scene changes, which are accompanied by blinking lights that call to mind something akin to circuitry. The action other unfolds in an essentially blank white space — save for the ping-pong table, of course.

Like his castmates, Min regards Libby’s ping-pong scenes as adding to Data's resonance. And not just because the Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme has suddenly made the sport hot, either.

“Ping-pong adds another textural element to the play,” said Min. “There’s the sound quality of ping-pong, the intensity of ping-pong. When we're talking about these quite abstract, cerebral things, it creates a tactility that will draw viewers in.”

“For a play that is so much about technology, you’re not going to see much of it on stage,” echoed Rafaeli. “It is about human beings talking to each other and wrestling with very human and immediate things [...] What does an individual do in the face of an increasingly oppressive system?”

Get Data tickets now.

Gillian Russo contributed reporting for this story.

Photo credit: Data off Broadway. (Photos by T. Charles Erickson)