Review: And Then We Were No More, a Dystopian Thriller for the Age of AI

No matter how acutely one feels the outrages of the second Trump administration, I think we can all agree that big government informed by big data promises a more chronic oppression—regardless of who occupies the highest office in the land. That assumption informs Tim Blake Nelson’s bleak dystopian drama, And Then We Were No More, now making its world premiere at La MaMa.

The tone is set from the moment we enter the theater and are greeted by a life-size photo of the glowering cast. Buckle up, they communicate with their steely expressions, this is a night of very serious drama about very important ideas. Your willingness to engage with those ideas while overlooking some of the more ludicrous aspects of the drama will determine how much you get out of a show that consistently astounds, though not always for the right reasons.

Nelson imagines a future in which justice has been delegated to the function, a godlike artificial intelligence that selects both the ideal panel of jurors and counsel for the accused. Elizabeth Marvel plays the lawyer, chosen to represent an inmate (Elizabeth Yeoman) who confessed to murdering her family and waived her right to a trial. Deemed “beyond rehabilitation,” the inmate has opted to be executed in a special machine that purportedly delivers a painless death. But she is entitled to one last hearing. Although the lawyer suspects that the outcome is a foregone conclusion already calculated by an algorithm, she reluctantly takes the case.

It’s in her one and only meeting with her client that she discovers that a series of cruel medical experiments has rendered her unable to speak in anything but slam poetry. “God in machine or doctor god / use my blood to make / no more me no more any us,” she informs her attorney (Yeoman fully commits to her twitchy, oracle-like performance). And here the lawyer spots the contradiction: How can the state deem the accused “mentally deficient” yet also accept her as competent enough to consent to her own execution?

Marvel argues this case passionately and persuasively. She’s Portia dropped into an Orwell novel, and we completely believe that her oratory leads to a reevaluation of a system that claims perfection but, like GPT-5, overpromises.

But how did this huge mass of data achieve such centrality in human society? Scott Shepherd convincingly tells that story with his disconcertingly sunny portrayal of “the official,” a techno-Jacobin in the role of both prosecutor and judge who almost certainly attended BYU Law. His performance is complemented by Henry Stram playing “the machinist,” a deeply creepy true believer who considers himself a “priest” of the new AI God. The very real and well-documented history of human error (and genuine malfeasance) makes a utopian vision that cuts humanity out of the equation very attractive. And why not make a little money in the process?

That’s where “the analyst” comes in. Jennifer Mogbock plays an agent of the investment firm bankrolling the death machine who has arrived to observe its use. “Make no mistake, we must move forward,” she says, like Darth Vader project-managing the construction of the Death Star.  Marina Draghici costumes her thusly in an ugly angular samurai suit (she’s strangely the only one sporting these quasi-futuristic duds) and a hideously shellacked haircut. It’s a bit on the nose.

Director Mark Wing-Davey isn’t always successful at massaging these performances into a cohesive whole, although the cold mechanical environment created by scenic designer David Meyer makes excellent use of the cavernous Ellen Stewart Theatre, which here becomes a vast prison complex. Lighting designer Reza Behjat makes it feel even larger and more terrifying, while sound designers Henry Nelson and Will Curry underscore the room with rumbling notes of tension. Wing-Davey’s choreography of the transitions (this play is supported by an army of stagehands masquerading as prison guards) thrillingly captures the rigor of a highly organized and pitiless technocracy.

That makes the second act a head-scratcher, as the lawyer, the official, and the analyst reunite years after the events of the first act to reflect—an event only slightly less plausible than a 2030 bellini brunch between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively. But Nelson clearly needed an excuse to get all these characters in the same place, or else to whom would the official deliver his monologue about the insidious role of the clock in the erosion of human freedom? Watching And Then We Were No More often recalls a dorm room bull session with a gaggle of philosophy undergraduates—without the benefit of marijuana.

But if you can suspend your disbelief in the tortured plot, And Then We Were No More offers plenty of big ideas to chew on, which makes it a worthwhile endeavor in 2025. AI and accompanying technologies will radically change our world in the coming decades, with culture and policy breathlessly struggling to keep up.