Review: In This Much I Know, Jonathan Spector Spins a Yarn About the Science of Decision-Making

I can’t speak to the intentions of Jonathan Spector, the playwright who penned the school-vaccine satire Eureka Day with a mix of wit and prescience that won him a 2025 Tony Award. But This Much I Know, Spector’s theatrical take on Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling psychology book Thinking, Fast and Slow now running off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters, functions as its own clever psychological experiment.

If there’s one broad takeaway from Kahneman’s book, it’s that brains love a good story. If his claims are correct, even the over 2 million readers who have lapped up his insights about human irrationality have continued putting the pieces of the world together in faulty ways. Because, of course, misunderstanding is preferable to no understanding at all. So what if, Spector effectively proposes, we wrap all that juicy information in story? Could that make it stickier? Is this the hack for humanity’s greatest programming bug? Perhaps. But with the most compelling bits of This Much I Know stuck in the realm of academia, it falls short of being a perfectly controlled experiment.

A psychology lecture hall is the play’s starting point and home base. Firdous Bamji, who stars as our academic sherpa Lukesh, welcomes us, his students, with the charisma of a professor whose classes garner the longest waitlists. With a wink, a smile, and an infectiously erudite accent, he dives straight into the central tenet of Kahneman’s book: Our minds have two systems that drive thinking. There’s System 1, the fast, intuitive kind, and System 2, the slow, logical kind. You can guess which one tends to get people into trouble. Spector attempts a seamless transition between info-dumping and storytelling, but the lines are clear when Lukesh works into his slideshow texts from his wife notifying him that she’s left—”possibly forever” (projection designer Mona Kasra, you’ll discover, is on hand for more than just lecture slides).

It’s from here that we start to skip around time and space to examine a constellation of personal stories, each of which highlights different aspects of the psychology of belief and decision-making. We go back in time to see the infuriatingly analytical Lukesh grate against his wife, Natalya (Dani Stoller, grounded but heart-forward), who’s struggling to reconcile her own part in a fatal accident. That journey is tenuously threaded to her impromptu trip to Russia where she tries to unearth details of her family history that intersect with Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (also played by Stoller in fanciful flashbacks). We follow that strand to Svetlana herself, exploring her culpability in her father’s reign of terror. Meanwhile, back at home, Lukesh advises Harold (Ethan J. Miller), a psychology student and heir to a legacy of white supremacy that he’s just starting to challenge (the very entertaining Miller also has his work cut out for him playing most of the incidental characters in Russia).

Spector admirably wrangles all these storylines, as does director Hayley Finn who organizes the puzzle on a stage without much real estate (Misha Kachman is efficient with her scenic design). The production’s trio of actors also deserve credit for being adept shapeshifters, jumping from character to character as plots bob and weave around one another (transitions are largely indicated by designer Colin K. Bills’s lighting cues).

But we’re ultimately less invested in the stories themselves than the ideas they demonstrate. We’re not so much holding our breath for Natalya to return home to her husband as we are intrigued by the question of whether her mind can hold her family’s (and her own) incomplete narrative. We don’t so much feel for Harold, a young man indoctrinated with racist ideology, as we are compelled by his untangling of those ideas through slow, sound thought (though, call me a cynic, but Harold’s willingness to question his inherited beliefs does ring with a bit of false idealism).

It makes you wonder if This Much I Know is, in part, hoisted by his own petard. Thought—at least the kind Spector and his source material encourage doing more of—is slow and considered. Emotions are fast and reactive. Can a piece of art effectively serve both? This much I don’t know.