The techies who packed Pallas, a small gallery space in Civic Center, last Saturday night for the premiere of a play did not dress up, as is the norm for a theater opening. But this was no normal opening. In their finest sweatpants, tech-branded zip-up hoodies, and those slip-on sneakers popular among venture capitalists, the members of the crowd were there to watch a two-hour dramatization of a canonical event in recent AI history.
“Doomers,” a new play by Matthew Gasda, tells the story of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ouster and reinstatement, which rocked the tech industry and captured massive media attention back in 2023.
It took six months of tinkering and rehearsal, plus a 16-show New York City run, for “Doomers” to come to San Francisco in market-ready form, where it will run through March 22.
Catering to the AI crowd
Altman was not in attendance at the opening, though a rumor circulated among the cast that one of the VCs in the crowd was there as an emissary.
I invited Altman to the SF premiere, and he responded at 5:30 the following morning: “its is a fun idea but im really busy :(”
This appears to be his only comment on the play so far.
Left unsaid was whether Altman would want to relive the 2023 events dramatized in “Doomers,” which lightly fictionalizes his saga of nearly being felled by an internal coup, only to rise to greater heights. Set in a condo in San Francisco, the play takes place entirely around a desk, with the audience just a few feet from the actors. It’s an extremely intimate setting; several times during the play, I had to swivel my legs as actors walked through.
The Altman character, known in the play as Seth, is played by Sam Hyrkin, a Palo Alto native who lives in New York and looks eerily similar to his real-life counterpart. In the first act, Seth plots how to get his job back as his colleagues debate the moral qualms of creating technology that could either elevate humanity to the sublime or destroy it.
While the performance was a hit in New York, it’s not necessarily Broadway-caliber. There, Gasda had his reputation as a Dime Square darling and director of a small but popular theater company. In San Francisco, he’s reliant on Altman’s notoriety and the legion of AI fans and critics who want to see what their lived reality could look like when transformed into theater.
“Doomers” stems from a previous Gasda play, “Zoomers,” which captures the lives of Gen Z transplants in Brooklyn. “Doomers” is often used to describe a certain type of Gen Z pessimist. But the term also comes from the book “Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future,” cowritten by Reid Hoffman, which identifies doomers as those who view the technology as an existential threat that should be nixed immediately.
The San Francisco-inspired jokes and intimate setting work to the play’s advantage. Gasda admits that some jokes hit harder in San Francisco than they did in New York; notably, those about ketamine and polycules, but especially the ones taking shots at Yahoo!
On the other hand, the use of a slur for the intellectually disabled, which “got a nasty laugh” in NYC, according to The New York Times, was met in San Francisco with nervous chuckles and an audible “yikes.”
Another line pokes fun at Bay Area “progressives” with “two master’s degrees” who “think they’re saving the world” but are “actually in a fucking suicide cult.” That one similarly did not elicit the laughs it did in New York, Gasda said.
San Francisco can be a tough crowd.
As someone who does not follow tech industry news carefully, I felt like I was listening to the rules of a card game I’ve never played. The dialogue moved quickly, the business references and tech jargon going straight over my head. While the writing and delivery felt ripped from “Succession,” I struggled to keep up with what was going on or what I was supposed to laugh at.
However, the overwhelmingly tech crowd appeared to buy it. “This did call a lot of good Bay Area bullshit,” said Chris Tolle, the COO of an analytics company who has worked in tech for 30 years. “It wasn’t about what you thought about AI as much as it was an amazing artistic experience.”
Gasda hopes to bring “Doomers” to other cities soon. A London production could feature a twist: twin performances — one using Gasda’s original script and the other generated by “Gasda Bot,” an AI model trained on the playwright’s body of work. Audiences would then be challenged to determine which version is the authentic “Doomers.”
“There is a non-zero chance that it just writes a better play,” Gasda said of AI.