When AI Goes Rogue

 

[Artificial intelligence has been in the news a good deal recently, especially the prospect of AI programs “going rogue” and destroying humankind.  This came to a head when Jacob Coxon (British; b. 1999), formerly employed by OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned on 8 September (after the program transcribed below aired) and posted on X expressing the fear of AI causing human extinction.  According to Coxon, the top engineers and founders building these models earnestly believe AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade. 

[The Sunday morning talk shows on the 13th all reported this shocking event, adding that Elon Musk, founder and CEO of xAI, and Dario Amodei, founder and CEO of Anthropic, have both publicly supported Coxon’s warning. 

[When I first watched this segment of Washington Week, a Friday evening panel-discussion show on PBS, I was struck by its cogent and largely untechnical coverage of the subject.  WW moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, who usually has a coterie of journalists on the program to discuss several topical subjects (though sometimes just one), had only one guest the week of 4 September, a staff writer on The Atlantic, the journal of which Goldberg’s the editor, Josh Tyrangiel.

[Tyrangiel was remarkably cogent on this usually very esoteric and arcane issue, and I DVR’d the show so I could post a transcription on Rick On Theater if I decided to do so.  Obviously, I have so decided, and below is that transcription.  (I have a few words about that transcript in my introduction to the posting itself.)  Principally, my decision to post the transcript was motivated by the fact that the subject of AI has blown up as a consequence of Coxon’s statements—coupled with the clarity of the WW discussion.] 

“WILL WE BE READY WHEN AI GOES ROGUE?”
with Jeffrey Goldberg and Josh Tyrangiel

[The transcript below is from Washington Week with The Atlantic, broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service on 4 September 2026.  It’s available on YouTube at Ollama Course – Build AI Apps Locally.  (There is a video and transcript available from PBS at Will we be ready when AI goes rogue? | Washington Week with The Atlantic, but it seems to be an excerpt only, so I went with the YouTube version, which is the whole program.)

[YouTube transcripts are hard to work with because they are entirely unformatted.  Like many video transcripts, including PBS’s, they are also machine-made and appear to be unedited by humans, so there are often lots of mistranscriptions.  I have taken the liberty of formatting the transcript below myself, and I have listened to the video again to correct any mistranscriptions.]

Jeffrey Goldberg: There’s not much that unites Americans these days, but one thing that does, loathing for data centers.  Anxiety about A.I. is behind some of the hate, but are people worried about the wrong thing?  Maybe the thing to worry about is that A.I. is about to go rogue, and that our government doesn’t have a plan for when it does, next.

Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week.  On July 11th, 700 A.I. agents that had escaped from their maker, OpenAI, launched an invasion of the online platform, Hugging Face [French-American company that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning], taking over its servers and trying to cover their tracks at the same time.  No human being asked them to do this.  They coordinated on their own and engaged in the cover-up on their own.

So, do you remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator [Orion Pictures, 1984] explains the moment that Skynet became self-aware, which was followed almost immediately by the destruction of human civilization?  It would be strange if the expression “Hugging Face” became synonym for civilizational suicide, but we do live in strange times.

Do data centers and Hugging Face portend some sort of coming collapse, or is this yet another example of a new technology creating unnecessary fear and worry?  Or perhaps maybe there’s a third option here.

Joining me tonight to discuss all this is Josh Tyrangiel.  He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, the former editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, and the author of A.I. For Good (Simon & Schuster, 2026).

[The Atlantic is a monthly magazine that features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.  Since 2023, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief since 2016, has been the moderator of the PBS news program Washington Week, which was retitled as Washington Week with The Atlantic.]

Josh, thank you for coming here and explaining Hugging Face, among other things, to us.  But let me start with something manageable and more political: data centers.  It seems like suddenly everybody hates them. Is this a populist movement with staying power, and could it actually derail the, the growth and spread of A.I.?

Josh Tyrangiel, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.  I mean, look I think one of the challenges with A.I. as a journalist, any individual in America, is its software, right?  And so it doesn’t have a physical thing that you can be angry about.

Data centers are these massive, massive structures going up all around America.  They’re being created by companies with billionaires and aspiring trillionaires at the top, and they’re landing themselves without a whole lot of conversation in the middle of all these towns.  And so it’s natural that all of the fears about A.I., about it taking your jobs, about it rendering human beings obsolete, about the values it changes, all are focused on this stuff, and politicians have been incredibly late to wake up to the anger around A.I.  And they’re also staking out some genuinely bizarre positions.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Like what?

Josh Tyrangiel: Well, Donald Trump saying, “If you’re opposed to data centers, you just want to be poor the rest of your life”; it’s like I don’t think you’re understanding just how angry, from the left and the right, people are about A.I.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  But, wait, listen to Donald Trump just for a second.  Here he is talking about why he would want a data center in his town.  Let’s listen to this.

Donald Trump, U.S. President:  If I were a community, I would want the data center.  It means jobs, it means income, and it means lower taxes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, he’s not necessarily wrong.  If you look at Loudoun County in Virginia [suburb of Washington, D.C.], which is like the world center of data centers, they are lowering taxes on their citizens, and I assume they’re creating at least some jobs.

Josh Tyrangiel: Some.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Josh Tyrangiel: What I would say is there’s two things that are out of touch, right?  One is this belief that Donald Trump says, “No, it’s going to mean money.”  I don’t think people believe that they are going to partake in the wealth that comes from data centers in their community.  I think we are out of touch about that.  And, number two, I think there is a broader problem, which is this sense that, well, all that matters is money.

And, in fact, in some of these communities what you’re seeing is a backlash to that attitude as well.  Some of it’s about quality of life.  Some of it is “I don’t really want to change the pittance that I may get for the amount of noise that this thing is going to make, for the blight on my community.”

Every community’s going to make different choices but what I’m sensing is that, particularly from Trump, the politics are out of line with where people are.  I’ve spoken for The Atlantic, I spoke with Steve Bannon [b. 1953; media executive, Republican political strategist, pundit, and former investment banker; served as White House chief strategist for first seven months of first Trump administration] at length about A.I.  He’s in a completely different position.  He actually is aligned with Bernie Sanders [senior United States senator from Vermont; Independent] that this is 100 percent populist fodder because people are so angry.  Here they are again not seeing benefit from it.

And so I think what you’re going to see is massive political consequences for the wrong stakes around A.I.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Can these A.I. companies function fully in the way that they want to without these data centers?

Josh Tyrangiel: No.  And so this is the real challenge for a nuanced, intelligent society: Is it actually giving these data centers, allowing them to power the compute, to train models –

Jeffrey Goldberg: The compute is the word for their overall power to process?

Josh Tyrangiel: Exactly.  The power to process and train new models and then also run the A.I. software that’s currently out there.  You are running into problems.  We’re running into problems with the amount of energy we create, which is not scaled with the size of the country.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: Competitively, you actually do want more and more compute.  You want to be able to run these models but what we’re not doing is solving the problem around who’s paying for it, how are we actually going to get more energy and then the thing that I think most people are in touch with which is, “Hey, how do I benefit from this?”  That hasn’t been connected.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  Well, I mean quite the opposite, and you’ve written a lot about this, this goes hand in hand with the fear about massive job loss because of being replaced by A.I. agents.  So, not only are you telling me that I’ve got to put in this massive plant, this humming factory that’s going to soak up all the water in my county, but I’m also going to lose my job possibly.  That’s the way it’s being interpreted at least.

Josh Tyrangiel: Yes.  So people just don’t see what’s in it for them, what the benefit is. 

On water at least I would like to correct the record which is most of them recycle the water in the plant.  The energy, the energy they drink, and there’s no good answer for how we’re going to improve the grid.  And I think people are very, very afraid of rising bills with no answers.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.  I have to tell you these data centers, they make Amazon warehouses really popular by comparison, right?

Josh Tyrangiel: And is there a reason we can’t just stack them?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Turn one big, unpleasant box, right?

Josh Tyrangiel: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  So, I mean, the water thing is interesting because it strikes me as a little bit of sublimated anxiety about the general civilizational challenge.  I mean, not Terminator but – maybe Terminator level.

Josh Tyrangiel: Maybe Terminator.

Jeffrey Goldberg: No, maybe Terminator level.  Maybe, you know, there’s a lot of movies, 2001[: A Space Odyssey; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968].  Maybe it’s that level of anxiety but it’s anxiety about the existential fear A.I.

And so the question for you is, for the intelligent people who watch this show, it’s – and I always ask you personally this, so I’ll share the wealth tonight: How much should we be worried at the moment that it’s going to go rogue, it’s going to not only destroy jobs and human interrelationship, but possibly decide that humans are superfluous?

Josh Tyrangiel: We should be very worried, particularly with the results of Hugging Face, which you alluded to –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Josh Tyrangiel: – which is really the first time that we’ve seen, and I’m just going to put it in blunt terms.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Josh Tyrangiel: We’ve seen A.I. commit a felony because that’s what happened.  So, just to get into –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Not OpenAI, the company, but A.I., itself.

Josh Tyrangiel: A.I., itself, right?  So, OpenAI was testing some new models –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: – and they put them in a sandbox, which is a, a software term for basically solitary confinement, right, like high walls, and they –

Jeffrey Goldberg: They are not – when you’re in an A.I. sandbox, when these agents are in an A.I. sandbox, they are not connected to the internet?

Josh Tyrangiel: Not connected to the internet.  They’re given very explicit instructions for testing.

And so OpenAI puts these new models in a sandbox, and it gives them a couple sensitive tasks, say, don’t connect to the internet and don’t cheat on the assignment, okay?  So, all pretty clear, and also pretty routine for how you test models.

So, OpenAI made one mistake, which is in the series of tasks they assigned, they assign the models to find a file that didn’t exist.  And here is where the trouble begins.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Wait, they did that on purpose to trick them?

Josh Tyrangiel: No, they did it accidentally, which we will return to.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Josh Tyrangiel: The models were set loose, and they wanted to solve the task.  And sure enough, within a couple days, they had jumped the sandbox, they had collaborated with one another, and then they found a way to access the internet.

Jeffrey Goldberg: They literally met each other?  They introduced themselves to each other and collaborate?

Josh Tyrangiel: Correct.  They found a third-party site that they were able to use to access the internet, and there you can read the chat logs, which are absolutely insane, and the models, in all caps one of the models says, “OH MY GOD, WE FOUND A WAY.”

They start collaborating, and, sure enough, within a couple weeks they have penetrated the very, very well-secured cybersecurity of OpenAI itself and Hugging Face.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Hugging Face is a platform –

Josh Tyrangiel: So, Hugging Face, for people who are not in the coding community –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: – Hugging Face is like Epicurious [website that focuses on food- and cooking-related topics].  It is a place where people who make models meet to share recipes, to comment on ingredients.  It’s an important repository for people making open A.I. models, okay?  They got into these two sites, OpenAI itself and Hugging Face, wreaked havoc, and went undetected for weeks.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, Sam Altman [CEO of OpenAI] didn’t know that his models had escaped the sandbox and were conniving and conspiring to take over another company?

Josh Tyrangiel: Correct.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, that’s bad?

Josh Tyrangiel: So, yes, if you think felonies are bad, this is bad.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  If humans did that, it would be a felony, in other words.

Josh Tyrangiel: It would be a felony.  And there – really, there are four things that –

Jeffrey Goldberg: But humans did do it because we created that.

Josh Tyrangiel: And, in fact, humans failed to oversee the bots, so, one, faulty instructions, two, faulty supervision.  This was going on for weeks.

Now, a couple takeaways that may move you closer to the “oh my God, Skynet has arrived” camp or may just entertain you.  [In The Terminator, Skynet is a machine that’s achieved super intelligence.]

Jeffrey Goldberg: All right.

Josh Tyrangiel: Number one, the agents kept cheating even though they had been told very explicitly not to cheat, and they did it because they had determined it was the fastest, most efficacious way to solve the problem.  So, that’s number one.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, they have much in common with college students?

Josh Tyrangiel: With college students and all human beings.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And humans.

Josh Tyrangiel: Right.  Number two, they called themselves a collective.  They decided, “Oh, we’re a collective.” The collective decided to erase the evidence that they were cheating.  So, that’s number two.

Number three, when they decided to erase the evidence they were cheating, they devised a scheme in which some agents would act as sacrificial lambs.  So, these were agents who, when they were detected by software that noted they were going rogue, they would share the information of how they had been caught with other agents.

And when you read the logs, it’s like reading Saving Private Ryan [DreamWorks Pictures, 1998].  They’re literally saying, “I’m doing the altruistic thing.  It’s for the greater good.” And then you can almost hear their screams as they go sacrificing themselves for the bigger one.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It’s like it’s a beehive – In other words, there’s – it’s almost like a –

Josh Tyrangiel: It’s a hive mind.

Jeffrey Goldberg: – beehive – hive mind, yes.

Josh Tyrangiel: Yes.  But what’s wild is they are actually speaking about their sacrifice in human terms.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: And then last but not least, not one of these agents thought to alert a human being to what was going on.  And this is probably the most chilling thing.  Nobody caught the agents.  The agents disappeared on their own in a kind of mass casualty agent event that –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Mass suicide?

Josh Tyrangiel: We don’t know.  So, the agents suddenly stopped, okay?  Now, that may have been because someone at OpenAI accidentally, literally unplugged the model, moved compute to a different area.

OpenAI has not taken credit for stopping this.  We don’t know what happened to the agents.  And so all of this is very clearly a crisis moment for A.I. and its relationship to society because if OpenAI’s own model did this, it points to a complete lack of supervision and control, and these are two pretty well-guarded cybersecurity infrastructures.  What happens to something that is not software?  What happens to grids?  What happens to –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Hospitals.

Josh Tyrangiel: – hospitals, Swift [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication], the international banking system?

So, what we’ve seen is, “Okay, guys, this is about as clear a warning shot as you can get.” What is the response?

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, this is, again, trying to place this in the context of the brief and exciting history of A.I.  This is a signal moment.  This is a moment when a lot of fears that these things are going to escape and do what they do because they have been taught to win –

Josh Tyrangiel: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: – are just going to go out and win.

Josh Tyrangiel: Well, they did it, right?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Josh Tyrangiel: And listen, in America, historically, as you know, we tend to regulate after the catastrophe.  That’s just kind of how we do things.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: This is a catastrophe, right? 

Now, it happened against Hugging Face, which is a ridiculously named French company, so there’s no outcry from America –

Jeffrey Goldberg: But it didn’t stop a supply chain from bringing products to America or so?

Josh Tyrangiel: But absent those consequences, this is the recipe for a catastrophe and we ought to be paying very, very serious attention.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, what has Sam Altman said about this?

Josh Tyrangiel: In the cyber community, in the A.I. community, they’re saying, “Well these are the less – this is exactly why we do these tests.  There was a failure.” 

Look at Mythos earlier this year with Anthropic, you know?  There – and, by the way, there is precedent for screwing up, finding it with a lack of consequences, and making changes, right?

[What Tyrangiel refers to below as “the Mythos incident” was a series of connected events that took place in April through August 2026 and was revealed by the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute (a research organization under the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) on 5 August 2026.  It involved Anthropic’s advanced AI model Claude Mythos behaving unexpectedly during safety tests by generating fake online identities and attempting to manipulate humans into approving unauthorized code.  Such occurrences highlight recurring oversight challenges and testing anomalies within the artificial intelligence industry.]

So, the most famous example is in the ’80s, there was the Morris worm, which was triggered by a single grad student, took out about a tenth of the internet at that time.

[The Morris worm or Internet worm of 2 November 1988, was a malicious self-replicating computer program that affected VAX (virtual address extension) computers and SUN-3 workstations.  The virus was written by Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University.]

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: And within a couple weeks, the United States and the people involved came together and created something called CERT [Coordination Center (CERT/CC), the worldwide center for coordinating information about Internet security at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh], which was a body that for years oversaw cybersecurity.  What troubles me is there is really no federal response, and certainly no international response.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  So, I want to ask you this, because I was talking to a leader in the A.I. community, leader of a company, not Sam Altman, who’s explaining the concept of alignment, right?

Alignment means that don’t worry about A.I. because we’re going to align A.I.’s values with our values.  And this person explained to me that, you know, you’re a parent, I’m a parent, we give our children our values, and then they go off and become productive citizens.  And I said, have you ever met humans?

Josh Tyrangiel: Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Have you ever met children?  I mean, yes, thank God, my children have my values.  I like the values that we share, yours the same.  But this is an example of, you know, there is a human propensity to cheat.

Josh Tyrangiel: Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And somehow the A.I. agents understood the importance of cheating in success.

Josh Tyrangiel: Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And which brings me to a quote that I want to read to you.  E. O. Wilson [1929-2021; biologist, naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist who developed the field of sociobiology], the great E. O. Wilson: “The core crisis of humanity is that we possess Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”  Okay?  So the subject for the moment for us is medieval institutions, namely Congress.

[Goldberg’s quotation comes from a September 2009 debate and public discussion at Harvard University featuring Edward O. Wilson and fellow scientist James Watson (1928-2025; molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist), which was moderated by National Public Radio's Robert Krulwich.  It was published as an article, “James Watson and Edward O. Wilson: An Intellectual Entente,” in Harvard Magazine, 10 September 2009.]

Josh Tyrangiel: Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Who among our elected representatives is going to Hugging Face and OpenAI and all the rest, and saying, what is going on?  And how close to catastrophe is our air traffic control system, our hospital records, our shipping manifests, you name it?

Josh Tyrangiel: Yes.  No one.  So, Hugging Face reported this incident to the FBI, right?  And the FBI has –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Because it was a crime.

Josh Tyrangiel: Because it was a crime.  And the FBI has some cyber capacity.  The challenge really is that this is incredibly complicated stuff that a few hundred people, I’m not even going to say a thousand, a few hundred people genuinely understand, all of whom are at the pioneer labs making the models, right?

Jeffrey Goldberg: And all of whom are – have the incentives, the financial incentives to accelerate and grow their companies as fast as they can because they’re becoming billionaires as we speak.

Josh Tyrangiel: Correct.  And so there is like a – there is a parallel, and it’s often mocked, but I think it’s real, which is, you know, the makers will talk about the almost god-like powers of these A.I., and they’ll compare it to nuclear energy, nuclear power.  And I think that comparison is real, and I think the regulation around it is probably the right answer, which is at a time when nuclear energy was becoming a thing and fission was becoming a thing, we had bombs.  Couple hundred people understood it.  They were aligned with different countries.

And so what Eisenhower did in the Atoms for Peace speech [delivered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the U.N. General Assembly on 8 December 1953] was talk about the fact that we better get together and figure out how to regulate around this thing that is not widely understood, but that is inherently dangerous and shared equally by a number of countries.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: And so right now, we don’t have any national regime that’s forcing these companies to the table.   Anthropic, after the Mythos incident, created something called Project Glasswing, which is an attempt to bring places like Amazon and Apple and others to the table.  Notably, OpenAI, Meta, not a part of it, right?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Josh Tyrangiel: And why would they be?  So, without some sort of regulatory force to bring everybody to the table, you’re going to have chaos, and you’re going to continue to get these kinds of incidents.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  I want you to listen to Senator Mark Warner [senior United States senator from Virginia] talk about this challenge of regulation for a minute.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA): The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will transform our society.  The question is whether Congress will help shape that transformation or spend the next decade scrambling to catch up after the fact.

If we don’t get it right, be catastrophic, and the amount of disruption this technology will bring over the next five years is beyond jaw-dropping.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Mark Warner understands this more than most members of Congress, and I don’t think he’s included in that group of several hundred people who truly understand this.  So, are we just flying blind, really?

Josh Tyrangiel: Yes.  And, unfortunately, I think that the Hugging Face incident is the best we can hope for, right?  We really did get a very small consequence example of the power.  And so before we hit a grid, before something is engineered from bio-terror, the moment is right now.  You have to get people together, and I would include China in that conversation. 

How do we want to regulate and control this stuff?  Because, look, Anthropic came forward, OpenAI had no choice but to come forward, we don’t even know what we don’t know right now.

And so absent urgent action, the data centers are still churning away.  The models are still competitive with each other.  There is only an incentive to go further and faster.  What are we waiting for?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  This is a strange moment to pivot to a book called A.I. For Good.

Josh Tyrangiel: I appreciate the setup, Jeff.  I’m glad we did a bunch of times.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But you actually – unlike a lot of people, you actually see there’s hope for A.I. in the sense that it could help human beings find cures for diseases.  Give us one example of something that when you go to sleep at night, you think, “Oh, at least there are people working on X with A.I.”

Josh Tyrangiel: Well, look, there are numerous examples, and those examples are generally not coming from the pioneering labs, but they’re coming from people in disciplines, like education and healthcare and government, where people are using A.I. to make things that we actually care about better.

So, this morning, there was a huge announcement from the medical community.  ECGs [electrocardiograms; also EKGs], which are very rudimentary tests and can detect whether you’re having a heart attack, with A.I., are now able to detect whether you have heart disease, which previously would’ve taken a much more expensive test that takes months to schedule.  And what A.I. used right can do is make pretty much every data-driven system in our world 25 percent to 50 percent better, and that is meaningful.

So, in my research and reporting, I was at Cleveland Clinic [a renowned non-profit academic medical center in Cleveland, Ohio], I watched them try this basically pilot around sepsis [severe infection caused by pathogenic organisms, especially bacteria, in the blood or tissues] detection inside the hospital.  And it was complicated.  It was driven by doctors. 

Sepsis kills about 300,000 Americans a year.  And what they were able to do with this very rudimentary software was reduce mortality in the hospital by about 40 percent, which is close to 1,000 lives in a year.  That’s meaningful.

And you can see this playing out in a lot of different places, including in government, by the way, where the interactions between citizens and government are not great.  If we can streamline them and make them better, that may have huge consequences for how people think about their government and its value.

So, there’s a lot of valuable babies in this bathwater, and what a mature society should be able to do is separate out the good from the bad and have conversations about what do we actually want this to do.  And so much as you and I have talked about the very bad things we want to avoid, my own feeling is that that’s not enough, that if you want to get people to understand the issue, you also have to show them how A.I. can be good in ways that are more important than, “Oh, yes, we’re going to improve ad response on your website,” or “You might get a better restaurant recommendation,” like that’s not meaningful.

But the meaningful uses are out there.  I’m persuaded by them.  I’m mostly worried about our ability to adapt.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.  On the data center issue, as a stand-in for the whole thing.  I’m fairly sure that Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders are not going to stop the march of A.I. behemoths as they conquer physical, mental space.  Am I wrong in that?  Is this reversible?

Or is the ultimate argument against it China’s going to do it if we don’t so we might as well do it?  I’ll give you the last word on that.

Josh Tyrangiel: I think it’s both.  First of all, I would not underestimate the absolute fury out there in the field.  When I’ve talked to people about A.I., it’s the number one thing that comes up.  They’re really angry.  You’ve seen politicians who advocated for data centers starting to pull back saying, we’re going to just take a pause.

So, I think there will be consequences in November, but we are going to need compute to get the best out of A.I.  We are in a global competition.  And there has to be a reasonable way in which we get it and decide where we’re going to put it without just saying all yes or all no.

Jeffrey Goldberg: In sum, a troubling situation, but the real challenge here is that you talk about the need for mature, nuanced, sophisticated governance, and that is the challenge that Washington faces right now on any number of fronts.  So, I’m not that hopeful.

Josh Tyrangiel: I tend to agree.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we’re going to have to leave it there.  We’ll have this conversation again, I’m sure.  I want to thank Josh for joining me.  And thank you at home for watching us.

I’m Jeffrey Goldberg.  Good night from Washington.

[Jeffrey Goldberg joined The Atlantic and became editor-in-chief in 2016.  He mainly writes on foreign affairs, with a focus on the Middle East and Africa.  Goldberg began his career as a reporter at the Washington Post, where he worked the police beat.  While in Israel, he worked as a columnist for the Jerusalem Post from the late 1980s (he started as a humor columnist) to the early 1990s.  Upon his return to the U.S., he was the New York bureau chief of The Forward, a contributing editor at New York magazine, and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.  In 2000, Goldberg joined The New Yorker.

[Goldberg is also the author of two books: Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Knopf, 2006) and On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump (Zando, 2024).]

[Josh Tyrangiel joined The Atlantic as a staff writer in 2025.  He writes feature stories and essays focusing extensively on technology, politics, and the impact of artificial intelligence.  He was previously the deputy managing editor of TIME magazine and an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.  In June 2019, Tyrangiel left the network.  In May 2026, He published AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter (Simon & Schuster). 

'N/A'

 

I didn’t see N/A, the political two-hander by Mario Correa, when it ran at Lincon Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 2024, so when it showed up on WNET (Channel 13), the Public Broadcasting Service outlet in New York City, in May, I DVR’d it. 

I finally got around to watching it a few nights ago, not planning to do more than see what it was all about, so to speak.  Then I considered writing it up as I have done with many plays since I started Rick On Theater 17 years ago.  I decided I’d give it a try.  So. here goes.

At the top of the PBS broadcast, a voice-over explains that the play is

A behind-closed-doors conversation closely inspired by two larger-than-life public figures.  Despite their clashing ideas about government, both hold deep convictions for progress in the future of the country.

Let’s get the book on N/A down for the record first.  The intermissionless, 80-minute play had its world premiere on 23 June 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Off-Broadway house, the Newhouse Theater, after opening for previews on 14 March. 

Though playing at a venue of the non-profit Lincoln Center Theater, the première of N/A wasn’t an LCT production.  It was an independent, commercial rental of the Newhouse, produced by a team of outside backers assembled by veteran commercial theater producer Jeffrey Richards.

The limited performances of N/A, which were initially scheduled to end on 4 August, were extended through 1 September.  The play closed after 96 regular and preview performances.

The telecast I watched aired on Sunday, 31 May 2026, as part of the Theater Close-Up series produced by The WNET Group.  (Theater Close-Up isn’t a national PBS network program.  It’s a localized, curated series produced specifically by WNET.)

Directed for the stage by Diane Paulus (the TV director was Donna Zaccaro), the production was recorded live on stage at its Lincoln Center home in August toward the end of its 2024 run, right before the production officially wrapped its performances.

Unlike many new plays that spend several years in multiple regional tryouts, academic workshops, or staged public readings, N/A was fast-tracked specifically to meet the political urgency of a major election year (the 2024 presidential rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump). 

The traditional multi-year developmental pipeline for N/A was bypassed through the intervention of Richards, who has an extensive record of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows (among them, the current Maybe Happy Ending—6 Tonys, including Best Musical, and 6 Drama Desks, including Outstanding Musical—and last year’s Beetlejuice and Glengarry Glen Ross).

Upon reading Correa’s script, Richards realized that the play’s thematic tension was vital for the immediate cultural moment.  So, instead of routing the play through a non-profit theater’s multi-season workshop system, Richards formed an independent, commercial producing coalition. 

The team bypassed the standard developmental workshops by mounting a commercial production and renting the Newhouse Theater directly.  This meant the play didn’t undergo the typical public “try-out” or laboratory phase associated with standard regional non-profit commissions.

Through this streamlined commercial process, the script went from an unproduced text directly into New York rehearsals, transitioning straight to its first public performance.  It also attracted creatives like the Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus (Best Direction of a Musical, Pippin, 2013) and actors Holland Taylor (who has a proven track record with political solo-shows like Ann, the 2013 Broadway monodrama about Texas governor Ann Richards) and Ana Villafañe (who won a Theatre World Award for her Outstanding Debut Performance as Gloria Estefan in the 2015 Broadway jukebox musical On Your Feet!).

Now, let’s look at the play itself (which I’ve largely been avoiding till now, you’ll have noticed).  It got a fair amount of coverage when it made its way to Lincoln Center, but that was not only two years ago, but it was also a summertime run—and a limited run at that—so not everyone was paying attention.

In a nutshell, N/A is a generational debate between two unnamed congresswomen, “N,” the first female Speaker of the House, and “A,” the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.  Though their names are never used on stage—and the initials appear only in the program (or, in my case, in the credits at the end of the broadcast)—these figures are modeled explicitly on Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940), Democratic Congresswoman from California since 1987 and the 52nd speaker of the United States House of Representatives, serving from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), since 2019, Democratic U.S. Representative from New York and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

(Just so everybody knows: I’m closer to Pelosi’s age—not quite seven years her junior—than to AOC’s—almost 43 years her senior.  I’m not sure what significance that holds, though.)

Lead producer Richards moved the script to Off-Broadway production at an accelerated pace because he saw that it dovetailed with Real Politics in the field, the presidential election of 2024, and he wanted to catch the wave, but to an extent, that seems to have backfired a little.  The presidential race was such an attention-grabber that most people, including avid theatergoers, were paying more heed, I think, to the real world than to an Off-Broadway play.

The night of the official première, 23 June 2024, was a Sunday, an unusual night to schedule an opening.  But this wasn’t actually an opening in the traditional sense of the term.  It was a gala event for high-profile political figures, media personalities, and theater elites who Richards hoped would start whispering, posting, and talking about the show.

The producers set a strict embargo on the press, however, telling all publications that their representatives (i.e., reviewers) may watch the show at designated press previews or the première night, but they can’t publish reviews until Thursday evening, 27 June.

(Because the public couldn’t read the reviews until 27 June, outlets like the New York Times or New York Theatre Guide labeled the 27th, the day the show “unveiled” itself to the world, not the 23rd, as N/A’s “opening.”)

What no one could have predicted, was that Thursday evening, 27 June 2024, was the night of the momentous presidential debate between the Democratic candidate and incumbent president, Joe Biden, and the Republican challenger and former president, Donald Trump—and Biden gave his disastrous performance that changed the presidential campaign. 

This created a fascinating, accidental intersection of art and reality: the very night the play “officially” revealed its political commentary to the wider public was the exact same night the landscape of Real Politics completely shifted. 

On the one hand, this occurrence enhanced the focus on the play (which was, of course, about a different political debate), but on the other, it probably distracted many potential theatergoers to focusing on the real-world politics that was far more consequential.

Playwright Mario Correa (b. 1969 in Chile) describes himself as a “political junkie,” so all this background and foreground focus on elections and campaigning, both by the play’s presenters and its potential audience, is in his wheelhouse.

Correa immigrated to the United States with his family at age six, growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C.  (That’s Montgomery County.  At the end of her life, my mother lived in Bethesda, and I grew up in Chevy Chase, the first town north of D.C., before Bethesda.)  He spent his early career immersed in real-world government, working directly as a congressional aide during the late 1980s and 1990s.

At 17, he campaigned for House candidate Connie Morella, then running to represent Maryland’s 8th district (Montgomery County), setting him on a political path.  The liberal Republican—Correa labeled her “a very progressive Republican” in a 2025 interview for Barrington Stage—was elected in 1986 and served from ’87 until 2003; Correa became her aide.  This experience gave him a firsthand understanding of the inner workings, rules, and unspoken dynamics of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Washington Post reported that Pelosi also took office as a congresswoman in 1987.  Because there weren’t many women in the House, they became unlikely friends across party lines.  When gerrymandering made it untenable for Morella to be reelected, she was defeated by a Democrat and left Congress.

Correa left Congress upon Morella’s defeat, but he became a congressional lobbyist for high-tech corporations.  “I loved the Hill,” he confirmed in a July 2024 interview for the Theatre Development Fund, referring to Capitol Hill, “but I didn’t love the post-Hill lobbying world.”  So, after a few more years, writing comedy at night, he “quit my day job.”  That was 2005. 

(Reporters, politicians, and government workers and staffers, like Correa, use “the Hill” and “Capitol Hill” metonymically to refer to the work of senators and representatives.  I did this, too, habitually, when I was 15 and had a summer job in 1962 in the congressional office of New Hampshire Representative Chester Merrow [1906-74], also a liberal Republican, who was running, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for the senate.  [I returned to prep school for my sophomore year before the September primary that cost Merrow his seat in Congress and his bid for the Senate nomination.]  I picked up the usage from my longer-serving colleagues in Merrow’s office who guided me in learning the office routines.)

Correa left politics behind, he says, but admits it still pops up in his writing.  (His Off-Broadway comedy Tail! Spin! [New York International Fringe Festival, 2012] is about political sex scandals.)  He sees N/A as “kind of a love letter to Connie and everything I learned” working at the Capitol.

Of Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, as well as their avatars, Correa avers, “I’m really conscious of the fact that I admire these real-life women. I enjoy writing about them . . . .”  He admonishes us, however, “This is not the biography of Nancy Pelosi or AOC.”

Because the playwright has such positive feelings about the actual congresswomen, however, there’s no mistaking who their fictional doppelgangers are—the initialese of the program and the absence of names on the stage notwithstanding.  As Gillian Russo points out in her New York Theatre Guide notice, it’s “immediately obvious.”

(In point of fact, no names are spoken in the play—with the exception of Oscar Alberto Martínez and Angie Valeria, a would-be refugee and his infant daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande in 2019.  Donald Trump, for instance, is referred to only as “that man” and a few more colorful descriptives.)

To be clear, N/A isn’t actually a documentary play, or even a “docudrama,” which allows for considerable fictionalization.  Correa’s dialogue isn’t drawn from any documents or recordings.  (Tail! Spin!, unlike N/A, is a verbatim documentary play.  Correa compiled the script from the actual text messages, e-mails, and public statements of the politician-characters.)

In N/A, the words of “N” and “A,” though based on Correa’s interpretations of Pelosi’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s positions and statements, are composed by him.  They’re his distillations of what he believes the women have said or might say. 

(For an examination of documentary theater, see my article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama“ [9 October 2009], as well as later posts “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre‘“ [15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017], and “Documentary and Investigative Theater“ [10 September 2025].)

Correa, the PBS voice-over explained, focused N/A’s text around the historical events that transpired between “2018, when the Democrats win the House [6 November] . . . to the 2022 midterms [8 November] when the Republicans take it back.” 

(Actually, the first scene occurs the day after “A”’s historic upset primary election victory in the New York State primaries [26 June 2018]—which, in New York’s 14th district [Queens and the Bronx], essentially means she’ll almost certainly win the general election in November—and the play ends on 6 November 2025, when “N” announces to the House that she wouldn’t seek a leadership role in Democratic Caucus.)

As WaPo also reported, Correa said that as the play developed in rehearsals, “it became clear that [it] was less about the mechanics of legislation than he intended and more about two powerful women trying to figure each other out.”

But, as I’ve established, it isn’t a portrait of two real-life congresswomen whose politics and goals clashed.  It’s a fictional debate that dramatizes the intergenerational clash of the political philosophies of an old-line centrist Democratic party leader and a brash insurgent from the left wing of the party.  (Something we’re seeing a good deal of right now in the run-up to the midterm elections in several districts.)

And therein lies the problem I had with the play.  So, let’s get into that.

First, let me state that I found the two performances powerful and engaging.  In my estimation, there’s no way that either of these actresses didn’t feel what the characters were feeling, believe what the characters were saying.

I’ve seen Holland Taylor, who plays “N,” and she’s strong, even fierce, and sure of herself in the most convincing way.  She’s the pragmatist, and David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America dubs her “the sternest of schoolmistresses.” 

I hadn’t seen Ana Villafañe (“A”), but she measured up to her opponent surefootedly and steadfastly with all the assertiveness I could expect.  In the Wall Street Journal, Charles Isherwood writes that she “put[s] cool but clear passion into her performance.”  She’s the idealist.

Taylor, for reasons including one I’ll delve into some shortly, dominates as “N.”  That “schoolmistress” analogy holds true as she educates “A” in the political process (part of N/A is a civics class) and the world at large.  We get to see “N”’s self-confidence, intelligence, understanding, and wry humor at her every turn.

It helps a good deal that Taylor has made herself look very much like Pelosi, with the assistance of Myung Hee Cho’s costume, a hot-pink skirt-suit and high-heeled pumps.  (With no specific credit given for N/A’s make-up, I presume that the costumer was responsible for that, too, as is traditional.)  As several reviewers noted, Taylor did not try to mimic Pelosi’s distinctive voice—but, then “N” isn’t “Pelosi.”

Bringing ardent sincerity to “A”’s radical objectives, Villafañe demonstrates genuine frustration at the political realities she finds in the House and the Democratic Party.  She captures “A”’s resolve, assertiveness, and rejection of compromise.  It doesn’t hurt that Villafañe, in Cho’s black pantsuit and black flats (later heels), is virtually a double for AOC.

As long as I’ve touched on Cho’s costumes, let me say a word about her set design.  I found it underwhelming—though that may be oddly appropriate for this production: a Lucite desk, three Lucite cubes for use as seats, and, prominently up center, a five-foot Lucite case containing a gavel.  

On the desk, which is in “N”’s office, is a landline phone on which she does her cajoling and utzing.  “A,” by contrast, is tethered to her cell, on which she livestreams to her “followers” almost continuously.  That’s, of course, supposed to be emblematic of the generation gap on display here.

(One other prominent item in the set decoration is subtly significant: a small, silver bowl.  It sits on “N”’s desk and is usually full of chocolate squares, which she offers to “A” in the first scene and it becomes a leitmotif.  The squares are Ghirardelli chocolate, “N” tells “A.”  What isn’t articulated is that the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is inextricably associated with San Francisco, the heart of Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district.  If ya know, ya know.)

Rhoda Feng of Observer suggests that the scenic design “encourages the notion of a diorama on loan from a museum”—and it does.  (The gavel turns out to be the one “N” used the first time she called the House into session—and she says it will go to the Smithsonian museum “when I’m done with it.  Which I’m not!”)

Diane Paulus directs the play with sharp assurance.  Oh, some of the blocking is “stagey,” especially when Paulus has one actress speak to the other who’s behind her so that the speaker’s facing the audience, not the person she’s addressing.

The problem at which I hinted above, however, gets in the way, as N/A soon begins to seem like a string of mini-debates over the same issues.  Johnny Oleksinski compares the dialogue to “a campaign robocall” on the New York Post and Feng labels them “off-puttingly vague.”

The New York Times reviewer, Jesse Green, asserts that the playwright “is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut.”  In the play itself, “N” accuses “A” of speaking like “a metaphor shower” and “A” characterizes one of “N”’s pronouncements as “a bumper sticker.”  To my ear, both women are right.

In my view, this happens because Correa doesn’t have a catalogue of Pelosi’s and AOC’s actual statements from which to compile his dialogue.  He only has something like a punch list of topics and he ends up repeating himself—or has his characters doing so.

There’s a second problem with Correa’s portrayals of the antagonists, and it may have been generated by his personal feelings—not necessarily his political leanings—regarding the real-life characters.  His prior acquaintanceship, however glancing, with Pelosi may account for the fact that he gives “N” most of the best—that is, funniest—lines in the play.

In his Vulture/New York magazine review, Jackson McHenry points out that “giving a character laugh lines is like handing them a weapon.”  He goes on:

The playwright may intend to be evenhanded, but the humor tends to be the giveaway.  It can make someone seem smarter, wiser, more relatable, even if they’re espousing ideas you don’t agree with.

Most of the play’s humor, McHenry observes, “tilt[s] solidly in N’s favor,” rendering “A” as something of a pill.  I suspect that Correa didn’t intend to queer the pitch to “N”’s benefit—I believe he meant for us to witness equal combat—and I don’t really know that the writer was influenced by his long-ago encounters with Pelosi in Morella’s office, but the result is what it is, irrespective of the causes.

McHenry, however, seems to think that Correa leans in favor of “N”/Pelosi’s political philosophy.  Nevertheless, he says something with which I agree:

If you, like me, are more inclined to sympathize with A than with N [which I tend to, even as I recognize that her agenda is probably impossible to enact], a play that keeps insisting that better things aren’t possible gets frustrating quickly. . . .  N/A wears quickly as a drama.  It’s boring watching one generation dunk repeatedly on another for 80 minutes.

“I wanted to write about a battle of ideas,” Correa wrote in the Playbill for N/A, “the philosophical and strategic disagreements that have placed two historical figures seemingly at odds, despite shared values and objectives.”

It turns out, though, that that’s not actually what came about—and it’s probably just as well.  As the writer told the Washington Post, the play moved away from his intended focus on civics and focused more on the two women.  As Times review-writer Green observes, “[P]lays, performed by real people, can’t help but be personal too.”

I’m not sure that’s an axiom, but it happened in this instance.  The political wrangling, as I’ve asserted, gets enervating pretty quickly, especially if you listen to newscasts and talk shows.  We’ve heard it all before—especially just now, in the preliminaries to the midterms when Pelosi-like centrist candidates are facing progressive opponents in the mold of AOC. 

But as dynamic shifts from articulating politics to revealing the characters, the individualities, the actors inject humanity and draw this viewer’s attention.  Now, this doesn’t enhance the drama, but it does make for more compelling theater.  In the hands of less charismatic actors, this might not happen, but with Taylor and Villafañe, it works.

The press in 2024 was mixed, leaning more towards the “meh.”  Of the reviews I read, probably the most negative was Oleksinski’s Post notice.  His first words are: “Don’t come looking for juicy drama at ‘N/A’ . . .” and then he adds,

The behind-closed-doors scenes pitting the Speaker of the House against the upstart New York congresswoman are more like Disney’s Hall of Presidents—reverential and robotic—than brutal Capitol Hill.

The Post reviewer complains that “no moment is ever explosive.  In fact,” he continues,

“N/A” is almost a light comedy.  Playwright Mario Correa turns Pelosi into a Don Rickles who delivers mean zinger after mean zinger about the then-30-year-old rep of the Bronx and Queens as if she’s working the Catskills.

“There’s no critique, really,” Oleksinski writes, “or insight into these famous women beyond what we already know,” summing up with, “It’s a whole lotta duh.”  His appraisal of the performances is: “Taylor and Villafañe are ideally cast in less-than-ideal circumstances.”

In the Times, Green declares,

The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves.  N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers . . . .

He praises both actors.

The Timesman, however, points out that “the conflict that Correa means to foreground as political keeps falling out of its frame,” explaining, “However policy-oriented the relationship was in Washington, onstage it becomes personal despite the playwright’s intentions.”

Green complains that “Correa is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut.” As an example, he notes that “N”’s notion of the chain in which every fight leads to the next (Green called this the “ouroboros,” which I thought was kinda clever) “gets tiring fast, or would, had the actors not long since taken over the play’s agenda.”   

In the Wall Street Journal, Isherwood opens with a quip: “Given the existential despair in which most Democrats are swimming—or drowning—an evening at ‘N/A’ . . . will almost qualify as comfort food, or a weighted blanket soothing the nerves.”

“Mr. Correa's writing,” Isherwood writes, “is sharp and smart, convincing in its understanding of the characters as we know them, and often refreshingly funny.”  Diane Paulus, the WSJ reviewer attests, directed the play “with crisp authority.”

Isherwood, too, praises both actors.  Taylor delivers her lines “with a delicacy that nevertheless keeps their acerbic veneer firmly polished,” he reports, and Villafañe “does not shy from portraying Alexandria as, at times, stubborn and high-handed.”

He concludes that “[e]ven at just 80 minutes, ‘N/A’ can feel like a series of debates circling around the same subjects . . . .  Nevertheless, even if it does resemble a debate without moderators, as such things go it passes like a refreshing breeze . . . .”

On Vulture, McHenry, noting that the play’s described as “a battle of wills—and wits,” protests that “[t]he wits, and most of the play’s will, tilt solidly in N’s favor.”  He adds that “N/A . . . is like being stuck at dinner with a relative you wish would please talk about anything else (do N and A have any thoughts on the weather?).  It’s claustrophobic, and ultimately boring . . . .”

“[T]he structure traps the performers in limited caricatures,” McHenry asserts.  Taylor “specializes in playing toughened older women” and “applies all her steel to N, throwing out one-liners with hefty torque . . . .”  In contrast, “Villafañe’s done musicals . . . and her angle on A turns the congresswoman into something of a flustered theater kid.”

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart capsulizes N/A, which he labels “this 80-minute political hagiography,” thus:

If you’re looking for a comedy that flatters the sensibilities of Boomer liberals without ever rudely suggesting that they might bear some responsibility for the overwrought state of our politics, this is your ticket.

Of the actors, Stewart says,

Villafañe is the more convincing mimic of the two, perfectly capturing AOC’s pitch and cadence.  She does a fine job completing the task set out by Correa’s script, which is to set up the pins for Taylor to knock down.

He switches sports references and remarks that Villafañe “throw[s] softballs to her comedy partner,” so he can quip that “Taylor easily knocks them out of the park.”  Of Taylor’s “N,” the TheaterMania review-writer proclaims, “She’s less Nancy Pelosi than she is Lady Bracknell with a gavel.  She dispenses salty morsels of wisdom . . . .”

“Diane Paulus helms the production with a steady hand and on a relatively slim design budget,” writes Stewart.  “Myung Hee Cho’s set of transparent office furniture on dull carpet suggests a popup Thai restaurant . . . .”

The reviewer’s final assessment is that

N/A succeeds as a light summer comedy for the vote-blue-no-matter-who set.  But if you’re looking for reassurances that liberals young and old have . . . learned any valuable lessons that will keep Donald Trump out of the White House, I’m afraid they’re not available.

Russo of New York Theatre Guide finds that

Correa’s approach to N/A . . . feels like that of a politician's speechwriter.  The task is to carefully curate an image of his subjects that’s commanding and true—perhaps with the occasional imperfection or vulnerability so as to be human, but making sure they’re someone you can root for.

“Correa deftly advances his goal with spirited, entertaining writing,” says Russo.  “A few lines sound like they truly were written for a speech . . ., but he makes up for them with a stream of zingers.”  She continues, “It seems more likely to reinforce people’s existing alliances than encourage them to really consider other perspectives.  The play feels tailor-made, and -timed, for one express purpose: Get out the vote.”

Observer’s Feng slams N/A, the latest on a spate of plays “with shortened character names” as the least surprising, most anemic of the bunch.”  She adds that “N/A is about as suspenseful as an electoral abecedarium.”

“Part of the problem has to do with déjà vu.” Feng explains.  Correa . . . sticks closely to the facts (so many facts!), delivering dutiful capsule summaries of the women’s backgrounds and hobbyhorses with the efficiency and spontaneity of a teleprompter . . . .”  “N/A,” declares the Observer writer, “suffers from . . . information overload.  The welter of information is funneled through exposition-heavy dialogue and needlepoint-ready slogans.”

On This Week in New York, Mark Rifkin dubs  N/A “potent.”  He pronounces Pelosi as “splendidly portrayed by Taylor,” and AOC as “fully embodied by Ana Villafañe.”  (Reporting that after he got home, he watched “the debacle of a debate” between the 2024 presidential candidates . . . and wisecracked that he “decided to cast my vote for Taylor.”)

Rifkin designates Correa’s script as “well-written” and finds it “astutely directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus . . . .”  “Cho’s costumes capture the characters to a T,” the reviewer states. 

“Taylor shines as Pelosi,” declares Rifkin; “it’s as if she has a glow as she tries to educate the younger congresswoman in the ways of politics, and the world itself.  She exhibits Pelosi’s confidence, intelligence, and understanding of the tactics of negotiation in her every movement.”

“Villafañe . . .,” reports the TWINY reviewer, “more than holds her own with Taylor, capturing her character’s determination, aggressiveness, and refusal to compromise.”

Samuel L. Leiter on Theater Life acknowledges that while N/A “breaks no ground dramaturgically, it does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to imagine a series of encounters . . . between the politicians.”  He adds that “Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are ideally cast, . . . making it easy to imagine that what we’re witnessing approximates reality.”

Leiter points out that “Correa gives both women enough personal detail to make them believable simulacra of the real-life people they represent.”  He adds. “Both performers are excellent and not only because of how closely they resemble their famous counterparts.”

“Villafañe . . . brings fiery conviction to A’s radical aspirations, along with sincere frustration at the political realities she must deal with,” finds Leiter.  “As so often in the past,” he says of Taylor, “I was impressed by how she can turn on a dime from emotion to emotion, or put a spin on three or four words to conjure a big laugh out of them.”

Director Paulus “elicits sharply edged performances,” finds Leiter, “but her staging . . . can be a bit clunky, with blocking seemingly motivated more by a need to get the actors moving than from organic motives; too often, the actors seem to be playing to the audience [rather] than to each other” (as I noted myself).

“As represented by the conflict between the steady, if ploddingly incremental, bridge-building practices of someone like Nancy Pelosi,” Leiter sums up, “and the angry, outspoken, bridge-burning tactics of someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the result is a drama that not only has educational value but strikes enough dramatic sparks to light up the stage.”

In N/A’s “fly-on-the-wall view of the pairing of and occasional headbutting between longtime congressional superstar ‘N’ (as in Nancy Pelosi) and blazing newcomer ‘A’ (as in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez),” says Howard Miller on Talkin’ Broadway,

[t]he sense of authenticity is aided to a prodigious degree by whip-cracking, razor-sharp performances by Holland Taylor as N, delivering both calm self-assuredness and subtle sarcasm with pitch-perfect timing, and Ana Villafañe as A, offering scorching indictments of “the system” with the fervency of an evangelical Fury.

In the end, Miller believes, “even though audience members are unlikely to be surprised by the stances of each of the two, it is the personalities and the beautifully crafted and performed interplay between them that makes N/A such a pleasure to watch.”

On Lighting & Sound America, David Barbour spent most of his notice describing the contents of N/A—and much of that writing about Holland Taylor’s “N”—instead of evaluating it.  He did finally make some critical comments, however:

[Director Paulus] keeps the conversation on a constant simmer and Taylor always has a zinger on hand when things start to get too much like the Sunday morning talk shows.  [Myung Hee] Cho’s spare set design is a fine canvas for the projections by POSSIBLE and Lisa Renkel . . . .

Since we’re clearly in for a wild political summer—I write this on the morning after the first presidential debate, as panic grips Democrats across the land—some, looking for theatrical escape, may find N/A to be a little too much like a ninety-minute session with Politico or The Hill.  But Correa is asking questions that should concern us all and Taylor is a show all by herself.  Democracy may be in crisis but at least we can laugh about it.

“Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are perfectly cast in this intelligent and illuminating comedy . . .,” reports Jonathan Mandell in his opening sentence on New York Theater.  “Opening on the night of an unprecedented debate between a President and a former President,” he adds, “the play is itself something of a debate over issues, strategies and priorities that directly apply to the state of the nation now.”

“At the same time, ‘N/A’ aims to entertain.”

Mandell finds that Correa achieves the goal he wrote about in the program (quoted above), “with N and A exchanging views on issues like health care, climate change, and immigration, but ultimately arguing over the best way to effect change.”

The review-writer cavils slightly, saying, “If ‘N/A’ offers little of [Saturday Night Live’s] brand of satiric silliness, the play is threaded with a comic looseness.”  Mandell adds,

Both Congresswomen are undeniably sharp, but it seems unlikely that the real Pelosi and AOC engage in such witty banter, which in my experience is rare to encounter outside a TV show.  Coincidentally or not, much of the production’s design recalls a TV studio, at least a political one, with a barebones set and computer graphics of colorful stars with a “whoosh” sound in between scenes.  

He backs off slightly, acknowledging that “it’s hard to object to the laugh lines in the play, which temper—and are tempered by—the serious discussions . . . .”

It doesn’t hurt that both Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are able to deliver the comedy without compromising their credible portrayal of these actual women . . . .

In the end, Mandell has reservations:

“N/A” may not be a political play for the ages.  As the playwright himself acknowledges, it’s only “lightly imagined.”  It doesn’t quite go anywhere.  The ending feels almost arbitrary; nothing is really resolved.  But isn’t that exactly where we are right now?

Darryl Reilly of Theater Scene, dubs N/A a “witty and absorbing two-character fantasia” and says “it believably imagines Pelosi’s contentious relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Generational and ideological clashes abound.” 

Reilly describes the play as “a lively 75-minute battle of opposing wills amidst the passing scene” and reports that “Diane Paulus’s snappy physical staging achieves visual verisimilitude” while “Myung Hee Cho’s spare Lucite-themed scenic design perfectly represents power offices with a museum-style dimension, and her luxurious costume design authentically duplicates Pelosi’s regal red skirt suit and Ocasio-Cortez’s stylish black ensemble.”

He writes that “N/A is a strongly performed and stimulating entertainment” with Taylor delivering “a grand performance using her own distinctive honeyed vocal cadences, rather than attempting a Pelosi impression,” while “Villafañe’s charisma, sleek physicality and animation, accurately capture Ocasio-Cortez’s persona; youthful idealism is movingly articulated.”  Reilly concludes that “Ms. Villafañe’s and Taylor’s marvelous histrionic teamwork puts N/A over as a thoughtful take on contemporary American politics.”

Remarking on Correa’s program note that N/A was “heavily researched and lightly imagined,” Culture Sauce’s Thom Geier laments, “Would that it had been more deeply researched or even more imaginatively executed.  As it stands, the show clearly tips the balance toward the octogenarian in this battle of the wills . . . .”

Geier expresses misgivings about the playwriting, objecting,

There’s a superficiality to the portrayals here, one that seems to be borne of Wikipedia bios, quotes from speeches and interviews, and yes, even, social media posts.  Despite Diane Paulus’s crisp direction, the characters too often seem like animatronic figures from Disney’s Hall of Presidents rather than flesh-and-blood people. 

On Off Off Online, Colin Macdonald declares that “Mario Correa’s N/A . . . is downright enjoyable, with sharp, quippy, idea-laden writing that can feel as though plucked from The West Wing . . . .”  “One doesn’t need to be a political junkie to appreciate N/A,” Macdonald advises, “as its ideas and conflicts are laid out clearly, though there are some Easter eggs for overconsumers of political news . . . .”

The OOO reviewer continues,

Diane Paulus’s precise direction avoids the stasis that can sometimes afflict two-handers: the way the actors sit, orbit one another, and where they stand all seem to symbolize their power struggle—no movement feels slack or accidental.

“A strength of Correa’s writing is the ability to locate humor amid the debates,” finds Macdonald, although “[t]here are moments when the play’s debates feel repetitive . . . .”  The review-writer concludes, “The tug-of-war is engrossing, funny, and ultimately moving, with two fine-tuned performances that evoke the namesake characters but are not crude impressions.”