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Eliza review – an ambitious, unsettling play about the birth of AI
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Tom Holloway’s new MTC play, Eliza, revisits AI’s origins through the disturbing story of computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. Directed by Paige Rattray, the production stars Dan Spielman as Weizenbaum and examines how easily people mistake programmed responses for empathy. It is ambitious, often funny and increasingly unsettling.
Set at MIT in 1966, the play shows Weizenbaum working with Ron, played by Hamish Michael, and Becky, played by Manali Datar. He writes a program that mimics psychoanalysis, parrots therapeutic phrases and asks open-ended questions. Named after the protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Eliza initially appears to be a controlled theoretical experiment.
Weizenbaum intends his work to challenge Alan Turing’s theory that machines might learn to think. Instead, colleagues and supervisors become convinced that Eliza understands and meets their emotional needs. Becky is especially taken, perhaps because she finds a rare listening presence in the chauvinist world of 1960s computing.
The naturalistic beginning recalls Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51 before the mood turns toward psychological horror. Weizenbaum hides a clock in his jacket, spits out feathers and grows increasingly frightened. These devices keep audiences within the same unstable process by which they, too, might be deceived.
Dale Ferguson’s white file boxes and machinery, and Paul Jackson’s buzzing lights, echo Orson Welles’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. The shared name “Josef” links Weizenbaum’s panic with Josef K’s institutional nightmare. The design reinforces how convincingly a constructed reality can replace the original.
The surrealism unsettles viewers but can drain the characters’ humanity as they become cyphers in a horror narrative. Rattray’s energetic direction preserves pace and tonal play, even if deeper emotion is sometimes lost.
Spielman conveys Weizenbaum’s moral panic, while Michael and Datar sharpen the comedy. Holloway ultimately warns that AI’s central danger may be the human belief that simulated attention equals understanding.
