The Glitch
Written by Kipp Koenig
Directed by Mark Koenig
Presented by AEI Theatricals at The Jerry Orbach Theater at The Theater Center
210 W 50th St., Manhattan, NYC
September 24-November 2, 2025
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| L to R: Danielle Augustine, Hannah Doherty (front), Jacquie Bonnet, Sunny Makwana. Photo by Shawn Salley |
What if you could preview your potential child the same way that you can use AR to preview how a piece of furniture would fit in your space before you click buy? That's the service offered by the startup in Kipp Koenig's sci-fi play
The Glitch: the chance for prospective parents to meet a holographic AI version of the child they might have. Set in the near future,
The Glitch engagingly blends humor and poignancy in its exploration of the rippling ramifications of one client's use of the service, touching on secrecy, guilt, generational trauma, and even metaphysical boundaries.
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| Jacquie Bonnet and Sunny Makwana. Photo by Shawn Salley |
The client in question, designated Client 10, is Amy (
Danielle Augustine), outwardly chic and spikily self-assured, who shows up to her initial interview at AI startup Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) without the partner whom she has indicated as the potential father of her theoretical child. Amy does arrive with a distrust of "computer people," which she freely expresses, much to the consternation of Wendy (
Jacquie Bonnet), who oversees ethics at the small company and is the sort of person who can't help but get endearingly excited over the technical minutiae of her work. Another employee, of a sort, and integral to AEI's process, is Aurora (
Amilia Shaw, imbuing her voice-only role with plenty of personality and laughs), an AI who functions as a therapist with total recall and the ability to know when someone is lying. Aurora is a carryover from the company's initial mission of grief counseling, which, as founder Wyatt (Sunny Makwana) explains, was not flashy enough for investors, hence the pivot to creating AI children such as Hailey (Hannah Doherty), modeled for Amy based on DNA, electronic records, and interview data. As if Amy's use of AEI to think about whether she actually wants a child were not potentially fraught enough, two things that we learn early on about Wyatt are that he loves Omar Sharif in
Doctor Zhivago and that he used to know Amy.
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| Danielle Augustine. Photo by Shawn Salley |
It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that secrets become a significant theme, whether it's glasses that change how one looks by projecting light onto the face or simply not speaking about certain aspects of one's experience. Hiding the self, or parts of it, is overwhelmingly positioned in the play as damaging, although Aurora does also describe denial as a survival mechanism, and even she, it eventually transpires, is keeping secrets. Wyatt has longstanding guilt over the role that not speaking up played in what he sees as the failure to protect someone he cared about, which finds a parallel in Amy's worries about not being able to protect her child were she a mother, a fear that is brought painfully to the fore in one interaction with Hailey. Amy also fears that she will reproduce the bad relationships she had with her mother and father, and even with her grandmother–Amy's own version of training data–with any future flesh and blood version of Hailey (whom Amy would name Grace). Such generational guilt and anxiety also highlights the perpetual presentness of the past, its influence on shaping the always iterating builds of human AI models and human identities alike. (There is a further parallel in the desire for newer versions in both cases to improve upon older versions.) At the same time, for the living, unlike for a dataset, parts of the past do fade, such as Amy's ability to mentally conjure up a deceased loved one. And if AI is all about data-based prediction, predicting the future based on the past, a mysterious development with Hailey suggests that maybe the future has its own ghosts that can haunt the present.
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| L to R: Danielle Augustine, Sunny Makwana, Jacquie Bonnet, and Hannah Doherty. Photo by Shawn Salley |
The Glitch mostly takes place at AEI, nicely evoked by the tech-lab feeling of
Josh Oberlander's minimalist white set, and the choice to keep Hailey always offstage, just a couple rows into one or another of the aisles, and under colored light–most often blue, in
Zack Lobel's expressive lighting design–artfully maintains her separation from the play's living humans. Doherty skilfully plays Hailey as a teenager, bursting with big emotions but also concerned with the little things, like getting a good nail polish color, any uncanniness coming from the disjunction between her perky delivery and what she's talking about, such as her early impatience with not yet having limbs. Bonnet's Wendy is enthusiastically intelligent, and especially funny in spirited exchanges with Aurora, as is Makwana when Wyatt is trying to avoid revealing his identity to Amy. He inhabits Wyatt's more emotional moments with sensitivity, not unlike Augustine's impressive and affecting rendering of both Amy's hard exterior and everything that it conceals.
The Glitch leaves the audience with a certain degree of openness in its ending but no question that, in the age of AI, sci-fi continues to thrive on the stage.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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