The poster for the play Data sports a foreboding warning: “The data is out there. The danger is real.”
That tagline is no exaggeration. Data, written by Matthew Libby, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, and now playing Off Broadway at New York’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, deals in all-too-real concerns. Data privacy, AI acceleration, immigration… It’s all on the table.
Data follows Maneesh (Karan Brar), a brilliant programmer at Silicon Valley company Athena Technologies. When he joins the data analytics team, he learns the truth of their top-secret project. Athena is competing for a government contract to (spoiler alert!) work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on a new form of AI-powered immigrant surveillance.
Watching the play unfold, it’s impossible to separate its story from current events. Not only are Data‘s themes of shady tech companies and surveillance especially relevant, but some elements of its premise are coming to life in real time. In 2025, months after Data‘s 2024 run at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enlisted tech company Palantir to create an AI- and data mining-powered platform to track immigrants. In 2026, Palantir developed ELITE, an app that uses data from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to pinpoint neighborhoods to raid. Both projects feel ripped straight from Athena’s internal memos.
These kinds of real-world events have had a direct impact on audiences’ reaction to Data, playwright Libby and star Brar told Mashable during a joint video interview.
“In D.C., we were very much in the heart of it, of the people who would be engaging in this contract, whether that be consultants or government contractors,” Brar said. “I think we saw a lot of Patagonia vests and blue shirts in the lobby, and a lot of people being like, ‘Yeah, this rings really close to home with what I’m doing.'”
The Arena Stage production of Data began Oct. 31, 2024, mere days before Donald Trump‘s 2024 re-election. Before the election, Libby recalled that there was never an audible audience reaction to Data‘s first DHS mention.
“After the election, there was a reaction every single time,” he said. “One of the things that that made me realize was the extent to which people were going to be bringing the real world into the space.”
That realization impacted how Libby approached how he prepared Data for its New York run.
Karan Brar and Sophia Lillis in “Data.”
Credit: T. Charles Erickson
“The play never mentions Trump, the play never mentions ICE. We never even mention what political party is in power,” Libby said. “But a lot of the rewrites we were doing were just writing more consciously towards the fact that people are going to have associations coming into this.”
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Some of Data‘s evolution stemmed from the public’s growing knowledge of the relationship between the government and big tech companies. Libby began writing Data in 2018, years before AI was the hot-button topic on every tech CEO’s lips. Initially, he hoped to give audiences “a peek into the black box of this world [of Silicon Valley].” It was a world he was familiar with, having attended Stanford and even interviewed for an internship with Palantir. Now, though, audiences have more awareness of that world.
“One of the big differences between fall of 2024 and right now is that everyone saw tech titans bend the knee to the current administration,” Libby said. “Everyone knows now that there is a connection.”
Brar added: “Before I worked with Matthew, I didn’t know what Palantir really was. I’ve learned about that side of Silicon Valley and these tech companies whose whole mandate is ‘We solve problems,’ and now the public is very aware of that. I think that has become a massive paradigm shift for the way that something like [Data] is perceived.”
Data‘s ending was also reworked between its D.C. and New York runs.
“The ending is, in some ways, the thing that has been the most reactive to world events,” Libby said. “As I’ve realized that the play did have a growing resonance with the real world, I was feeling a lot of pressure on myself to work through how I felt about it.”
Data‘s original ending was “plottier,” with more of a corporate espionage feel, something borne from Libby’s feeling that the characters needed to “hashtag resist and solve the problem.”
Yet as he worked on it further, he zeroed in on Maneesh’s core dilemma: Does he act on what he knows about Athena? Does he risk upending his entire life and career to do what he knows is right?
“There’s power in just watching a person make a decision for the first time in a long time,” Libby said of the new ending. “It doesn’t matter what’s going to happen offstage. What matters is that this guy has broken out of a cycle of dehumanization. The more I realized that, the more I was like, ‘That feels to me like the thing that I am trying to live right now, at this moment in history. How do I feel everything? How do I not dehumanize myself?'”
These calls for action persist after Data has ended, when its cast members take their bows. In New York, they return to the stage wearing anti-ICE pins. The show’s first preview took place Jan. 9, two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. Brar recalled that on Jan. 24, the day Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Raymundo Gutierrez fatally shot Alex Pretti, Data‘s evening audience was especially subdued.
The cast’s anti-ICE pins were initially just pen on Scotch tape, improvised by Brar’s co-star Brandon Flynn. Later, the cast received a donation of more formal, visible pins, and they’ve since become a permanent part of the bows.
“I’m so grateful that we have a creative team that’s so aligned and together about what we’re saying that we can bring ourselves into the bows and make a statement like that,” Brar said. “As someone who’s first-generation, it is hard for me not to continuously think about what the institution of ICE represents. The most patriotic Americans that I’ve ever met in my life are actually immigrants. The way my father has spoken about this country — his hope, his fears, his inspiration — is what America is. Something like ICE is the antithesis of that, and [wearing the pins] felt instinctual to do and obvious to do. It feels like a staple that will stay.”
Brar concluded: “It’s been really powerful doing it every night. I know that sounds cheesy, because we’re doing art and people are dealing with real-life consequences, but it is nice to feel a little bit fearless in a world that is so fearful.”
Data is playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City through March 29.
