Theater Review

"This Much I Know" by Jonathan Spector, at 59E59

Simply put, what gives me the right to write a New York theatrical review? I’m not an aficionado of the theater, nor have I written on the subject, nor have I been recognized as some authority. I base my reason for the ‘right’ because — vis-a-vis this play — I am an outlier. A random person would not experience the play as I did. I found the play resonated almost 100% with my thoughts.

Let me try to explain. First, I need to give you ‘some’ idea of what the play is about. Here is a brief abstract, given like the Abstract in front of a medical journal report or article. It’s supposed to provide a summary and the main findings. In this case, I’ll take a shortcut and give you what Grok says about the play (my italics):

This time-hopping drama explores themes of psychology, ideology, decision-making, and personal agency, intertwining stories of a professor searching for his missing wife, Stalin’s defecting daughter, a young man rejecting white supremacist upbringing, and an accidental killer. It’s inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. Directed by Hayley Finn, the cast includes Firdous Bamji, Ethan J. Miller, and Dani Stoller.

I will stop here and pause for a moment to give you a tip, along with some thoughts about Grok and chatbots in general. They are fantastic at reshaping meaning and reducing ideas into something smaller, more organized, and more easily apprehended by the mind. I predict that this property will be their main use, and its addition to our mental armamentarium will prove to be a true unique revolutionary mental ‘tool’. AI and chatbots will allow for a more efficient and effective transfer of knowledge; perhaps from machine to man at first, but ultimately from one person to another. We will learn to use it well; it will teach us. Start with x, ‘shrink’ to ‘y’: no cry. Start with x; ‘expand’ to ‘A’: no way. Start with x; push to 8: hallucinate. That’s my tip on how to use chatbots. Always ask them to condense and reorganize for better understanding.

So back to the play… Sondra and I are members of 59E59 and we can choose plays and get a discount, so we tend to take advantage. I have no memory of why we picked this particular play; but today, as I examine the blurb on the website (which I ‘must’ have read), the play “takes us on an explosively theatrical interrogation of how we make decisions, how we change our minds, and how much responsibility we bear for the things we do not control”. Reading that alone would be enough for me to push for it.

What I didn’t know until I sat down to write my Substack (about the experience of seeing this play), was that I had already encountered the ideas of Daniel Kahneman, although I had almost completely forgot it. In fact, as I later found, not only had I encountered his ideas, but I had gone searching on Grok for more information. Yet as the actors spoke his name and delivered the lines containing his ideas, everything passed by me sitting in the audience with only a vague rumble of quasi-familiarity, and no aftershock. I had almost totally forgotten.

But I was left with some sense of maybe I knew of him; I wasn’t sure. So… [and here I take off on another aside] — because my computer (as opposed to my aging self) never erases its memory, I went back to see if I had a prior interest in Kahneman. You should know I am always trying to train myself to take greater advantage of the modern computer’s capability. We are entering a new ‘age’, and it’s coming on strongly. Don’t worry about AI, cloud computing, and the global Internet; just think of a new kind of ‘deep, wide, almost neurological planetary connectedness’, never seen before in human history.

So I sat down at the keyboard and began my search for any prior interest in Kahneman. I played a hunch that perhaps I had researched him in the past on Grok. I ran a search and quickly found that he was part of a question I had asked Grok to get clarity on an article from the New York Times on September 3, 2025, with the hot title of “The Fever Dream of Imminent Superintelligence Is Finally Breaking”.

I had cut and pasted 3 long paragraphs from the article and sent it to Grok, asking for clarity and a further restatement of some of its ideas. It was in these 3 paragraphs that I first encountered Kahneman and his ideas. I learned that Kahneman (based on his studies in psychology) taught that the human mind (my focus of interest) does not rely on a ‘single cognitive mechanism’ but uses two systems of thought. One is ‘quick, reflexive and automatic and driven largely by the statistics of experience but is superficial and prone to blunders’; and the other is ‘driven more by abstract reasoning and deliberative thinking but is slow and laborious’.

Those two systems in our brain’s architecture sounded exactly what I would call, using a framework of neuroanatomy from my medical background, our ‘limbic system’ for Kahneman’s ‘quick system’; and the product of the ‘logic centers in our cerebral cortex’ for his ‘slow system’.

Within the last 100 years, you could also add in the findings of comparative neuroanatomy and the fossil record, which would place these systems on an evolutionary timeline. Kahneman’s ‘quick system’ would again conform to the concept of the ‘limbic system’, as the outcome of early ‘lower level’ (or reptilian) brainstem development. Later on, the timeline would reveal a higher level of development, with the appearance of cerebral hemispheres in mammals, and most notably, in man, the frontal lobes, now comprising our ‘slow system’ of thought.

None of these schematics are new, of course. They could be simply new labels on old philosophical bottles of wine sitting around since the time of Plato, i.e., ‘passion’ versus ‘reason’. As one of my subscribers had earlier suggested, “Lay-off the cortical parts and descent and ancestry… At best, it looks like an thinly veiled unsuccessful attempt to paint a gloss of science on simple arguments.“ It’s true that these concepts of two cognitive systems still mainly exist as labels; they remain mere deductive classifications that can’t be connected (as yet) to specific nerve bundles or ganglia. They still can’t be easily differentiated or studied in action by EEG or other imaging laboratory tests (as yet). However, they must exist; there’s simply too much evidence for their reality to be denied effectively.

So, having (in a sense) re-encountered Kahneman in the course of last night’s play, I was able today, by means of my ‘modern’ computer — (actually a 10 year old MAC desktop, not longer even made, much less sold!) — to recreate what I had essentially forgotten. I could reconstruct the connections between Kahneman’s thinking, and my own, and how they tied into my reactions to the play, and ultimately this Substack review.

In the course of writing this, I learned that Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. I learned he got a Nobel in 2002 for ‘integrating insights’ from psychology into economics. His book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, came out in 2011. He died last year at age 90.

I continued my ‘investigations’, only to discover that some of what I thought I knew about him was wrong. Somehow, in my mind, I had anagrammed the first 4 letters of his name as “K-H-A-N”, so I was shocked (and yes pleased) to find out he was Jewish. He wore that (and his Israeli background) proudly, although he was not averse to criticizing anyone’s decisions, always advocating for “more rational and less emotionally driven approaches to conflict and decision-making, without endorsing specific policies or ideologies” (Grok). I decided that had he lived, he would be a rationalist, a centrist, a political independent, and a ‘neoconservative’ (I’m sure) like myself. He would subscribe to Commentary, approve of some of Trump’s policies and dislike others; but thoroughly loathe the ‘man’ with his personality/design flaws. He would approve of Trump’s current solution to the Gaza war, recognize his central importance to the long-term success of his solution, and worry that Trump’s attention span regarding Israel and the region could flag and imperil that success.

Like any Jew who held Zionistic values, I had been more than troubled by what has transpired over the past two years with the Gaza war. I have witnessed a long loud and explosive tidal wave sweep across the planet. The wave seemed composed of a crazy mixture of warm humanitarians, tree hugging idealists, mixed in with anti-Israel, antisemitic and proHamas supporters.

It seemed as if a substantial proportion of the planet was blind to the basic notions of cause and effect; that if your neighbor (Israel) deeply believes that your intentions are hostile, you do not build neighborly trust by always trying to kill him and sometimes succeeding. If your neighbor believes his life is on the line, that you are shooting to kill, naturally he’s going to try to kill you first as quickly and as deadly as he can. War is hell; in heat of battle, mistakes are made. Does the press of Israel write about the recent Manchester synagogue attack by ignoring the terrorist attacker; instead claiming that 50% of Jewish deaths were caused by the English police, and that these same police eagerly enforced the expulsion of all Jews from the country over 700 years ago. No, they don’t, because they use their heads and recognize that while such ideas are easily defensible as ‘true’, they are not only irrelevant to what happened in Manchester, but are profoundly distorted. The consecutive armadas of pro-Palestinian vessels tells me that many seem to have little contact with their frontal lobes when trying to understand the Middle East. But I digress…

To return to the play seen last night… I found it very engaging. Like Sondra, I found the narrative story, folding in and out of the play’s timeline, to be very compelling. The acting and the staging was beyond captivating, such that you didn’t need to have an interest in Russian history as well as the neurosciences to really enjoy the play.

It’s not as if some did not find it too rich and too chock full of themes and ingredients. As we filed out, I overheard a group of Russian women (by their accents) complain that too many themes were woven into the script; too much Russian history, too much seemingly random midnight arrests in the late 1930’s, followed with quiet executions by Stalin’s secret police. These complaints were not without their justification, given that social media, white supremacy, today’s teenagers, and how ideologies are passed down through culture and society all found a place. The author even touched on age and mortality, things of course to which I might pay attention.

As Grok’s ‘abstract’ reported, the play explored how we think, how we make the decisions we make, all the while told through interlocking stories showing complicated relationships — husband and wife, father and child, teacher and student, life and death. Touching upon all these were larger questions: causality, responsibility, and belief systems. I thought in general the writer of the play handled the interplay of these manifold ideas rather well; the work of the playwright, Jonathan Spector, reminded me somewhat of Tom Stoppard, whose play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, I first saw in 1968, when I arrived in New York from Dallas. Stoppard’s plays also explore large philosophical themes — fate, free will, and how chance mixed with absurdity impacts our life.

For those who scanned this review, probably skipping what might be to some the tedious quality of the middle section, I will say that last night, all of us who saw the performance gave it high marks. For me, the marks were extra high, enough to include it in my Substack journal entry for today. I hope it results in some extra sprouts in some out of the way cerebral field partial to neurogenesis.

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