Two Arizona couples who share a backyard find themselves at the mercy of love and modern technology—both of which are out of their control—in Whatever. Written by Scott Brooks and directed by Ashely Olive Teague, the performance is at times very funny, at other times too real and, throughout its 90-minute runtime, highly entertaining.

The audience is dropped in mid-conversation between the two couples enjoying some drinks in the backyard: Chrissy and Cooch, played by Julia Atwood and J. Richey Nash, and Luna and David, played by Olivia Miller and Sinclair Mitchell. Through expertly woven exposition, tasteful jokes and sharp acting, we find out the occupations of each character: Cooch, a college baseball coach, Luna, a flight attendant and influencer, Chrissy, a kids media personality and, most intriguing, David, a former Navy and commercial pilot who now flies exclusively for a mysterious employer.

The rest of the story unfolds on the same band of energy: the characters run circles around each other with easy chemistry, as if they really were neighbors, husbands and wives. Where Chrissy and David’s secret relationship creates an air of seriousness, Luna provides moments of hilarity in her devotion to coffee enemas, of which she proudly claims to take two per day. The plot is driven by the vice that all people share today: the internet and its poisonous whirlpool of information. Chrissy and Luna’s online fixations are endearing, however random: whales showing up dead, reindeer gone wild, and a new virus unearthed by a tech company’s drilling through the Arctic permafrost. The latter sends the world into upheaval, the new “string virus” sending all four neighbors to the edge of their emotions. 

Mid-story, Ruby, played by Monica Ho, introduces herself via scooter (which prompts David to break the fourth wall in a joke about the theatre’s liability insurance). David, it turns out, is the pilot for the private jet that will fly tech billionaire Don Watts—who is behind the Arctic drilling—to safety. When we find out that the string virus was merely a misdirection for the real danger—a super-AI computer that Watts’s company created but lost control of—the bitter root of the story takes hold. 

Ruby’s ruminations on AI and humanity’s reliance on the technology were little needed: by the time David takes off on a private jet that he knows will be blown-up by ecoterrorists, the point comes home, and a story that was mostly light-hearted closes in dark manner indeed.