by Barry Willis *

San Francisco Playhouse has launched another incisive play from the talented Aaron Loeb, whose dark comedy Ideation went from a much-praised local phenomenon to a weeks-long run off-Broadway.

That production was a disturbing look into the world of business consultants tasked with creating a foolproof way to dispose of millions of corpses while hiding the evidence from the remaining population. His new play, R.O.I. (Return on Investment) tackles subjects similarly disturbing—such as the willingness of investors to fund doubtful enterprises, and the lack of fundamental moral convictions among scientists and financiers.

The tale’s trajectory is conveyed through sampling a few years in the life of a young woman named May Lee (Sharon Shao), who abandoned a hoped-for career as a pop singer in favor of big opportunities in Silicon Valley. We meet her as a partner in the Montrose Fund, founded by an industry veteran named Paul Montrose (Anthony Fusco), an amiable but ethically agnostic player in the heady world of high-tech finance.

Montrose is all about big wins. He regales May about his early exposure to a fictional tech exec named Mark Beatty, who owned fifty acres in Menlo Park planted with banana trees repeatedly imported from Costa Rica. (“I didn’t know there were fifty acres available there,” Montrose confesses.) The object of the game wasn’t the banana trees, but the extravagance of growing exotic plants in an unsuitable climate—and having more banana trees than a rival financier. Such pointless competition makes perfect sense to Montrose, for whom the bottom line is the meaning of life. The scoreboard is everything.

May brings in Dr. Willa McGovern (Lauren English) founder of a medical technology company called Precure, claiming to have a genetic test that could eliminate cancer. Perhaps “on the spectrum,” McGovern is awkward and nervous in her initial meeting, fumbling with her notes and almost bombing in her presentation, but May and her partner see the potential. Eliminating cancer could be hugely profitable, as in hundreds of billions.

Dr. McGovern gets her funding.

Her confidence grows as she gains power, and soon the three are wrestling with profound issues of who will receive the benefits of Precure’s technology. Not everyone will be treated equally—it turns out that McGovern is both racist and anti-Semitic. She doesn’t want to work with Chinese or Israeli companies, and she wants treatments—when/if they are proven effective—to go first to Europeans and those of European ancestry. She does not want to cure disease in Asia, Africa, or South America. 

Loeb draws heavily on the character of Elon Musk in creating McGovern, and on the Theranos scandal that rocked Silicon Valley several years ago. In that case, a 19-year-old Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes duped the financial world out of hundreds of millions of dollars by claiming that her company could diagnose dozens of diseases from a single drop of blood.

Like cold fusion, it was too good to be true. Theranos was scuttled by an exposé in the Wall Street Journal that eventually led to multiple fraud charges against Holmes and her partners, and a lengthy jail term which she is still serving.

Loeb implies a similar fate for McGovern and Precure, but never makes it explicit. He also makes clear that scientists are not necessarily altruistic, and that many harbor their own deep-seated prejudices and social phobias.

Lauren English is superb at conveying this disturbing reality—brilliant intellects do not always come equipped with social consciousness or moral fiber. The always-excellent Anthony Fusco gives Paul Montrose a loquacious laissez-faire attitude about any negative implications from his company’s biggest investment—again, it’s all about the score. Only May escapes—barely—from the purgatory she helped create.

Directed by Jonathan Moscone, on an elegant set by Bill English, the script covers an incredible number of pertinent topics and pressing issues with fantastic efficiency. The three leads work beautifully together, with a cameo by Bonnie Akimoto as the older, post-retirement May. The hilarious congressional investigation scene alone is worth the trip to the Creativity Theatre at Yerba Buena Center, but the entire production is among the most concisely thought-provoking new plays to come along in a very long time—brilliant and enormously entertaining.

Playing through September 5, 2026 at Creativity Theatre, 221 Fourth Street, San Francisco.

Click HERE for more information and tickets.

Photos by Jessica Palopoli

Barry Willis is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and past president of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact:barry.m.willis@gmail.com