McNeal
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal is about artificial intelligence and, well, it has the artificial part down. Robert Downey Jr. plays Jacob McNeal, an old-school American author with an iffy history when it comes to women (cf. Philip Roth) and a possibly fatal liver condition that his drinking doesn’t help. It is the very near future, and literary novels like McNeal’s are starting to be outflanked by AI-written bestsellers—what he dismisses as “these new computer-generated stories flooding the zone like odorless sewage.” Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, he gives a sententious speech about human creativity. “Shakespeare wrote a play called King Lear, which shares 70% of its words with a previous play, called King Leir, which was uploaded into Shakespeare’s system probably when he performed in it as a younger man,” McNeal says. “Put that original version of Leir into any of these fancy language models and run it through a hundred thousand times—you'll never come close to reproducing the word order the Sweet Swan of Avon came up with.” He then spends the rest of the play undermining his own position.
Or does he? It’s hard to know. Nothing in McNeal is convincing: The characters are thin, the timelines are off, the situations are at once implausible and cliché. (When McNeal is negotiating his contract, he is shown a big number on a cell phone—barely a step up from a folded paper slid across a table.) The play’s middle scenes—McNeal’s lurid confronta