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 confrontation with his son (Rafi Gavron) and an off-the-rails interview with a young, Black New York Times reporter (Brittany Bellizeare)—ring utterly false, and the actors elsewhere seem flat: Andrea Martin as McNeal’s agent, Ruthie Ann Miles as his doctor, Melora Hardin as his former mistress. McNeal is the only one with any dimension, but neither his dialogue nor Downey's guarded, petulant delivery suggest the charm that others impute to him. Dressed in a writerly uniform of corduroy blazer and jeans, he’s a standard-issue manchild; the play feels a bit like spending 90 minutes with Bill Maher on a crabby day.
McNeal | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman
These factors and others add to the sense that maybe—and I am not being sarcastic—McNeal is not very good on purpose. All of these actors and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, have done excellent work in the past, and Akhtar won a Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced; they can do better than this. And it is clear from the start that we are witnessing a metatheatrical exercise of applied technology. Though ostensibly opposed to it, McNeal has been employing AI under the table to write his new book—and/or, perhaps, to plot his own trajectory, and/or the very play that we are watching. Immediately following the Nobel speech, we see a projected ChatGPT list of literary sources that will be echoed in the narrative, including Madame Bovary, Hedda Gabler, the parable of the Prodigal Son and psychiatric papers on borderline disorder. (McNeal has stopped taking his Lexapro.) A cursor then enters a prompt: “Please rework these texts in the style of Jacob McNeal.”
Is McNeal the one typing this prompt? Or is it Akhtar? McNeal aims to blur the lines that separate real stories from fictional ones, and to question how both kinds of stories are generated. Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton’s sleekly curved set evokes being inside an iPhone, and there are neat graphics involving swirling combinations of letters. But the trick up the production’s sleeve—a morphing effect that was touted as "a highly realistic Metahuman Digital Likeness" by the entertainment studio AGBO—is kind of a dud, and so is the production overall. McNeal offers little beyond its own narrative ourobouros; it concludes with a Shakespearean flourish, but it doesn’t accomplish the trick that McNeal lauds in Stockholm—it doesn’t transform its subject and sources into a greater artistic whole. Is that by design? Perhaps it is. But when the end result is a 90-minute slog, it doesn’t matter much if the synthetic banality is a feature or a bug.
McNeal. Vivian Beaumont Theater (Broadway). By Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Bartlett Sher. With Robert Downey Jr., Andrea Martin, Melora Hardin, Rafi Gavron, Brittany Bellizeare, Ruthie Ann Miles, Shasha Talwar. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
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McNeal | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman
