The writer Jacob McNeal is, among other things, a bestselling and influential novelist, an esteemed winner of the Nobel prize for literature, a writer with style consistent and public enough to serve as a prompt for ChatGPT. From another view: a narcissistic cad, a terrible father, a lonely drunk. People argue whether he’s a genius, a fraud, an iconoclast. After nearly two hours with him, it’s not clear which. Though mesmerizingly brought to life by Robert Downey Jr in Ayad Akhtar’s muddled and occasionally poignant new play of the same name, McNeal remains more reflection than character – a projection of success, an outlet for anxieties over artificial intelligence, a cipher to destabilize one’s view of reality.
All of these angles offer fertile material for a play of ideas, and to Akhtar’s credit, McNeal is not only a rare original Broadway play but an ambitious one, given starry billing and splashy, tech-forward staging at Lincoln Center. It’s also all over the place, a play of strong performances – Downey, in his Broadway debut, chief among them – that chafe against vague, inchoate ideas about a vaguely ghoulish technology.
Things start simply enough: a giant, blue light-abundant iPhone interface looming above the stage, the home page tracking the minutes clicking by on Friday, 10 October in a way intriguingly familiar to most people in the audience. It’s sometime in the near future, when ChatGPT-like AI is even more firmly grounded in American daily life – enough, as McNeal off-handedly remarks in Dr Sahra Grewal’s (Ruthie Ann Miles) office, that several New York Times bestsellers are openly composed through machine learning.
The play proceeds in chronological-ish chapters in the sunset days of McNeal’s distinguished career: an appointment diagnosing liver disease; a triumphantly tipsy and moralizing speech accepting the Nobel prize; a meeting with his hammy agent Stephie (Andrea Martin); a reunion with his estranged adult son Harlan (a jittery Rafi Gavron), who harbors intense loathing for the father he blames for his mother’s suicide decades earlier (and which features some telenovela-esque revelations that nearly took me out of the play entirely). Some border on the surreal; some, especially a tete-a-tete between proudly un-woke McNeal and a young female Black reporter at the New York Times (Brittany Bellizeare, a standout) whip up propulsive, left-field tension as the novelist plunges deeper into the whiskey bottle. (Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton’s evocative sets cover both, most pleasingly released in a luscious bookshelf full of both real and made-up titles.)
But as the chapters build, the narrative cohesion slackens. For each interlude deliberately muddies the waters by introducing the prospect of AI-generated material – Downey Jr’s voice, as McNeal, prompting the machine for the scenes we are about to witness and providing personal material to synthesize. Eventually, the projections deliver dialogue as deepfakes of McNeal and his late wife/former paramour (Melora Hardin). (The program credits the “digital composites” to the company AGBO.)
Akhtar, a Pulitzer-winning dramatist (in 2013, for Disgraced) and novelist, has dressed up a reliably grating inclination – a writer writing about writing – with the mind-bending and reality-questioning drama of our fears with AI. The framing devices don’t need to do much to touch on, without spoiling, the lines between inspiration and exploitation, between borrowing and theft, between assistance and cheating. Although delineating it this way feels like I’m giving the play too much credit – McNeal at most nudges these fault lines, seemingly chuffed with bringing up the topic as an end unto itself.
Downey, operating firmly in his lane of wise-cracking, sardonic charisma, is at least never less than compelling, and thankfully on stage for almost the whole show; the whole exercise is worth it to see an actor in peak, seemingly easy form. He sells McNeal both as a narcissist spiraling at the end of his road and as a provocation of AI’s blurry ethical lines. Such provocation contains little insight, beyond that AI is scary and could make things worse; perhaps McNeal’s most interesting idea is the unoriginal notion that generative AI will enable narcissists, or that it will allow people to express themselves through an artistic medium without putting in the hard work of craft.
McNeal ends on a confounding note, explicitly invoking the question: what is real, and how do you know? One could generously read the play’s descent into confusion as a meta treatise on what a world full of AI slop and questionably generated material will wreak on our perception, tenuous as it is already. One could also say that it’s a bit of unearned ambiguity. Our standards haven’t fallen so far yet as to not hope for art with a clear vision.
