It’s hard to tell what’s real in Ayad Akhtar’s play starring Robert Downey Jr. as an alcoholic novelist who turns to AI.
Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal (right) and cast of McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
McNeal, written by Ayad Akhtar, directed by Bartlett Sher,
Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, 150 West 65th Street,
through November 24, 2024
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About an hour into McNeal, I began nursing a daydream set inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. CUT TO: Billionaire industrialist Tony Stark in tux and tinted specs, sliding into his orchestra seat at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. The inventor playboy flips idly through the program. Something called McNeal. About AI and artistic truth. Starring Robert Downey Jr. Stark cracks a joke to an elderly lady on his right about movie stars ruining Broadway. Lights dim. Actors bark purple dialogue on a stage awash with sterile video projections and virtual scenery. Stark, who as Iron Man battled Loki, the Hulk, and the dreaded Thanos, cannot withstand agony this intense. During a blackout, he slinks off, bested by a boring night of theater.
Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal in McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
I’m being frivolously meta, but so is Ayad Akhtar’s coy morality tale of an alcoholic novelist coming to terms with his textual vampirism, which has metastasized through an addiction to improbably versatile chatbots. The action takes place in a “very near future” where three AI-generated novels occupy the New York Times bestseller list. McNeal (Downey Jr., making his Broadway debut) is your standard-issue raffish literary lion, with an estranged and angry son (Rafi Gavron), a mentally ill wife who died by suicide, and a pushy agent (Andrea Martin) hot to capitalize on McNeal’s recent Nobel Prize. A womanizer? You betcha. Fed up with Gen Z wokeness? Yup. McNeal’s alarmed (and barely characterized) doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) warns of imminent liver failure, but the celebrated scribe is less concerned with saving his organs than cannibalizing great writers, feeding Kafka, Ibsen, and Shakespeare into AI along with years of his wife’s private journals. What the machine, prompted to compose “in the style of Jacob McNeal,” spits back may be the very play we’re watching.
Andrea Martin as Stephie Banic in McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
Which would imply that McNeal is a hack, since Akhtar’s stilted lit-chat and awkwardly dropped references suggest an inferior writer’s idea of greatness. McNeal idolizes Saul Bellow and King Lear, but his takes on them rarely move beyond quippery or bitchery (coveting Bellow’s Nobel until getting his own). His best-known novel, Goldwater, explored how conservative ideology was channeled through the blank slate known as Ronald Reagan. Said tome sounds like a metaphor for artificial intelligence, not a bid for immortality. Other of McNeal’s cheesy, sub-Rothian titles, Malice’s Marvel and Falcon’s Flight, make you wonder if Akhtar couldn’t choose between book-world satire or chin-stroking social criticism. Defending his decision to go off Lexapro, McNeal grumbles that “every idiotic social expectation started to make sense to me. I should go to the book parties. I should write reviews for the Times. I should be dating. . . . Effervescent flatness. The meds were a delivery device for the mediocre logic of the world.” Edgelord, heal thyself.
Ruthie Ann Miles as Sahra Grewal and Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal in McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
You expect more of Akhtar, since he has distinguished himself for over a decade with a couple of well-received novels (American Dervish and Homeland Elegies) and a handful of earnest, issue-driven plays. He dramatized the financial chicanery of high-yield bonds in Junk (2016) and the post–September 11 ambivalence of a Pakistani American lawyer in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Disgraced (2012). Both solidly crafted, sociologically acute works, if also a bit didactic. Does he have anything refreshing to say about automated digital content that hasn’t already been asserted and attacked on social media?
Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal and Rafi Gavron as Harlan McNeal in McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
How about: artists were the first AI, which is now replacing them with copies of the copies copied from life. At its center, McNeal is a familiar tale of the writer who exploits friends and family in his pages, trading success for human connection, until he can’t tell real from fake. His wife shot herself twenty-odd years ago after finishing the draft of a novel, and McNeal freely raided the unpublished manuscript for his latest opus. Harlan, the dyspeptic son, threatens to send his mother’s book to the media, exposing dad as a plagiarist. It’s not theft, McNeal counters, if the artist transmutes base metal into gold. Later, in an interview with a bizarrely unprepared young Times reporter (Brittany Bellizeare), McNeal asserts that his wife’s work was brilliant. We never learn which is true, since Akhtar seems to prize ambiguity over a good story.
Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal and Brittany Bellizeare as Natasha Brathwaite in McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
Had it been staged as a straight play served up with the usual pathos and plot twists, McNeal would be bland but inoffensive. Unwisely, Akhtar and director Bartlett Sher dress their production up in video backdrops with sinister glitches and AI interfaces to imply the entire affair is a computer-generated simulacrum—orchestrated, Prospero-like, by the titular protagonist. Sliding screens contract to make the rear wall resemble a colossal iPhone, then expand to form the screen of a laptop. Projection designer Jake Barton fills these surfaces with glittering New York cityscapes, the woods of upstate New York, or mega-screensavers: letters cascading across the scrim like hailstones and white dots swarming in inky blackness. At one point, we see a deepfake “hallucination” of a former editor McNeal once dallied with (played by The Office’s Melora Hardin) in extreme close-up before mutating into Downey Jr.’s visage, which then merges with a CGI rendering of Reagan, then, finally, Barry Goldwater. The face-morphing in Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” video has more aesthetic zhuzh than this head-scratching Boomer interlude.
Melora Hardin as Francine Blake and Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal in McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
The tropey treatment of writers and lack of coherent conflict would be easier to take if McNeal were an outrageously funny antihero. But Downey Jr. comes off as dour and constrained. A gifted stage actor can fake genius. Think of Richard Griffiths as The History Boys’ polymathic pedant; Jeff Daniels’s crusading Atticus Finch in the stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird; Jodie Comer’s virtuosic attorney in Prima Facie. Downey Jr. has made a career playing overachievers, whether clown (Chaplin) or cyborg (Iron Man), up to Oppenheimer’s Machiavellian bureaucrat Lewis Strauss. But that’s movie-smart. Theater-smart requires more than motormouth attitude and restless body language. Downey Jr.’s failure to endue McNeal’s badinage with zestful conviction reduces the figure to cirrhotic narcissist with a book deal. I’ve always found something anhedonic about Downey Jr.’s arch self-assurance; do his characters enjoy their adventures? Whether they’re going Method in blackface (Tropic Thunder) or cosplaying Sherlock Holmes, his creations seem joyless in their tunnel-visioned excellence. Not for nothing has the film star’s greatest role been a man encased in shiny armor.
Which makes the tech-fetishizing kitsch of McNeal more the pity, a missed opportunity for growth. You get an MCU icon performing live onstage—and you surround him with pixelated eye candy. Hasn’t this man wasted enough of his life posing in front of green screens? Give him richer language, breathing characters, a plot that’s not a heap of red herrings. Believe it: had there been an intermission, Tony Stark would have flown away.
David Cote is a theater critic, playwright, and librettist based in Manhattan. He reviews theater for Observer. His work has been produced in New York, London, and around the US.