In ‘McNeal’ the Future Belongs to Robert Downey Jr.

There is quite a theatrical box of tricks deployed in McNeal, Lincoln Center Theater’s blockbuster autumn show (through Nov. 24) starring Robert Downey Jr.—in his Broadway debut—as the titular character Jacob McNeal. This “author of renown” is also—as we would expect, knowing the all-too familiar dramatic archetypes of male novelists—a total mess, this one determined to save at least his professional status by using the most modern and controversial of technologies.

In no particular order: McNeal has liver failure, he drinks, he is cantankerous, waspish, he sympathizes with Harvey Weinstein, he has a screwed-up relationship with his son, treats women badly (apart from his agent who is a surrogate, admonishing parent), he is ickily racist towards his agent’s assistant Dipti (Saisha Talwar), and he may have stolen his dead wife’s only work of fiction as the foundation of his new novel.

He is also a supreme plagiarist, using AI to write his books using the words of others, who, at the beginning of the play, wins the much-desired Nobel Prize—indeed, the play opens with a projection of typing-by-unseen-fingers asking a search engine who will win that year’s prize. With mortality nipping at his heels, McNeal wants his reputation and legacy enshrined.

One can see why Downey Jr. may have felt an affinity to the role. On screen, he is most famous for playing tech billionaire Tony Stark. In real life he has, as Forbes has reported, “backed dozens of AI-powered startups through his investment firms, Downey Ventures and FootPrint Coalition Ventures.”

Ayad Akhtar’s ambitious if airless comedy-meets-drama, directed by Bartlett Sher, is very much of the moment—and with all its techno bells and whistles is visually reminiscent of another of his plays performed at LCT, Junk. (He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013 for Disgraced.)

In McNeal, dazzling projections of words fly across the stage like flocks of birds, to convey the scale of McNeal’s wholesale electronic appropriation and deception. Some of the works we see filched, flitting across the walls of the theater—King Lear, Oedipus Rex, Madame Bovary, psychiatric papers on borderline disorder, Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Hedda Gabler—share peppered presences in the play itself.

Akhtar does not necessarily condemn AI and its intrusion into the narrative and imaginative process—far from it, the play suggests that such technology may expand the writer’s realm of references and creation to produce better work, and certainly faster work. McNeal himself makes the point that the greatest writers did not always produce wholly original work—and what does original mean anyway?

Downey Jr. has very much de-movie starred for the role. He has a shifty, rakish vibe rather than intensity—and adeptly switches between light and dark his character demands. He is difficult to like or dislike, he is a main character but not an emphatic one, and seems almost as much a composite as the works his character creates.

We see him react, we see him theorize, we see him drink and be gently provocative, but what does he really think and feel? Should we root for him, against him, or just watch him tread the tightropes that surround him? Isn’t what he is doing wrong? Cheating? The play shrugs us into pressing “any of the above.”

Similarly, as a theoretical exercise, McNeal is about a lot of things, and so comes to feel a little like a collection of news articles we’ve read before—and in McNeal himself, a familiar portrait of a damned, dinosaur white male. The play feels very much of the first flush of the #MeToo era.

In its focus on fame, ambition, and good standing, McNeal doesn’t interrogate the questionable behavior of its title character is doing professionally, and instead settles for loftier meditations of the production of art. We are even given an AI version of Prospero’s closing speech of The Tempest. That speech famously sees Prospero bid farewell to his art; well, to borrow Lloyd Bentsen’s putdown of Dan Quayle, “Jacob McNeal, you are no Prospero.”

Matthew Murphy

A welcome spritz of reality and witty bite is provided by Andrea Martin as Stephie, McNeal’s agent, who stands up to his nonsense and tries to ensure his one-man publishing empire and reputation stay intact. Rafi Gavron as McNeal’s son Harlan is another tangy, all-too-briefly sketched source of conflict, blaming his father for his mother’s suicide—although McNeal has some devastating receipts of his own about their relationship.

Brittany Bellizeare plays a New York Times journalist named Natasha, sent to write a magazine profile of McNeal, but ultimately making clear she hopes his cultural influence—and prejudices—are on the wane. And yet, she and Sahra (Ruthie Ann Miles), McNeal’s physician, both find themselves drawn to McNeal, despite all he represents.

It is refreshing to hear a far more definitive and felt takedown of his behavior launched late in the play by Francine (Melora Hardin), McNeal’s ex, a former Times editor, who he cheated on his wife with.

In this macho mash-up of authors like Updike and Cheever, it is not surprising mortality is thrown into the mix. “What am I so afraid of, so terrified is going to happen to me if I’m not—more careful or controlling or paranoid or healthy—I mean, if I walk it out to the end, what’s the worst that happens?” McNeal asks. “I die. Right? I don’t want to be living in fear anymore. Of anything. Especially not the end.”

As much as he hymns the power of AI, even he knows that “a thing computers don’t understand and never will, a thing no words have ever been able to penetrate” is death. A storm in his yard meant that his wife’s grave was exposed. “Cradling your dead wife’s skull will teach you a thing or two about being alive. I never felt more love as I did staring into empty sockets lined with shreds of her still-withering flesh.”

McNeal leaves open the possibility that McNeal not only thieved his dead wife’s manuscript, but also her life; he claims the opposite, that she was happy to serve him but not happy to be unrecognized.

Evan Zimmerman

The sharpest of Akhtar’s writing, then, is away from the both-sides debating around AI: you’re either for it, against it, or are mesmerized by its zoo of possibilities and damnations as represented by the fluttering flocks of projected words.

Another key confrontation between Natasha and McNeal doesn’t scan convincingly; she objects to his racism, his general lack of thought, asks barely any questions (when will plays, movies, and TV shows actually get journalists right?), and then—after delivering the play’s biggest line and putdown—writes, bafflingly, a sympathetic profile of him.

The play seems to posit that, even without the warping power of AI, McNeal is irresponsible. Francine tells him she hated being misrepresented on the page as the villain in the breakdown of his marriage: “Lie to me, f*** me, leave me, use my most personal intimate details to concoct a public lie in which you blame me for the one thing you still can’t process. And now insult me with the dubious claim about your self-serving fiction being more important than the truth.”

The play’s final flourish is to throw the very question of authorship and identity into question. McNeal certainly leaves these subjects open and refreshingly unjudged, but don’t so many texts, movies, and university courses sell the same what-is-reality shtick these days—AI is another quiver in postmodernism’s bow. McNeal, for all its style and Downey Jr.’s unexpected reticence, feels like a high-minded ping-pong match, its characters convenient viewpoint-givers, rather than people we care about with inter-relationships we feel involved with. The play wants to make you feel smart, rather than stimulated, sad, cheering, furious, or engaged.

If the future really is as McNeal supposes, computer programs may be able to impersonate us and steal from others to write reams upon reams, but whether they will be able to make us feel is another matter. This play doesn’t. But hey, the good news it may send us all fast back to the nearest quill and ink.