‘McNeal’ Review: Ayad Akhtar New Play Artificially Grapples with the Realities of A.I.

In the new play from Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut as Jacob McNeal, a celebrated novelist drinking himself toward liver failure as he desperately awaits the Nobel Prize in Literature he so cherishes. But after he actually wins the prize, rendering his initial moping about not having won the prize irrelevant, Jacob inexplicably abandons his work ethic, devotes his creative energies to running a bunch of classic texts through a chatbot, and slaps his name on an A.I.-generated novel.

Jacob’s also finishing up edits on another tome, this one with a story overly borrowed not from robots but from the women in his life, including his wife whose suicide haunts him. In such moments, Akhtar attempts to interrogate whether plagiarism via chatbot is any worse than regular plagiarism or just lifting stories from real people’s lives, but that’s an unhelpful equivalency when trying to get at the real consequences of artificial creation. (McNeal takes place in a near future in which three New York Times bestsellers are A.I.-generated.)

Staged with a lot of flying bookcases and projected screensavery fanfare by Bartlett Sher, McNeal is a very small play on Lincoln Center’s very large stage, mostly the story of a man going mad playing around on ChatGPT. Jacob’s surrounded by other people, but most of them have very little impact on his ChatGPT experiments, and, therefore, on the play itself.

McNeal’s doctor, who hasn’t read any of his books, tells him that she suspects that she wouldn’t “appreciate how you write about women.” Perhaps she also wouldn’t appreciate the writing of the women in this play. After making that assertion early on, Tony winner Miles’s character spends the next 80 minutes wordlessly assisting with transitions between scenes. Usually she’s moving furniture and helping with costume changes, but at one point she’s tasked with holding a wastepaper basket while Jacob pukes into it. A greater waste of talent is hard to fathom.

Meanwhile, the comic wonder Andrea Martin gets scant opportunity to crack wise, stuck as she is in a deadly dull copy-editing sequence as Jacob’s long-suffering agent. But McNeal’s most bizarre scene belongs to Brittany Bellizeare as a New York Times Magazine reporter who’s yet to read Jacob’s most famous novel but has been tasked with interviewing him for a profile anyway. Even after he asks her if she’s a diversity hire and claims that he envies Harvey Weinstein, she decides that she’s feeling “weirdly inspired” and will write a favorable piece.

But why would she? Is she taken in by his charm? His charisma? His lack of filter? Are we? McNeal might, perhaps, be a more animated play if Jacob were a Richard III-like schemer and we could root simultaneously for him and for his downfall. He’s not fun, though, just a boring, self-consciously misogynistic baddie who’s repetitiously solipsistic and obnoxious, even if Downey imbues the character, as best he can, with a superficially impish appeal.

But Akhtar blocks the way for his actors to make sense of their characters, Downey most of all, by leaning into opaque surreality in the play’s difficult-to-follow second half. Not only is A.I. apparently very disorienting for a user’s grasp on reality, but Jacob is also mixing alcohol with liver steroids, resulting in hallucinations. When Akhtar begins to suggest that Jacob may be hallucinating while metatheatrically generating certain scenes with ChatGPT, the stakes fall precipitously. Not knowing what’s real and what’s not is less compelling than McNeal contends.

In contrast to his far more sophisticated and disturbing Disgraced, which took on a knotty set of perspectives on Islamophobia and assimilation in the wake of 9/11, Akhtar here submerges the most upsetting element of his plot—involving the past relationship between Jacob’s son and dead wife—in flippant technological fiddle-faddle. This climaxes in a deep-fake sequence (the firm AGBO is credited with creating the “digital composite”) in which Downey’s face morphs into Ronald Reagan’s and then Barry Goldwater’s. Your enthusiasm for this effect will likely be proportionate only to your enthusiasm for a reanimated Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.

The technology distracts from the real human drama that McNeal depicts, and the seriousness of that drama dilutes any coherent argument about the impact of machine language models on literature or life. And, no, that lack of clarity cannot be explained by Akhtar using A.I. himself in creating the text, as he insists that all the words are his alone. The hollow McNeal, after all, is only halfway to presenting as artificial intelligence. It’s got the artificial part down pat.

McNeal is now running at the Lincoln Center Theater.