Good luck making sense of “McNeal,” Ayad Akhtar’s clunky, glitchy, and pontificating new drama starring Robert Downey Jr. as a famous and egotistical writer
who becomes unhealthily obsessed with artificial intelligence. The play is receiving its world premiere on Broadway in a tech-savvy production directed by Bartlett Sher, the undisputed heavy-hitter of Lincoln Center Theater.
Downey Jr. is certainly bringing a whole lot of people to Lincoln Center who would not otherwise be checking out the latest work by Akhtar, who specializes in contemporary tragedies about professionally successful men whose hubris gets the better of them, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Disgraced” and “Junk” .
However, subsequent scenes indicate that McNeal has a history of lifting ideas for his novels from the lives of those around him and that he took the unpublished manuscript of his deceased wife and passed it off as his own work. He also asks a chatbot to cull through personal journals and literary masterworks in order to produce a new story “in the style of Jacob McNeal.” One wonders whether the scenes we are watching are really happening or if they are supposed to reflect an AI creation.
The other characters tend to be flat, leaving fine actors such as Ruthie Ann Miles , Andrea Martin , and Melora Hardin with little to work with. On the other hand, Downey Jr. gets to live it up as an outrageous, condescending, toxic figure who is supposedly also fascinating and insightful.
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