In his Broadway debut, Robert Downey Jr. plays a writer who succumbs to AI in 'McNeal'
A friend texted soon after I arrived in New York to see “McNeal,” the new play by Ayad Akhtar at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont starring Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut. The message was prompted by the recently published bombshell in the New Yorker about David Adjmi’s Tony-winning play “Stereophonic.”
Bear with me for a second — there's a connection.
My friend, an L.A.-based screenwriter, is a superfan of "Stereophonic" and was upset when he read that the play seems to recycle a number of details found in "Making Rumours," a memoir by sound engineer Ken Caillat, who worked on several Fleetwood Mac albums. The playwright has downplayed any direct link between the legendary rock group and his play, which dramatizes the tense recording sessions of a 1970s band uncannily like Fleetwood Mac perfecting a magnum opus strikingly similar to "Rumours." No one has taken the denials seriously. The parallels are glaringly obvious. But the New Yorker article, echoing earlier reporting, raises more complicated questions.
“Seems as if David Adjmi is a liar and plagiarist,” my friend wrote, more in sorrow than in anger. “You could say the same about Shakespeare,” I tendentiously texted back from Penn Station. The lawyers will fight it out, I added, but I "don’t think this takes away from what was [artistically] accomplished.”
About two hours later, a version of this same debate was taking place in “McNeal,” a play about an old literary lion seemingly on the brink of being canceled who falls under the spell of AI. A modern-day Faust story, Akhtar's drama turns Faust into a prize-winning author who, after succumbing to the temptation of ChatGPT, doesn't so much mourn the loss of his soul as wage a literary defense of his new dark arts.
A ferociously ambitious, politically incorrect writer who has been drinking himself to death after his wife's suicide, Jacob McNeal (Downey) wants nothing more than to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. But when his dream finally comes true, he's rattled by the heightened scrutiny that comes with the international spotlight.
McNeal has a closet crammed with skeletons. He's friends with a group of high-profile men who have been me-too-ed and fears he might be next. His mentally ill wife took her life after discovering that he was having an affair. Akhtar sets up multiple paths for McNeal's downfall. But the play is more concerned with abstract questions about art and originality than with the fate of one morally shady writer.
How indebted can a novelist be to the work of other people? Where is the line between creativity and plagiarism? (Were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides guilty of ripping off Homer?) If a writer gets an assist from a machine, can he legitimately claim authorship?
McNeal doesn’t subscribe to the Romantic view of the artist as solitary genius. His thinking is more aligned with that of literary scholar Harold Bloom, who contended that poems beget other poems, in a network of influence that owes as much to Darwin’s theory of evolution as to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex.
In his address to the Swedish Academy, McNeal argues for a more complex understanding of artistic originality by citing the example of “King Lear." Shakespeare, McNeal posits, did something more radical than adapt "King Leir," an anonymous Elizabethan play that he may have acted in. He rewrote the rules of tragedy, and in the process gave a glimpse of humanity’s moral and existential predicament that has yet to be matched.
“Put that original version of Leir into any of these fancy language models and run it through a hundred thousand times — you'll never come close to reproducing the word order the Sweet Swan of Avon came up with,” McNeal asserts, as much in defense of his own borrowings as of Shakespeare’s.
Akhtar, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Disgraced,” is continuing an argument he found himself embroiled in after publishing his brilliant 2020 novel “Homeland Elegies." That book blends fact and fiction to tell the story of how America became Donald Trump-ified.
In interviews, Akhtar was routinely asked to explain his rationale for not simply writing a memoir when so much of his family's history is in the book. Why call it a novel and raise ethical questions about the uses of autobiography? His answer was consistently the same: He was in search of a deeper truth. Conceiving the book as a novel allowed him to transcend the literal record of his life. For a creative artist, sources matter less than how they're redeployed.
Akhtar reanimates this dialectical discussion of artistic freedom in the fraught context of AI. The problem is that the play is overwhelmed with ideas, themes and talking points. "McNeal” is swirling with things to say about literature — how it's created, where it gets its value and why its truth can be so dangerous — but it's as if ChatGPT had been asked to spit out the pros and cons of advanced technology on the practice of literature. The human story gets lost in the shuffle.
In scenes with his worried doctor (an underutilized Ruthie Ann Miles) and enabling agent (a lively Andrea Martin), McNeal reveals himself to be a charming literary creep. A moral dinosaur, he admits to Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare), a New York Times arts writer doing a magazine profile on him, that he actually envies men like Harvey Weinstein for "getting what they wanted." She's impressed by his reckless candor but suspects his flamboyant "transparency" is a way of throwing her off the scent of a bigger scandal.
Downey's McNeal has the chiseled masculine swagger of such writers as Richard Ford and Paul Auster. Physically, he's Hollywood's ideal of the successful novelist — lean of build, coiffed like a tidied-up aging rock star and dressed with a studied casualness that would cost a small fortune to replicate.
A film actor unaccustomed to having to articulate to the back row, Downey relies on the excessive amplification of Bartlett Sher's production. But his characterization is properly scaled for the stage. McNeal's ambivalence is boldly handled: Unbridled egotism is punctured with regret. Downey, who plunged into tech's moral gray zones in his "Iron Man" outings, makes it possible for an audience to both deplore McNeal and delight in the abrasive pleasure of his company. What his impressively embodied portrayal can't overcome is the play's lifeless set of relationships.
McNeal is continually refining the prompts he feeds his new best friend, ChatGPT, to improve the literary quality of his manuscript drafts. He asks the program to upload his collected works along with other material, including "King Lear," "Oedipus Rex," a smattering of Ibsen, psychiatric papers and the journals of his late wife. It's this last item that gets him in trouble with his son, Harlan (Rafi Gavron), who has detected in his father's latest novel a short story that his mother wrote, her one and only literary legacy.
The father-son standoff, in which Harlan threatens to expose McNeal's literary crime to the New York Times in revenge for the way he treated his mother, is strangely unaffecting. Akhtar keeps tossing out red herrings. I began to imagine the prompt the playwright might have issued to the blinking cursor of his own computer while starting "McNeal": "Write a Jon Robin Baitz play in the pugilistic intellectual style of Ayad Akhtar, and make it as unwieldy as possible within a 90-minute running time."
The artificiality of the protagonist's interactions made me wonder if the whole play might be an AI dream. The scenes all have something in them that feels slightly off, whether it's dialogue that's a little too on the nose or behavior that seems hollow. Are these characters, I asked myself midway through the play, or ideas of characters? Is there a core to the story or just an endless supply of plot permutations?
The production design, swooshing across Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton's set, creates a background blizzard of technological flashes and blips. Audiences are drawn into the inner workings of the protagonist's iPhone through Barton's projections. A deepfake of Downey's McNeal blends the image of his wife with historical figures from his literary output, including Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.
Akhtar clearly wants us to struggle to distinguish between reality and its AI-generated simulacrum. The question of perception, how we filter the world around us, has been a recurring theme in his playwriting. But it's hard to sustain interest when a drama hasn't given us sufficient reason to care about the characters. McNeal's belated reckoning with Francine Blake (Melora Hardin), his former mistress whom he treated almost as badly as his wife, is no more meaningful to us than his reflex flirtations with Dipti (Saisha Talwar), his agent's attractive 20-something assistant.
The plot, hinging on whether McNeal will face the consequences of his actions, is enlivened by Downey's antihero bravado. But the play falls victim to AI's chief limitation — its emotional deadness.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
