REVIEW: McNeal

The production of McNeal, now at Lincoln Center Theatre, opens with a projection of an iPhone looming over an empty stage. Instantly, I thought of Steve Jobs’ minimalist ethos and flashed on the new iPhone’s AI capacity. It turns out that artificial intelligence is very much at the heart of McNeal, and that projections are essential to the production. 

McNeal was written by Ayad Akhtar, a Pakistani-American who won a Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, which I saw on Broadway in 2014. Set at a dinner between two couples, it was filled with discussions about Islam and Judaism and American values. McNeal is also very much a drama of ideas in the Shavian sense – about truth and lies, art and commerce, the ethics of appropriating other people’s lives and work – and it could be quite dry, except for the presence of Robert Downey, Jr. in the lead role.

This is Downey’s Broadway debut; his production company, Team Downey, is one of the producers, so this clearly a property he’s invested in.  His character, Jacob McNeal, is not particularly likable. A newly-minted Nobel Prize winner, he’s suffering from writer’s block and liver disease. He’s impatient with his doctor, condescending to his agent, and at odds with his adult son. As he tells his doctor, “The good thing about literature -- it’s not about liking the people in it.” If you have the real flesh-and-blood magnetism of Downey onstage, that may be true of theater as well.

Downey is a well-developed, believable character, even though the plot is a bit of a schematic structure for Akhtar’s considerations. McNeal admits that he has borrowed from other sources, especially his dead wife’s lone book, which he posits as his own. Shakespeare drew on a contemporary play, King Lair, by an unknown playwright, in writing King Lear. How different is that, he asks, from what he is doing?

Further, Jacob McNeal relies on AI to create his unfinished book, using ChatGP and prompts for well-known authors, including Shakespeare, to write “in the style of Jacob McNeal.” As AI is insinuating more and more into our culture, this is pretty timely. What is proprietary in publication? The nature of truth recurs throughout the play. Excusing his appropriation of his wife’s work, McNeal comments, “Crafted a lie that told a deeper truth.” And in an encounter with a former lover near the end of the play, he says, “Stories aren't about the truth, Francine. They're better than the truth.”   

The beautiful sets which emerge from below add verisimilitude, and the digital projections (reminiscent of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) capture the magic of AI and make the play less abstract. Beyond Downey’s power as an actor, the uniformly fine cast, including Andrea Martin as McNeal’s agent and Ruthie Ann Miles as his doctor, inhabits Akhtar’s writing as real people. And there may be no better director at creatively using the large Vivian Beaumont stage than Bartlett Sher, whose work ranges from Oslo to South Pacific.  

The use of Deepfake images of Jacob suggests a certain shape shifting of the character. There is ambivalence about his intentions and his end. We’re left with a coda in which he types the prompt: “Please write a final speech for an audience confused by what is real and what isn't, inspired by Prospero's final speech to the audience in Shakespeare's The Tempest." (Is it a coincidence that the name McNeal itself is an echo of Macbeth?) We are left with these words:

With your good hands, and now, tonight's last blaze,
I leave you both in word and flesh. Forgive
My sins, if any, and know I had but one:
Not to bow to your desires, nor flatter,
But to craft a truthful lie that might still matter

In the end, as good as Downey is, you don’t deeply you care about him as a person. But Akhtar makes us care about issues that matter, and that in itself is a service.  

Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman