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Slow to grab hold and knotty when it does, Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, opening tonight and starring Robert Downey Jr. in a formidable Broadway debut, is, at its core, a sort of literary parlor game: Let’s take that most mighty of 20th Century book-chat tropes – the macho, aging male superstar novelist who amorally mines the lives and works of his enemies, his betters and, most cruelly, his loved ones, as grist for his art, fuel for his bank accounts and supply chain for his trophy shelves. Now drop him into the brave new world of AI, where thievery can be accomplished with an ease and at a magnitude heretofore unimagined.
Does the artificiality of artificial intelligence – the very complexity of the enterprise – place some kind of moral distance between our writer and his actions? Are his hands somehow cleaner? Or is he still the same miserable old shit who would sell out his own son if it meant another bestseller?
With much 21st Century razzle dazzle provided by the magnificent video projection designs of Jake Barton and huge digital composite images – video AI projections of faces of the actors meld into one another at one point – from AGBO, McNeal, astutely directed by the great Bartlett Sher, is an often confusing though wheedlingly emotional mindgame. The discombobulation is, one suspects, Akhtar’s intention, a way of presenting on a physical stage a near-future realm of thorny, magic-seeming complexity in which thousands of years of data – from Shakespeare and Ibsen to your dead wife’s old notebooks, and everything in between – can be melded into a book with your name on it, and in relative minutes. Is this theft, or merely a literary Moog waiting for its Brian Eno?
Downey, in his rumpled Important Novelist garb (costumes courtesy of Jennifer Moeller, on point as ever), is perfectly cast as Jacob McNeal, an old-school author – he’s sexist, misogynist, drinks too much, wallows in self-pity when he isn’t shouting his self-important ambitions, narcissistic, dreams of Shakespeare, lives like Mailer, and as he approaches liver failure can’t quite decide whether “I’m sorry” or “Fuck You” should be his epitaph.
We meet the late-60s-ish McNeal in the exam room of his doctor’s office – or rather, the suggestion of a doctor’s office, mere frame and a lonely few bits of equipment. The intriguing Michael Yeargan-Jake Barton sets will toy with our perceptions throughout – sometimes they suggest the skeletal abodes in early video games, other times the detail-rich naturalism of an old-fashioned play. And neither might be “real” in any usual sense.
McNeal, comfortably grumpy with his longtime physician (Ruthie Ann Miles), as he dodges questions about his resumed alcoholism – a slip that could have disastrous consequences given that he also is on a new, experiment and contraindicated medication for his failing liver. (Remember, we’re in the near-future here, with miracle drugs we can’t imagine). Just as the doctor is laying out an option in which McNeal can visit a Swiss Clinic to die in peace and pain-free, McNeal gets a call from a Swedish entity: He’s won the Nobel prize.
Is this all really happening? So far we have no reason to doubt what’s being offered, although that road offering Switzerland or Sweden seems just a wee bit literary, no? Something an author might concoct with a bit of help from artificial intelligence?
Next we’re in a Stockholm City Hall Banquet Room, wonderfully re-created by Baron’s projections. As he excepts his award, a probably drunken McNeal rambles on about the dangers and shortcomings of AI and its seeming inability to force us to confront such truths as mortality. Only literature, he says, can do that. Oddly, he tells an anecdote about having to personally move the remains of his dead wife after her grave had been disturbed by a storm, a confrontation with death that was all too real.
And probably a lie, lifted from the life of McNeal’s literary hero Ralph Waldo Emerson. But that theft is small potatoes compared to the revelation presented by McNeal’s troubled, estranged son Harlan (Rafi Gavron): Seems dad’s latest Big Book is, in fact, completely plagiarized from a manuscript, long thought destroyed, written by McNeal’s wife, Harlan’s mother, who committed suicide after discovering her husband’s adultery.
When Harlan threatens to send the last surviving manuscript of mom’s novel to The New York Times, McNeal fights back hard – that Chekhov’s gun on the table goes unfired, but McNeal wounds his already wounded boy with some long-buried information about mom, the son and a secret as destructive as any bullet. McNeal gets his way, no matter the cost to others. (A side note: Kudos to Downey for taking on a new and not-always-likable role when so many of his movie star peers opt for the safety of beloved revivals or Shakespeare grandstanding).
McNeal’s encounters with others in his life – all, save the son, women – include Francine (Melora Hardin, The Office‘s Jan) with whom he committed adultery to tragic ends; his agent (Andrea Martin, a delight as always, by turns funny and dead serious); a young, Black, female New York Times reporter (Brittany Bellizeare) who represents a shift in the cultural order that both threatens and somehow comforts the aging white man; and Dipti, the agent’s 20something assistant (Saisha Talwar) whose flirtatious fawning over the star novelist hints at a pattern that will just as surely require yet another Dipti once this one has wised up.
When all of the women in McNeal’s life converge on the stage to watch as the betrayed Francine finally has her say with the author over his use of horribly personal details as plot devices for more than one of his books, McNeal seems rather like its been AI’d not with King Lear and Madame Bovary and Ibsen and The Book of Luke that Jacob McNeal so favors: In this comeuppance scene we sense that Akhtar has watched Fellini’s masterpiece 8 1/2 more than a few times.
If the playwright did borrow from Fellini, could anyone blame him? Doesn’t the story of a monstrous genius whose narcissism is rivaled only by his artistry all but demand a nod to one of the classics of the genre? After all, Akhtar isn’t really stealing anything. He leaves that to his creation Jacob McNeal, who has walked and trampled that line before, and now comes armed with something that is both a tool for unrivaled experimentation and a literary weapon of mass destruction.
Title: McNeal
Venue: Broadway’s Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center
Written By: Ayad Akhtar
Directed By: Bartlett Sher
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Brittany Bellizeare, Rafi Gavron, Melora Hardin, Andrea Martin, Ruthie Ann Miles, Saisha Talwar.
Running time: 1 hr 40 min (no intermission)
