Robert Downey Jr. And Brittany Bellizeare.
Picture: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Good luck making sense of “McNeal,” Ayad Akhtar’s clunky, glitchy, and pontificating new drama starring Robert Downey Jr. as a well-known and egotistical author who turns into unhealthily obsessed with synthetic intelligence. The play is receiving its world premiere on Broadway in a tech-savvy manufacturing directed by Bartlett Sher, the undisputed heavy-hitter of Lincoln Middle Theater.
In a fall season marked by too many celeb appearances to maintain monitor of, Downey Jr., who’s making his Broadway debut, stands out given his A-list Hollywood standing and spectacular movie report starting from Marvel Universe superhero flicks to the bio dramas “Chaplin” and “Oppenheimer,” for which he received an Academy Award earlier this yr.
Downey Jr. is actually bringing an entire lot of individuals to Lincoln Middle who wouldn’t in any other case be trying out the newest work by Akhtar, who specializes in modern tragedies about professionally profitable males whose hubris will get the higher of them, such because the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Disgraced” (a couple of Pakistani-American company lawyer who loses his cool throughout a debate over race) and “Junk” (a couple of hotshot Wall Avenue dealer modeled on Michael Milken).
Downey Jr. performs Jacob McNeal, who learns in the primary scene each that he’s dying of liver failure and that he simply received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which segues into an over-the-top acceptance speech in Stockholm the place he rails in opposition to books being written with AI, which the character describes as “odorless sewage.”
Nevertheless, subsequent scenes point out that McNeal has a historical past of lifting concepts for his novels from the lives of these round him and that he took the unpublished manuscript of his deceased spouse and handed it off as his personal work. He additionally asks a chatbot to cull by means of private journals and literary masterworks in order to supply a brand new story “in the type of Jacob McNeal.” One wonders whether or not the scenes we’re watching are actually taking place or if they’re imagined to replicate an AI creation.
Probably the most memorable scene is a confrontational interview between McNeal and a New York Occasions characteristic author (Brittany Bellizeare). When the author, who’s younger, feminine, and Black, doesn’t instantly recall who Eric Schneiderman (the New York lawyer common who resigned in 2018 following accusations of bodily abuse) was, McNeal, shockingly, asks whether or not she was a “variety rent.” McNeal additionally admits to as soon as envying Harvey Weinstein for his mastery of energy.
The opposite characters are typically flat, leaving high-quality actors akin to Ruthie Ann Miles (as McNeal’s physician), Andrea Martin (as McNeal’s agent), and Melora Hardin (as an editor who as soon as had an affair with McNeal) with little to work with. Alternatively, Downey Jr. will get to stay it up as an outrageous, condescending, poisonous determine who’s supposedly additionally fascinating and insightful.
“McNeal” is at its finest in the course of the scene transitions, in which the stage is dominated by fluid digital projections of pc apps and deepfake expertise, together with a montage in which McNeal, whereas talking, morphs into Ronald Reagan after which Barry Goldwater. (Considered one of McNeal’s books facilities on the notion that Reagan was an empty vessel who made the concepts of Goldwater sound wonderful, reflecting the play’s theme of appropriating different folks’s concepts).
Let’s give credit score to Downey Jr. for coming to Broadway in a brand new play (relatively than a revival of a traditional) that makes an attempt to wrestle with AI, a supply of unprecedented technological and social upheaval and uncertainty. It’s unlucky that the play is a large number, leaving theatergoers 90 minutes of pure bewilderment alongside with just a few nifty graphics.
Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 W. 65th St., lct.org. By way of Nov. 24.