| McNEAL Last Night |
| Last Edit: sergius 09:19 am EDT 09/21/24 |
| Posted by: sergius 09:17 am EDT 09/21/24 |
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| An elegant muddle. McNEAL looks great, but it’s uncertain. Akhtar has ideas about AI and its influence—on imagination, on invention—but his intentions are never really clear; the play ambles handsomely, but it’s dramatically inert. Sure, writers are thieves. The best have always stolen stories and reconstituted them. Now AI just hands them out. The interesting tension between the work of finding ideas and the ease of being given them is underexplored here. It doesn’t help that Downey’s performance lacks size and registers mostly as a skillful shrug. And while Andrea Martin brings needed life to the often listless proceedings, she’s in a different play—a farce it seems—than everyone else. MCNEAL is a style over substance enterprise; it’s sleek, but it’s running on empty. |
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