McNeal by Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Bartlett Sher. Sets by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton. Costumes by Jennifer Moeller. Lighting by Donald Holder. Sound by Justin Ellington and Beth Lake. Projections by Jake Barton. Jacob McNeal Digital Composite by AGBO. Vocal Coach Kate Wilson.
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Ruthie Ann Miles, Andrea Martin, Saisha Talwar, Rafi Gavron, Brittany Bellizeare, and Melora Hardin.
Theater:Vivian Beaumont Theater
Tickets: Telecharge.com

Robert Downey Jr. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

To be sure, there are many individual moments in which Robert Downey Jr. (making his Broadway debut) and the rest of the game and talented cast manage to grab our attention for entire disjointed scenes. But on the whole, McNeal comes across as a scattering of ideas that suggest that what we are watching is a mash-up of rough drafts of two very different plays. And neither the playwright nor director Bartlett Sher seems to have been able to help us fully grasp either of the two, except in general terms.

Let's call them Play A and Play B. Play A features Downey as Jacob McNeal, a very successful novelist who is strong on charm and, presumably, talent, but who suffers from narcissism, self-doubt, bouts of depression, alcoholism, and a general misogynistic approach toward women. He uses his half-Jewish identity to his advantage when it suits him, and he is an admirer of the work of Saul Bellow. So, modeled on Philip Roth? Though, to give the playwright his due, Roth had two Jewish parents to McNeal's one, and he was not known to be an alcoholic. Nor did Roth win a Nobel Prize, an honor which, in the play, is bestowed upon McNeal.

In any event, in scene after scene, we see McNeal showing us charm, talent, narcissism, self-doubt, depression, heavy drinking, and misogyny as he interacts with his agent (Andrea Martin, playing it broadly as if in a comedy, which McNeal does not appear to be); an interviewer from The New York Times (Brittany Bellizeare); his agent's assistant (Saisha Talwar); his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles); and his ex-lover (Melora Hardin), with whom he was having an affair around the time his wife committed suicide.

All of these women, representing a wide range of ages and racial/ethnic identities, succumb in varying degrees to his apparent magnetism. And, as if to emphasize the point, Downey goes out into the audience on a couple of occasions, spreading both McNeal's and his own allure beyond the fourth wall. Only when he makes a brief visit to his son (Rafi Gavron) does McNeal drop the pose and show a mean and ugly side to his personality.

Melora Hardin and Robert Downey Jr. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

But first, for the sake of transparency, and getting back to the Philip Roth references, I will let you know that I double-checked information on Roth by asking ChatGPT to outline his personal characteristics and reputation. I did so in order to be in keeping with the second set of ideas that are being presented in a way that makes it seem as if they are part of an overlapping play.

If Play A seems to be a retread of a well-known portrait of a gifted but troubled writer, Play B is all about the use of artificial intelligence and easily accessible computer programs such as ChatGPT. It seems that McNeal is not above a certain degree of plagiarism, and that he draws on AI for assistance, as in the command he types into his computer after he has uploaded various texts (a scene from King Lear, an excerpt from Kafka, and so forth): "Please rework these texts in the style of Jacob McNeal." We then see projected before us the immediate results produced by the AI program.

There's a lot of this going on throughout McNeal. For instance, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which he created with the assistance of artificial intelligence, McNeal notes that "three books on The New York Times Bestseller list were written, largely, by AI." These all-to-brief snippets about AI that are jimmied into the main story (i.e. what I am calling Play A) are incredibly fascinating. And anyone with a curiosity about the future of AI will surely be intrigued.

There is also the element of the possibly addicting ease of slipping into the use of AI to do all of our writing for us, say, for example, playwriting. Indeed, McNeal ends with a projected typed prompt: "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." The gibberish results pop up, and Downey recites them for us the way one might declaim an actual Shakespearean sonnet. It's all very clever; since few of us have a thorough familiarity with Elizabethan English, Downey/McNeal is able to pull it off as if it did make complete sense. A deeper dive into this entire topic could very well make for a fascinating play in and of itself. McNeal, unfortunately, is not that play, or, at least, not yet.