Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.

That’s only fitting for a story, set in “the very near future,” in which computer-mediated interactions — predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence — are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It’s the pen vs. the pixel.

I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.

Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.

“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.

“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.

We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”

Even more troubling than what he is willing to say is what he is willing to do to support and extend the legend of his greatness. Most of the play is taken up with the confusingly twisted story of his having used A.I. to jump-start a novel by feeding it portions of his previous ones, heavily spiced with Shakespeare, Ibsen, Flaubert and Kafka. What happens when his agent (Andrea Martin), his disaffected son (Rafi Gavron) and the journalist (Brittany Bellizeare) catch on is the burden of the plot’s, and the character’s, unwinding.

But the A.I. business is really a red herring for writer’s block. Even before GPT was developed, McNeal engaged in various old-school shades of plagiarism: repurposing an ex-lover’s trauma for fiction, stealing a manuscript from his wife after her suicide. A.I. is just a cleaner, more efficient way to do what he always did.

It’s a credit to Downey in his Broadway debut, if not a surprise given his films — including “Oppenheimer,” for which he won an Academy Award in March — that he is willing to go so dark. But it’s not as if he had much choice. The play needs him to be outrageous enough to support its outré plot points, which are otherwise inexplicable even for a man who bolts down quarts of bourbon when facing a diagnosis of advanced liver disease. Still, you feel Downey straining to justify McNeal without softening him, an impossible job in an impossible part.

But most of the parts, incompletely retrofitted from the argument, are impossible. Only Martin, as the worried yet professionally codependent agent, manages a vivid sketch of a recognizable figure, though it’s the rare agent indeed who personally edits a client’s work.

Otherwise, the sets (by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton) and the projections (by Barton) — along with Sher’s typically expressive manipulation of them — are the production’s most successfully integrated elements, especially the squircle panels, pop-up rooms and torrential digital imagery. When McNeal, drunk and soul-sick, throws up, he vomits literal words.

That’s a brilliant image for a play that considers all forms of writing to be some form of plagiarism. Shakespeare, McNeal points out, lifted most of the plot of “King Lear” from an earlier play, so what’s so wrong about lifting “King Lear”? Or other people’s stories? A.I., he maintains, merely does the same work as any author, digesting life and its artifacts to make an expansive story from a limited supply.

It’s a fascinatingly contrarian point for a writer to raise, the kind of proposition that Akhtar, in previous plays, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Disgraced,” is drawn to. As for its validity, well, I’ll get back to you on that when you show me an A.I. novel that’s as compelling as “Madame Bovary” or a play compiled by Siri that’s as rich as “King Lear.”

Meanwhile, I hope this was helpful.

McNeal
Through Nov. 24 at Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; mcnealbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.