Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal starring Oscar winner Robert Downey, Jr. at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater certainly looks impressive in Bartlett Sher’s dazzling, special-effects-laden production. Akhtar’s script deals with a narcissistic, Nobel Prize-winning novelist facing his own mortality and the encroaching dangers of artificial intelligence. Sher stuns us with a sleek, futuristic staging. The time is “the very near future” when three of the top volumes on the New York Times best-seller list are authored by AI. The cool, sterile sets by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton, the eye-popping projections by Barton, and the impressive lighting by Donald Holder create a sci-fi, video-game universe fit for a Hollywood blockbuster. But the self-indulgent plot seems like an AI-generated melodrama extrapolated from the introspective works of Philip Roth.
After receiving a dire diagnosis from his stern doctor (solid Ruthie Ann Miles) to cut down the booze, winning that Nobel, and preparing for his latest work to be published, McNeal battles with his estranged son (overzealous Rafi Gavron), worried agent (brilliant Andrea Martin), and former lover (weepy Melora Hardin). Trouble is the opinionated, unpredictable McNeal may have plagiarized the work from his late wife (dead by suicide) and from the pervasive demons of AI.
Akhtar does have some interesting and cogent arguments about AI and several other troubling trends in our screen-obsessed world. These are expressed in the sole gripping scene of the play—between McNeal and an antagonistic African-American woman journalist (a strong Brittany Bellizeare). Harvey Weinstein, Ronald Reagan, the Me Too movement, the dumbing-down of America, and McNeal’s creed of truth above everything all figure in this stimulating exchange.
Too bad it’s like an island of sane discourse is a sea of melodrama. Downey, Jr. exhibits his trademark bad-boy charm as the explosive author, but even he can’t make us care about the basically obnoxious author. Andrea Martin rescues her scenes with split-second timing and subtext-laden silent reactions. She turns a rapid telephone exchange with a stubborn publisher into a lesson in comedy. The remainder of the cast, which also includes Saisha Talwar as the agent’s eager assistant, do their level best to bring life to this derivative and flashy play, but McNeal is a hollow retread of Roth’s washed-up, self-hating protagonist trope.
