The cast of Lincoln Center Theater’s production of McNeal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

Ayad Akhtar is not a writer who shies away from a play of ideas–sometimes, I would argue, to the detriment of writing plays about humans. So I anticipated being able to pick any number of arguments with his new play McNeal, a piece that in theory delves into a number of pressing issues in the two cultural domains where I spend most of my time: theater and book publishing (see, my day job). The play, again in theory, looks at the function of literary culture and the creative mind in the age of AI; at the cultural niche of the boundary pushing “bad boy” white male writer in the age of cancel culture; at the meaning–or meaninglessness–of traditional signifiers of literary merit in the age of “authentic” voices and diverse stories. But it doesn’t really have enough to say about any of them to even bother making its characters mouthpieces for arguments. Rather than annoying me or frustrating me or even making me roll my eyes with recognition at my dislike of Jacob McNeal, McNeal just left me bored. Jacob McNeal feels like the stereotype of genius writer 101–self-absorbed, selfish, forgivable for his brilliance, lovably exasperating–but that shouldn’t preclude an audience caring about him. 

And surely we are meant to care whether McNeal (Robert Downey Jr.)—newly minted literature Nobelist, alcoholic about to enter end-stage liver failure, a man who claims his raison d’etre is to transgress boundaries in the service of art, all around asshole—uses AI in his writing process, whether he’s plagiarizing from his late wife, even to care whether he drinks himself to death, but McNeal never succeeds in making McNeal any sort of convincing center of gravity, nor in making us believe in the singularity of his literary talent. He’s neither a compellingly murky villain nor a grudgingly admired antihero, neither a hothouse flower of genius nor an obvious hack. He’s a mildly charming (when is Robert Downey Jr. not charming?) man who seems to move through life oblivious to the effects his choices and actions have on other people. He’s capable of a kind of petulant cruelty, especially to his semi-estranged son, Harlan (Rafi Gavron), but ultimately doesn’t seem particularly invested in anyone or anything around him. McNeal shows us a digital avatar of McNeal, created by the television company Agbo, but that avatar feels only slightly more neutrally and abstract than the man himself.

It feels like Akhtar, director Bartlett Sher, and even Downey got so caught up in trying to use ethically compromising tools to tell a story about ethical compromise that they forgot to establish a character with any ethics to compromise. There’s plenty of details about McNeal but they don’t add up to a believably human shape (which, I suppose, is as good a description of generative AI as any other, so there’s that). There’s detail to McNeal, anyway; there’s a horrifying lack of anything other than outline to every other character here. If one wanted evidence for the argument that McNeal the writer has issues with women, McNeal the play might be exhibit A. 

The people around him in the play are mostly women, and women utterly lacking in any attributes other than their adjacency to Planet McNeal: his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles, underused); his agent (Andrea Martin, who’s doing her best to lift the proceedings); his agent’s young assistant (Saisha Talwar), who thinks she’s clever); an interviewer from The New York Times Magazine (Brittany Bellizeare); and a former lover/former editor from The New York Times Book Review (Melora Hardin). Most get a scene or two; most display a bemused affection for Jacob even as they give some bits of rote criticism of his work.   We can’t judge whether those criticisms are fair or not, since we never see more than a few sentences of his work, and what we do see rapidly becomes tainted by accusations of stealing from his deceased wife and of using ChatGPT as a primary source. 

Akhtar has, admittedly, set a hard task: it’s hard to write a compelling piece of art about that questions how we judge compelling pieces of art, especially if one of the things you’re trying to investigate is how different machine mimicry really is from compelling art: McNeal’s constant prompt to his digital tool is write this “in the style of Jacob McNeal.” It’s hard to use the tools we already know about in the theater–video projection, especially at Lincoln Center, is nothing new–to show us what we’re meant to believe is something new, something stranger. But in order to do that investigation, to make that case, either you or the machine needs to be producing compelling art in the first place, and here neither one is showing much evidence of it. 

In his New York Times interview, McNeal quotes himself: “Well-managed surprise is the soul of narrative pleasure.” There’s precious little of either here. As long as McNeal is the one pushing the buttons, he doesn’t have to care–and therefore neither do we. It’s just another story about another distasteful so-called genius finding another way to hold on to his time in the spotlight. It’s just one more paean to his own ego. I can imagine a parallel trajectory in which a different writer–the young journalist, say–uses ChatGPT to rewrite a novel of her own in the style of Jacob McNeal, and then get lauded for it in a way her own work never receives praise. But to give the Nobel Prize winner another set of cheap tools to stay exactly where he is? Who needs that?