NEW YORK — What with artificial intelligence on everyone’s lips, deep fake videos messing with an election and the unctuous excellence of ChatGPT coming for you like self-driving vehicles wiping out truckers, it’s getting hard out there for an insecure writer.
Being a member of the liberal elite, it seems, and even being the subject of breathless magazine profiles in the New York Times soon is going to be no defense against well-trained artificial intelligence — well trained on you, sucker — coming up with better novels, plays and acceptance speeches for prestigious awards than any human ever could.
Playwright Ayad Akhtar’s intellectually stimulating but aesthetically chaotic new show in the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, starring no less than Robert Downey Jr., mercifully live and in person, is an anxiety play, fundamentally. It’s a cri de coeur of authorial worry that takes the side of flawed, carbon-based beings in our collective battle against the clinically accurate bots.
“McNeal,” the object of a huge Lincoln Center production from director Bartlett Sher, is at its best when it explores the limits of originality and muses whether AI really is any different, say, from Shakespeare borrowing a story from Plutarch, or you taking an idea from your life or even David Foster Wallace taking magic mushrooms, or whatever, to unleash some kind of perceived deeper truth inside himself. No writer ever creates from whole cloth; will the future be an intensification of that truth or do we await the pending total decimation of cultural professionals?
And what is AI? A tool that cannot be ignored or a Faustian bargain that will destroy theater, literature, film, TV, the whole shebang?
Those are very interesting topics for 90 minutes in the theater. It’s already the case that if you asked AI to come up with something in the style of Writer X, it would likely do a better job than X would manage his or herself. And this play makes the indisputably accurate observation that we are not stepping back from this creative brink anytime soon. There will be many more plays on this theme.
But Akhtar by no means confines himself to those matters in this overstuffed play. It is as if we are watching a brutal Edward Albee drama like “The Goat” stuck inside a high-tech exploration of our pending mutual digital apocalypse.
A big problem here is that Downey’s titular character is a bomb-throwing truthteller, a grumpy and self-obsessed relic in his seventh decade, ever on the brink of being cancelled for saying stuff like how much he envied the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. He treats the women in his life with casual disdain, whether they are his agent (Andrea Martin), a staffer in her office (Saisha Talwar), his old lover (Melora Hardin) or even his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles). His relationship with his adult son (Rafi Gavron) is predictably dysfunctional. And thus “McNeal” has the problem of forcing you to spend your time with a profoundly unlikeable protagonist. In fact, McNeal, played with halting vocal rhythms by Downey but hardly with the level of vulnerability of which this gifted actor is capable, is such a jerk that you sit there hoping AI will take him down. I suspect that element went further than Akhtar first intended.
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Downey is challenging himself here, and good for him; he’s quite compelling at times, even on screen, even when he’s a fake. But he doesn’t seem to have a throughline upon which he can hang his hat. He never really looks the audience in the eye. There’s no “there,” and there has to be a there, there.
Moreover, none of the supporting characters, which includes two current or former employees of the culture desk of the New York Times (Brittany Bellizeare plays the other), feel truly real. Maybe they are not supposed to be. Maybe this whole thing is one big AI experiment and, for sure, nothing feels like the fault of the actors. But once your head goes down that road, the show seems to collapse in on itself even more.
In essence, “McNeal” ends up being yet another entry in the long list of reminders that live theater invariably struggles when trying to rail against the digital incursions on our most human of art forms by including its extensive use in a show. The technology here (Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton share the set design credit) is certainly big scale, but also soporific and all of the epic deep fakery feels like, well, epic deep fakery, and it’s striking how resistant one is to that in the theater, notwithstanding all the prompts on the screen and the fusing of real images and visual lies, yada yada.
Akhtar (“Disgraced”) is a skilled scribe, best when he works in taut situations with characters facing imminent crises of the soul. There are glimpses of that here in the best bits. As counterintuitive as it may seem, and it’s certainly contrary to the instructions in the script, I think “McNeal” would work best in a smaller production where the humans and the technology are scaled to what feels like a fairer fight. As unfair as it may actually be in the future. This is still the live theater.
On Broadway in the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, 150 W. 65th St., New York; www.lct.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com