Robert Downey Jr. at Lincoln Center Theater
Playwright Ayad Akhtar Tackles AI
By: Susan Hall - Oct 01, 2024
Robert Downey Jr.. is everything you could hope for and more in this New York stage debt as the title character in Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal. Downey started his career playing a dog in Pound directed by his father. Familiar to filmgoers, his physical presence on stage at the Lincoln Center Theater combines his casual warmth with an edge demanded by a role in which his character may well have precipitated a suicide.
This play questions a writer’s originality in the time of AI. McNeal likes to use AI and pontificates on how Shakespeare might have adapted it. McNeal uses people. Not surprising because anyone who knows a writer has to be prepared to be ‘material.’ McNeal’s son Harlan resents this. He is naive.
The novelist’s doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) is trying to talk him out of booze. His agent (Andrea Martin) wants to keep him alive so her share of the proceeds continues to flow. Both are directed as robots. A Times reporter (Melora Hardin) who fell for the writer is also AI-ed. So too the son Harlan (Rafi Gavron). Making them AI characters appears to be a deliberate production decision. The playwright wanted AI to be the envelope in which the play unfolds. Now we have characters inside the envelope infected by the non-human aspects of AI.
When Downey interacts with these characters, they come to life, suggesting that a writer of his talents can animate the characters computers create. More closely matching human is a New York Times Magazine interviewer (Brittany Bellizeare) who comes to like the writer, despite his enthusiastic endorsement of Harvey Weinstein. Dipti (Saisha Talwar), the saucy young assistant in the agent’s office, catches Downey’s attention with her endorsement of Nobelist Annie Ernaux, so good at evoking sexual desire.
The playwright called for projections as a dramatic and narrative element of importance. We are engorged in “dematerialized virtual space of digital cognition.” The question of authenticity and plagiarism which includes AI material was more interesting than these images, which granted were beautiful, but not threatening enough.
McNeal has some of Philip Roth’s less attractive parts, misogyny and extreme self-preoccupation. Yet Roth deserved a Nobel and McNeal’s fictional award makes up a bit for this failure of the Academy.
It is Downey who rightly dominates the show and engages us every moment he is on the stage. The dialogue is lively, even when it is mistakenly delivered staccato and breathless. Not Downey’s, which has a just right range from fury to humility.
What makes us human? When does a writer become a robot? What is theft and what is a genius turn? Downey as McNeal raises these questions. We as audience grapple with them.
Playing through November 24 at the Lincoln Center Theater. Tickets here.