Robert Downey Jr.'s Broadway Debut in 'McNeal' Sparks Controversy and Mixed Reviews

'McNeal' review: Robert Downey Jr.'s awful Broadway play about AI is...

One hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission. At Lincoln Center Theater, 160 W. 65th Street.<br> The tiresome Broadway play "McNeal," starring Robert Downey Jr., is about every windbag's favorite topic -- AI. In Ayad Akhtar's drama, which opened Monday night at Lincoln Center, those two letters are, of course, supposed to stand for Artificial Intelligence. But as the story ambles on and on, their meaning evolves. To Audience Irritated. Should your sole aim be to watch the Marvel and "Oppenheimer" actor, who's making his Broadway debut, give a capable performance in his signature Tony Stark staccato, mission accomplished. However, it is, well, a marvel how even the most blinding star power can dim when blacked out by a mind-numbing plot, mouthpiece supporting characters and a Universal Studios-scale set of giant screens that's an expensive apology for the actual play. Even Iron Man is no match for a fatally shoddy script. The actor plays a brilliant writer and pretentious jerk named Jacob McNeal, whose dream is to win the Nobel Prize in Literature -- a Lincoln Center hero if there ever was one. Downey Jr. does variations on this cold-and-catty type in films all the time, so while he's undeniably confident and charismatic, no surprises await you. McNeal wins the Nobel, naturally. While talking with his doctor, who's concerned about his drinking, he gets the fateful call from Sweden and soon he's flying out to bloviate at Europeans. But the origin of his next novel, "Evie," is murky. On those enormous screens upstage, we watch the author ask AI to rework classic texts "in the style of Jacob McNeal." And the writer's son Harlan (Rafi Gavron), who's still traumatized by his mother's suicide, confronts him about the book's resemblance to material he might have stolen. It sounds more lucid when summarized than as staged by Bartlett Sher -- the director's third crummy new play in as many years. The author-with-a-secret aspect brings to mind the Glenn Close film "The Wife," only more jumbled and far less engrossing. Call it "The WiFi." No one can accuse Akhtar of lacking ideas. He slathers the show in constant, disparate thoughts that go nowhere. When McNeal is interviewed by a New York Times reporter named Natasha (Brittany Bellizeare), he asks the black woman if she is a "diversity hire." Topping himself, he then expresses his admiration for Harvey Weinstein's taste in film. Later, when our brains are already floating to the 66th Street 1 train, an ethical quandary is introduced between Jacob and a Times editor. The point of that, I do not know. Also stirring up confusion is the AI-generated head of Robert Downey Jr. that's blown up to movie theater size and occasionally superimposed on Ronald Reagan. There's an interminable bench scene in which Jacob's confronted by dull figments of his imagination. And, oh, wait for the fleeting suggestion of incest. Can't forget that. It's also never quite clear how much of the action is actually happening or is just another story Jacob is working on. For instance, right before the talk between McNeal and Harlan, the writer says to ChatGPT, "Pull material for a scene in which a father and son confront a family secret." Once again, that setup sounds juicier than it turns out to be. Akhtar would have a much better show on his hands had he focused more on dangerous lies and relationships rather than checking off headlines and pondering the possible consequences of barely understood technology. Much like being sat next to a cousin who's into bitcoin, artificial intelligence is more theoretically intriguing than grippingly dramatic. Our eyes glaze over when people, fictional or otherwise, drone on about it. McNeal, at least, gets the advantage of being pithy and cruel between his musings. The playwright's other characters are as flat as a touchscreen. Andrea Martin plays Stephie, his stereotypical book agent, whose every sentence has a whiff of "don't call us, we'll call you." Harlan gets one mode -- angry. And Natasha and Francine (Melora Hardin), the Times journalists, made me long for the days when stage depictions of reporters were fun. There will surely be more plays and films about AI, its possibilities and perils to come. But this frustrating early effort is bogged down by superficial intelligence.

'McNeal' review: Robert Downey Jr.'s new Broadway play is an endurance test

After scooping up an Oscar in March for his simmering turn in "Oppenheimer," the A-lister earned an Emmy nomination for HBO's "The Sympathizer" and nabbed an eye-popping payday for two more Marvel movies. His showbiz ubiquity continues with "McNeal," a provocative yet cumbersome new Broadway play that opened Monday at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar ("Disgraced"), the drama follows a blowhard named Jacob McNeal (Downey), who has just been diagnosed with end-stage liver failure when he gets a call that he's won the Nobel Prize for literature. The prestigious accolade happens to coincide with the impending launch of his next book, "Evie," which Jacob warily agrees to promote with a New York Times Magazine profile. But accusations that he may have plagiarized the entire novel threaten to implode its release, and so do Jacob's public displays of bad behavior. More often than not, the play feels like a 90-minute Bill Maher rant. He shakes his fist at Instagram and texting slang, carping that kids just don't read books anymore. He draws eye rolls for a racist joke about a young South Asian assistant (Saisha Talwar), and later tries to goad an astute Black journalist (Brittany Bellizeare), calling her a "diversity hire" and lionizing Harvey Weinstein during a booze-soaked interview. ("Guys like him were getting what they wanted," Jacob smarmily suggests.) If he's not blathering on about the malleability of truth, he's bemoaning the good old days when politicians like Ronald Reagan "at least tried to say things." And when his estranged son (Rafi Gavron) and ex-lover (Melora Hardin) confront him about pillaging their most painful, personal memories for his novels, he callously shoots down their grievances. ("Carnage be damned," he proclaims. "I'm doing God's work.") Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. The problem is not that Jacob is inherently unlikable. Many of pop culture's best recent creations - Lydia Tár in "Tár," the Roy family on HBO's "Succession" - have been morally bankrupt and viciously uncompromising. But unlike those characters, we rarely get a glimpse of his self-loathing or heartache. Instead, he's an exhausting person to spend any length of time with, and Downey's natural charisma can only go so far in offsetting Jacob's more insufferable qualities. "McNeal" marks Downey's first Broadway outing, following a short-lived run in the 1983 off-Broadway musical "American Passion." While most celebrities of his stature choose time-tested plays to make their debuts, it's to the actor's credit that he selected a new work, which aims to be both resonant and button-pushing. Artificial intelligence, and the notion of whether to fear or embrace it, is threaded loosely throughout the narrative. Many of the play's interstitial scenes take place within "the cloud," which is vividly brought to life by Jake Barton's sleek projections and his scenic design with Michael Yeargan. A giant iPhone screen and an uncanny AI portrait of Downey tower over the proceedings at various points throughout the show. Jacob denounces chatbots from the outset, blustering that they only tell us what we want to hear and numb us to cruel facts of life such as illness and death. As a test of both AI's humanity and his own, he eventually decides to "write" an entire new book using ChatGPT, although the thorny questions it raises go limply underexplored. "McNeal" commits the cardinal sin of wasting Broadway treasures Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles, who pop in briefly as Jacob's frenzied agent and concerned doctor, respectively. More ironically, it's exactly the type of play that Downey's smug title character would claim to deplore: all empty provocations and not an ounce of soul.

Review | Robert Downey Jr. is in a play about A.I. that makes no sense

"McNeal," by Pulitzer winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, is a high-gloss mess that strands the audience in the weeds. "Did AI write this?" will never again be an unfair question. It's one that crossed my mind as I narrowed my eyes and leaned toward Robert Downey Jr., as though doing so might help make more sense of "McNeal," the Oscar winner's Broadway debut. (It didn't.) Ayad Akhtar's new play does demonstrate generative technology -- ChatGPT is a named character, and its capabilities regularly appear in projection -- but a free scan at zerogpt.com confirmed that the script is 0 percent AI. Skip to end of carousel The Style section Style is where The Washington Post explains what's happening on the front lines of culture -- including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion -- with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, click here. End of carousel I'm sorry, but it had to be done: The concept of originality, and what if anything remains inextricably human about art, is the play's main subject. The staging for Lincoln Center Theater, from director Bartlett Sher, is characteristically dazzling, a gobsmacking display of what deep pockets and cutting-edge tools can do (it's presented in association with Downey's production company). Those resources are leveraged to explore a provocative question: Is generative AI all that different from how art has always been made, by drawing influence from the past? But there's a funny irony here: Celebrity vehicles about hot topics are proven Broadway cash cows, so isn't "McNeal" itself the product of a predictive algorithm? Even if that's some part of a meta point, the show is nevertheless a bloodless and convoluted mess. Downey's character, Jacob McNeal, is a composite of adjectives associated with any number of Great Male Authors -- alcoholic, egotistical, womanizing, etc. -- stacked up like raccoons in a trench coat. There is reason to distrust him from the start: The first thing McNeal does is ask ChatGPT who is going to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and then when McNeal himself does, he rails against AI in his acceptance speech. His doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) warns him in the first scene about the hallucinatory side effects of a lifesaving medication that could kill him if he keeps drinking while taking it. So, all the events of the play are very likely the fever dream of an unreliable and self-destructive narrator. McNeal achieves the pinnacle of literary success, and we're encouraged to wonder at what cost. Did he pilfer his dead wife's unpublished manuscript to get there? Did AI help him and pass it off as his own? Does he feel any remorse? Artists are increasingly grappling with AI onstage, including some who are eager to prove that it's bad at their jobs. But McNeal is understandably seduced by how much easier feeding prompts to a machine is than toiling over a page. Even his own words echo the technology's tendency toward mundane platitudes. "We like to lie to ourselves," McNeal says from behind the Nobel podium. (About what?) "The computers are our fondest enablers." (How so?) "The great humans have always chosen not to play along with our lies, but to confront them." (Uh ... okay?) McNeal claims he ran that speech through a chatbot but didn't accept its suggestions. Maybe he's lying. Either way, it's a wasted opportunity for the play to make a coherent argument. Akhtar has previously picked apart thorny issues onstage, as in "Disgraced," his 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner about Islamophobia, and "Junk," an explainer about financial markets also staged at Lincoln Center, in 2017. But "McNeal" strands the audience in the weeds with a morass of formal and intellectual experimentation. Swarms of hyper-sophisticated projections between scenes accompany voice overs or deepfake videos of McNeal feeding classics into the digital maw then directing it to regurgitate them in his style (projections are by Jake Barton, lighting is by Donald Holder, sound is by Justin Ellington and Beth Lake). Elements from these canonical texts are threaded into Akhtar's own: mother-son incest ("Oedipus Rex"), a spouse's destroyed masterpiece ("Hedda Gabler"), a dying man railing into the void ("King Lear"). Spotting these references comes with little reward. Even as a literary exercise, "McNeal" is garbled and staticky, like white noise. The biggest problem, though, is conceptual: Nothing about "McNeal" feels human. His agent (Andrea Martin), a young reporter (Brittany Bellizeare) and his son (Rafi Gavron) are sketched only in relation to him and granted little sense of interiority. They might even be in his imagination, which doesn't give the actors much rope. And despite his ego swallowing the room, McNeal himself remains an enigmatic bot of a man. That's a challenge, even for the actor who played Iron Man. "Effervescent flatness" is how McNeal describes his experience on Lexapro, which is not a bad way to describe Downey's particular talents. The honorary Brat Packer is famous for playing inscrutable men with hints of surface mischief that mask untold worlds of secrets. It does the actor little service that there's no there there with McNeal. Downey doesn't seem uncomfortable onstage, but nor is he charismatic, sexy, dangerous -- anything that might make us care about a generic monster. Akhtar also boldly lays himself a trap, by articulating conventions of good storytelling by which it's impossible not to measure this one. "The job's to give them pleasure," McNeal says, "lift them to a place of beauty, order, truth." Technology has always been used to break the rules. Still, it's tough not to miss beauty, order and truth in their absence. McNeal, through Nov. 24 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York. 1 hour, 40 minutes with no intermission. lct.org.

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?"

Robert Downey Jr. Makes His Broadway Debut With a Witty, Charismatic Performance in 'McNeal'

Downey plays the title character in the new play from Ayad Akhtar, whose probing social conscience and capacity for finding nuance in divisive issues have informed works such as 'JUNK' and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Disgraced.' It has been said that good artists copy and great artists steal, and it would seem that in recent years such pursuits, along with those of many lesser talents, have been increasingly facilitated by technology. Early in Ayad Akhtar's new play, "McNeal," the title character, a celebrated author, is accepting a highly prestigious award when he veers into a delicious screed against artificial intelligence. Jacob McNeal, played in this production by Robert Downey Jr., marking the Oscar-winning film star's Broadway debut, notes: "AI language models writing books and plays and shows today work by breaking down the future into word order." He argues that "the future is still one of our two great existential unknowns, and no matter what the data purports to tell us, Palo Alto is no Delphi. Sam Altman is no oracle." I'll confess that I almost stood up and cheered at this swipe at the tech mogul, who has been known to refer to writers as "content creators." Yet as we will learn over the next 90 minutes, Jacob himself is no paragon of literary or moral virtue; and Mr. Akhtar, whose probing social conscience and capacity for finding nuance in divisive issues have informed works such as "JUNK" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Disgraced," is interested in something more complicated than a takedown of Silicon Valley. The other great unknown that Jacob mentions in his speech is death. The play opens with a doctor's appointment, during which he is warned that his drinking is slowly killing him, and this sense of mortality will drive a mix of soul-searching and denial. Jacob is as fascinated with AI as he is appalled by it, as director Bartlett Sher and his design team emphasize with dazzling visual and sound effects when, for example, the author on several occasions tries to rework texts in his own writing voice. Jacob's other problem, at least as his critics see it, is women. Like Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, to cite just a few real-life bards, this protagonist has been accused of misogyny; not by coincidence, all but one of the play's characters are female, including his late wife, Jessica, who has committed suicide. We meet her nonetheless, via Jake Barton's projections and a digital composite by AGBO, which enables Jacob's face to merge eerily with hers and those of two noted subjects of his historical fiction, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. It turns out that Jessica's inspiration on her husband's latest project, which centers on a woman, may have crossed a bright red line, and as "McNeal" progresses, Jacob's personal and creative quirks become more interconnected, bringing time-old questions about separating artists from their art into a contemporary context. If Mr. Akhtar's dialogue, with its name-dropping of noted scribes and inside talk about editing and publishing, will be catnip for writers and avid readers alike (as well as critics), few fresh insights are provided here, and the high-tech staging can result in an alienating coolness at times. Still, under Mr. Sher's characteristically intuitive guidance, the actors -- among them Ruthie Ann Miles, touching as the doctor, and Andrea Martin, predictably tart and funny as Jacob's agent -- are all sharp and affecting. Jacob, notwithstanding his existential pondering, is no Hamlet, but Mr. Downey turns in a witty, charismatic performance. The star is particularly compelling in scenes that find Jacob interacting with the younger characters, from his embittered 20-something son (a lacerating Rafi Gavron) to a Black female reporter (Brittany Bellizeare, showing a breezy authority) who proves both smarter and more generous than Jacob expects. "I remember a time when you'd never get in trouble for telling the truth," Jacob tells the journalist. That word, truth, pops up 18 times in "McNeal," and not by accident: If popular terms like "lived experience" are now used to suggest objectivity where it shouldn't necessarily apply, Mr. Akhtar reminds us that debates over authenticity and the limits of creative license are nothing new -- even if the tools and agents are constantly changing.

Robert Downey Jr is oddly restrained as an AI-using novelist in Broadway debut McNeal

Robert Downey Jr makes a surprisingly low-key Broadway debut in McNeal, playing a renowned Texan novelist facing a mid-life reckoning in the shadow of artificial intelligence. Opening at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, Ayad Akhtar's latest topical play stirs together musings on artists stealing from life and on AI stealing from art, but lacks the verve of truly human messiness. Bartlett Sher's production feels expansive, whether McNeal (Downey Jr) is sparring with his agent (a delightful Andrea Martin) in her office, or delivering his Nobel Prize acceptance speech at a lonely podium. That's partly due to screens that tower over the stage displaying ChatGPT-style requests or blizzards of text. McNeal appears to write novels by asking AI to apply his style to amalgams of western literature while also cannibalising the lives of loved ones. "I'm a writer," he says at one point. "I don't keep anything to myself." And the ornery novelist certainly has no shortage of material to draw on: a wife who died by suicide; a resentful son (Rafi Gavron); an affair with a prominent newspaper editor; near-fatal alcoholism. But the unruly character that all this might suggest is not especially in evidence in Downey Jr's performance, which dials down his usual charm but doesn't feel imbued with a suitably profound emotional core. We do see tantalising flickers of Downey Jr's sly dexterity as an actor in McNeal's face-off with a younger journalist (a commanding Brittany Bellizeare), who is writing a cover story about him. Committed to tell-all candour, McNeal drawls out opinions (on Harvey Weinstein, for example) that could sink his reputation. There is a spark as Downey Jr and Bellizeare circle each other, both wise to the rules of the game. But what's clearly meant to be a pivotal moment in examining McNeal's cultural stature and position of privilege ends just as it's lifting off. Akhtar's emotional scenarios can feel oddly musty at times, as when McNeal's grown-up son confronts him about his mother's suffering at dad's country cabin (the most elaborate of Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton's sharp sets). It's hard to feel the depths of father-son animosity or affection here, and it's not helped by Gavron's powering through the conversation with a peevish hustle. Better is the banter between McNeal and his New York agent, Martin nearly stealing the show as she fusses over him and keeps him in line. The play's other women seem simply to orbit McNeal's life, appearing only in attenuated forms, perhaps because they are filtered through his solipsism: his former lover (Melora Hardin) in a murky scene of reunion; his exposition-supplying doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles); his agent's avid assistant (Saisha Talwar). It's an open question whether McNeal's story deflates his stature as a literary lion or ends up just being Rothian ego-aggrandisement. The play's ruminations on AI and the interplay of artistic originals and influences -- one prompt involves mixing Shakespeare, Ibsen, Kafka and the Gospel of Luke -- can feel less impactful than the set and lighting orchestrations, which periodically conjure audiovisual fugues. McNeal is an apt follow-up for Downey Jr after his Oscar-winning, simmeringly contained performance in Oppenheimer, a film that also deals with world-changing technology. But Akhtar's play does not quite ignite, and -- ironically for the story of an uninhibited writer -- it could use a bit more fire in the belly.