Lincoln Center Theater’s McNEAL, a new play by Ayad Akhtar, directed by Bartlett Sher opens tonight on Broadway! Read the reviews!
The cast features Robert Downey Jr., Brittany Bellizeare, Rafi Gavron, Melora Hardin, Andrea Martin, Ruthie Ann Miles, and Saisha Talwar.
Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Jacob McNeal (Robert Downey Jr.) is a great writer, one of our greatest, a perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But McNeal also has an estranged son, a new novel, old axes to grind and an unhealthy fascination with Artificial Intelligence. Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s new play is a startling and wickedly smart examination of the inescapable humanity – and increasing inhumanity – of the stories we tell.
Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal: “McNeal,” directed by Lincoln Center Theater’s newly named executive producer Bartlett Sher, is itself a confused and discursive if thought-provoking drama that often seems a grab bag of ideas Mr. Akhtar delves into without finding much depth.
Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Or does he? It’s hard to know. Nothing in McNeal is convincing: The characters are thin, the timelines are off, the situations are at once implausible and cliché. (When McNeal is negotiating his contract, he is shown a big number on a cell phone—barely a step up from a folded paper slid across a table.) The play’s middle scenes—McNeal’s lurid confrontation with his son (Rafi Gavron) and an off-the-rails interview with a young, Black New York Times reporter (Brittany Bellizeare)—ring utterly false, and the actors elsewhere seem flat: Andrea Martin as McNeal’s agent, Ruthie Ann Miles as his doctor, Melora Hardin as his former mistress. McNeal is the only one with any dimension, but neither his dialogue nor Downey’s guarded, petulant delivery suggest the charm that others impute to him. Dressed in a writerly uniform of corduroy blazer and jeans, he’s a standard-issue manchild; the play feels a bit like spending 90 minutes with Bill Maher on a crabby day.
Aramide Timubu, Variety: “McNeal” falters because it doesn’t know what it wants to say. Moreover, the narrative felt confusing and meaningless, with a mix of genres and no actual theme or climax. Jacob is a writer, but viewers can never penetrate who he is beyond the surface. Instead, the play becomes an illustration of a self-absorbed man who treats the people around him like accessories for his own gain.
Robert Hofler, The Wrap: Bartlett Sher directs and he pushes each of these supporting players to overact to the extreme, while Downey Jr. delivers an oddly staccato performance. It’s as if he’s trying to distance himself from the character with his tick-filled delivery of the lines. However, as this 90-minute play progresses with its over-the-top performances from the supporting actors, Downey Jr. begins to emerge as the calm eye of the angry storm raging around his character. He wins our sympathy by default.
Jeremy Gerard, Deadline: With much 21st Century razzle dazzle provided by the magnificent video projection designs of Jake Barton and huge digital composite images – video AI projections of faces of the actors meld into one another at one point – from AGBO, McNeal, astutely directed by the great Bartlett Sher, is an often confusing though wheedlingly emotional mindgame. The discombobulation is, one suspects, Akhtar’s intention, a way of presenting on a physical stage a near-future realm of thorny, magic-seeming complexity in which thousands of years of data – from Shakespeare and Ibsen to your dead wife’s old notebooks, and everything in between – can be melded into a book with your name on it, and in relative minutes. Is this theft, or merely a literary Moog waiting for its Brian Eno?
Patrick Ryan, USA Today: “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.
Johnny Oleksinki, The New York Post: 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.
Jackson McHenry, Vulture: McNeal’s woozy ruminations about art and technology might strike with more force if the actual drama around them had more tensile strength. The human dynamics Akhtar and Sher hang all of this on never get past cliché: McNeal confronts a cadre of women, including Martin’s assistant (Saisha Talwar), a horrifyingly underprepared magazine journalist (Brittany Bellizeare), and a former New York Times books editor who is pretty obviously based on Pamela Paul (Melora Hardin). In his exchanges with them, they get to do little except absorb his rants about everything from the work of Annie Ernaux to Harvey Weinstein. If McNeal wants to tell us that a great artist — specifically a great man, in this case — is some unique force in the universe, it requires a more finely crafted rendering of that man. But on the opposite end, if the play wants to suggest AI could offer an alternative to that figure that’s equal in stature? Well, there’s an issue of rendering there, too.
Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune: 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.
Emlyn Travis, Entertainment Weekly: McNeal might ask fascinating questions about a writer’s sense of integrity, the disconnect between generations of writers, and the limits of artificial intelligence within art, but the delivery is so garbled that it is difficult to ascertain what the play is actually trying to say about these complex issues… if anything at all. Grade: C+
Dan Rubins, Slant Magazine: The technology distracts from the real human drama that McNeal depicts, and the seriousness of that drama dilutes any coherent argument about the impact of machine language models on literature or life. And, no, that lack of clarity cannot be explained by Akhtar using A.I. himself in creating the text, as he insists that all the words are his alone. The hollow McNeal, after all, is only halfway to presenting as artificial intelligence. It’s got the artificial part down pat.
Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: Star power is not to be underestimated. Not only can it bring in audiences who may not normally attend new Broadway plays, it can also infuse a problematic work with a gravitas it might not normally possess. Such is the case with Lincoln Center Theater’s production of the new drama by Ayad Akhtar (Disgraced, The Invisible Hand) that touches on such themes as artificial intelligence, plagiarism, and writerly inspiration without really coming to grips with any of them. But it doesn’t matter, thanks to the presence of Robert Downey Jr. in the title role. Downey, who recently won an Oscar for the film Oppenheimer and is here making his stage debut, brings such charisma and magnetism to McNeal that it’s easy to overlook the play’s flaws.
Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: Before I get into the merits of the play and Lincoln Center’s thrilling production, something else that’s very real is the extraordinary talents of its leading man. Making his Broadway debut, Robert Downey Jr., who most of us know only through his film work, is a great stage actor. As famed novelist Jacob McNeal, an egotistical, self-acknowledged asshole, he is a fascinating creature treading the line between obnoxious and seductive. You can’t take your eyes off him…and happily, he’s on stage for the entirety of Akhtar’s 90-minute drama.
