The author Jacob McNeal is, amongst different issues, a bestselling and influential novelist, an esteemed winner of the Nobel prize for literature, a author with fashion constant and public sufficient to function a immediate for Chat GPT. From one other view: a narcissistic cad, a horrible father, a lonely drunk. Individuals argue whether or not he’s a genius, a fraud, an iconoclast. After practically two hours with him, it’s not clear which. Although mesmerizingly delivered to life by Robert Downey Jr in Ayad Akhtar’s muddled and sometimes poignant new play of the identical identify, McNeal stays extra reflection than character – a projection of success, an outlet for anxieties over synthetic intelligence, a cipher to destabilize one’s view of actuality.
All of those angles provide fertile materials for a play of concepts, and to Akhtar’s credit score, McNeal is just not solely a uncommon authentic Broadway play however an bold one, given starry billing and splashy, tech-forward staging at Lincoln Middle. It’s additionally all over, a play of robust performances – Downey, in his Broadway debut, chief amongst them – that chafe towards imprecise, inchoate concepts a few vaguely ghoulish know-how.
Issues begin merely sufficient: a large, blue light-abundant iPhone interface looming above the stage, the house web page monitoring the minutes clicking by on Friday, 10 October in a approach intriguingly acquainted to most individuals within the viewers. It’s someday within the close to future, when Chat GPT-like AI is much more firmly grounded in American day by day life – sufficient, as McNeal off-handedly remarks in Dr Sahra Grewal’s (Ruthie Ann Miles) workplace, that a number of New York Instances bestsellers are brazenly composed by machine studying.
The play proceeds in chronological-ish chapters within the sundown days of McNeal’s distinguished profession: an appointment diagnosing liver illness; a triumphantly tipsy and moralizing speech accepting the Nobel prize; a gathering along with his hammy agent Stephie (Andrea Martin); a reunion along with his estranged grownup son Harlan (a jittery Rafi Gavron), who harbors intense loathing for the daddy he blames for his mom’s suicide a long time prior (and which options some telenovela-esque revelations that just about took me out of the play solely). Some border on the surreal; some, particularly a tete-a-tete between proudly un-woke McNeal and a younger feminine Black reporter on the New York Instances (Brittany Bellizeare, a standout) whip up propulsive, left-field pressure because the novelist plunges deeper into the whiskey bottle. (Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton’s evocative units cowl each, most pleasingly launched in a luscious bookshelf filled with each actual and made-up titles.)
However because the chapters construct, the narrative cohesion slackens. For every interlude intentionally muddies the waters by introducing the prospect of AI-generated materials – Downey Jr’s voice, as McNeal, prompting the machine for the scenes we’re about to witness and offering private materials to synthesize. Finally, the projections ship dialogue as deepfakes of McNeal and his late spouse/former paramour (Melora Hardin). (This system credit the “digital composites” to the corporate AGBO.)
Akhtar, a Pulitzer-winning dramatist (in 2013, for Disgraced) and novelist, has dressed up a reliably grating inclination – a author writing about writing – with the mind-bending and reality-questioning drama of our fears with AI. The framing gadgets don’t must do a lot to the touch on, with out spoiling, the traces between inspiration and exploitation, between borrowing and theft, between help and dishonest. Though delineating it this fashion appears like I’m giving the play an excessive amount of credit score – McNeal at most nudges these fault traces, seemingly happy with mentioning the subject as an finish unto itself.
Downey, working firmly in his lane of wise-cracking, sardonic charisma, is no less than by no means lower than compelling, and fortunately on stage for nearly the entire present; the entire train is value it to see an actor in peak, seemingly simple type. He sells McNeal each as a narcissist spiraling on the finish of his highway and as a provocation of AI’s blurry moral traces. Such provocation incorporates little perception, past that AI is frightening and will make issues worse; maybe McNeal’s most attention-grabbing concept is the unoriginal notion that generative AI will allow narcissists, or that it’s going to enable individuals to specific themselves by a creative medium with out placing within the exhausting work of craft.
McNeal ends on a confounding be aware, explicitly invoking the query: what’s actual, and the way are you aware? One might generously learn the play’s descent into confusion as a meta treatise on what a world filled with AI slop and questionably generated materials will wreak on our notion, tenuous as it’s already. One might additionally say that it’s a little bit of unearned ambiguity. Our requirements haven’t fallen to this point but as to not hope for artwork with a transparent imaginative and prescient.
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