McNeal
Opening Night: September 30, 2024
Theater: Vivian Beaumont
Website: mcnealbroadway.com
Jacob McNeal (Academy Award® winner 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. Directed by Tony Award® winner Bartlett Sher.
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September 30, 2024
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.
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September 30, 2024
But the emotional stakes of the play are often too distant for us to really cling to. While McNeal tackles up-to-the-minute themes on a grand scale, the result feels like a chatbot’s attempt to write a review of a theater production it never saw, all head, little heart. Regardless, Akhtar still makes important points about art being a uniquely human invention that connects the masses, and how computer-generated creations may be able to come close, but they could never replicate the same relationship.
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September 30, 2024
McNeal, the play, therefore comes and goes; a mild thumbnail in a growing pile of decreasingly worthwhile content, featuring artists and themes we know and love, borne back ceaselessly into the archive.
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September 30, 2024
“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.
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September 30, 2024
Nothing in McNeal is convincing: The characters are thin, the timelines are off, the situations are at once implausible and cliché.
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September 30, 2024
Downey, in his rumpled Important Novelist garb (costumes courtesy of Jennifer Moeller, on point as ever), is perfectly cast as Jacob McNeal, an old-school author – he’s sexist, misogynist, drinks too much, wallows in self-pity when he isn’t shouting his self-important ambitions, narcissistic, dreams of Shakespeare, lives like Mailer,
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And therein lies McNeal’s biggest problem: It is so committed to toeing the line with its unique framing that it struggles to tell the story in a fulfilling way.
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September 30, 2024
Akhtar is a synthesizing playwright interested in picking apart vast systems, whether America’s relationship to Islam or the financial markets, but his writing about AI disappointingly doesn’t untangle much, instead falling into familiar tropes and arguments.
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September 30, 2024
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.
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September 30, 2024
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.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 30, 2024
“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.
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September 30, 2024
As spectacular as it all appears, Downey Jr.’s performance is the linchpin of the entire production, and it’s a tribute to his gifts as an actor that he turns the work into an engrossing study of the intersection of art and the powers of cyber science. His McNeal is a deeply flawed individual and yet one who recognizes his shortcomings, though not enough to change. He explains “computers are our fondest enablers.”
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We never really feel any emotional engagement with the characters, many of whom seem diagrammed as if by A.I. And while the ideas being thrown about are intellectually engaging up to a point, they ultimately feel like a poorly thought-out think piece
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