"MCNEAL:" The Unbearable Act of AI
I know next to nothing about AI and try to keep it that way. I realize this is not a very enlightened strategy or a wise one, necessarily. AI is coming for us all one day, let’s face it. But it will have to find me first.
My AI ignorance, if not abstinence, made me a nominally less than optimal audience for McNeal, the new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar that is closing this weekend at Lincoln Center Theater. In spite of my insufficiencies, though, I enjoyed McNeal a lot; or maybe because of them, I’m not sure. Fundamentally, the play is repurposed Faust, with AI as the devil, and a Nobel Prize winning a-hole of an American novelist as the title character who sells his soul.
Laboring to write his next great work, Jacob McNeal begins to flirt with AI, which proves far better than he imagined at, not just reproducing his authorial voice, but improving it. And down the rabbit hole we go.
It was fascinating to watch Robert Downey Jr. inhabit this guy, live and in person. An actor I have long admired onscreen (and long felt for offscreen), Downey has a corrosive talent for conjuring intriguing, somehow likable schmucks as fully rounded flawed characters. This is an even trickier tightrope walk to behold onstage. At times I did feel Downey was pushing too hard, but you can’t blame a guy for trying. And often succeeding.
Andrea Martin, as McNeal’s longtime literary agent, was as fine as ever, capturing the slippery, over-the-shoulder moralism of this publishing pro confronting the amorality of her client as amplified by AI. Martin managed to make this woman sympathetic, fleetingly admirable, alternately revolting and continuously hilarious. Each of these affects also helped frame Downey’s performance by contrast. Nicely done.
A rote backstory about McNeal’s family betrayal was far less compelling, though acted deftly by Downey and Rafi Gavron as his outraged son. The requisite tech pyrotechnics, as choreographed by director Bartlett Sherr — a consummate traditionalist by nature — were both dizzying and instructive, projecting AI in both word and voice.
AI, as the devil itself, is ultimately what McNeal is all about; not the treacheries of human interaction but the inhuman treachery of artificial intelligence. The play opened up AI for me as the pandora’s box I envisioned it to be, but the writer in me couldn’t help but admire the sophistication with which Akhtar tells this story — assisted, in fact, by AI; as he concedes in a program note.
The fatal flaw of both AI and this play, I couldn’t help but feel, is the assumption that writers find the demands of writing so unbearably burdensome, they are easily seduced by AI’s ease. Maybe. For most of us, the challenge of finding just the right word to say what we want to say is the reason we write. And the effort is the art.