The writer Jacob McNeal is, among other things, a bestselling and influential novelist, an esteemed winner of the Nobel prize for literature, a writer with style consistent and public enough to serve as a prompt for ChatGPT. From another view: a narcissistic cad, a terrible father, a lonely drunk. People argue whether he’s a genius, a fraud, an iconoclast. After nearly two hours with him, it’s not clear which. Though mesmerizingly brought to life by Robert Downey Jr in Ayad Akhtar’s muddled and occasionally poignant new play of the same name, McNeal remains more reflection than character – a projection of success, an outlet for anxieties over artificial intelligence, a cipher to destabilize one’s view of reality.
All of these angles offer fertile material for a play of ideas, and to Akhtar’s credit, McNeal is not only a rare original Broadway play but an ambitious one, given starry billing and splashy, tech-forward staging at Lincoln Center. It’s also all over the place, a play of strong performances – Downey, in his Broadway debut, chief among them – that chafe against vague, inchoate ideas about a vaguely ghoulish technology.
