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.
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.
In Ayad Akhtar’s crisply staged yet dramatically muddy play, McNeal, Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. summons every ounce of his innate swagger and smugness as a misogynistic author who’s just found himself the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Broadway debut, Downey steps up; he’s sure-footed and magnetic. The play itself, less so.
2024 | Broadway |
Lincoln Center Theater Broadway Premiere Producion Broadway |
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