Robert Downey Jr. can’t save this AI-inspired Broadway show

NEW YORK – It’s been the year of Robert Downey Jr.
After scooping up an Oscar in March for his simmering turn in “Oppenheimer,” the A-lister earned an Emmy nomination for HBO’s “The Sympathizer” and nabbed an eye-popping payday for two more Marvel movies. His showbiz ubiquity continues with “McNeal,” a provocative yet cumbersome new Broadway play that opened Monday at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), the drama follows a blowhard named Jacob McNeal (Downey), who has just been diagnosed with end-stage liver failure when he gets a call that he’s won the Nobel Prize for literature. The prestigious accolade happens to coincide with the impending launch of his next book, “Evie,” which Jacob warily agrees to promote with a New York Times Magazine profile. But accusations that he may have plagiarized the entire novel threaten to implode its release, and so do Jacob’s public displays of bad behavior.
More often than not, the play feels like a 90-minute Bill Maher rant. He shakes his fist at Instagram and texting slang, carping that kids just don’t read books anymore. He draws eye rolls for a racist joke about a young South Asian assistant (Saisha Talwar), and later tries to goad an astute Black journalist (Brittany Bellizeare), calling her a “diversity hire” and lionizing Harvey Weinstein during a booze-soaked interview. (“Guys like him were getting what they wanted,” Jacob smarmily suggests.)
If he’s not blathering on about the malleability of truth, he’s bemoaning the good old days when politicians like Ronald Reagan “at least tried to say things.” And when his estranged son (Rafi Gavron) and ex-lover (Melora Hardin) confront him about pillaging their most painful, personal memories for his novels, he callously shoots down their grievances. (“Carnage be damned,” he proclaims. “I’m doing God’s work.”)
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The problem is not that Jacob is inherently unlikable. Many of pop culture’s best recent creations – Lydia Tár in “Tár,” the Roy family on HBO’s “Succession” – have been morally bankrupt and viciously uncompromising. But unlike those characters, we rarely get a glimpse of his self-loathing or heartache. Instead, he’s an exhausting person to spend any length of time with, and Downey’s natural charisma can only go so far in offsetting Jacob’s more insufferable qualities.
“McNeal” marks Downey’s first Broadway outing, following a short-lived run in the 1983 off-Broadway musical “American Passion.” While most celebrities of his stature choose time-tested plays to make their debuts, it’s to the actor’s credit that he selected a new work, which aims to be both resonant and button-pushing.
Artificial intelligence, and the notion of whether to fear or embrace it, is threaded loosely throughout the narrative. Many of the play’s interstitial scenes take place within “the cloud,” which is vividly brought to life by Jake Barton’s sleek projections and his scenic design with Michael Yeargan. A giant iPhone screen and an uncanny AI portrait of Downey tower over the proceedings at various points throughout the show.
Jacob denounces chatbots from the outset, blustering that they only tell us what we want to hear and numb us to cruel facts of life such as illness and death. As a test of both AI’s humanity and his own, he eventually decides to “write” an entire new book using ChatGPT, although the thorny questions it raises go limply underexplored.
“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.
“McNeal” runs through Nov. 24 at New York’s Vivian Beaumont Theater (150 W. 65th Street).