Theater Review by Carol Rocamora . . .
Jacob McNeal, celebrated American novelist and playwright, has a problem. He’s trying to kill himself.
Wait a minute, you say to yourself at the onset of Ayad Akthar’s profound new play McNeal, currently having its world premiere at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Why is he doing that? It doesn’t make any sense. He just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He’s got a new novel coming out in the spring. Moreover, he’s being played by the charismatic Robert Downey Jr., and directed by Bartlett Sher (the newly named executive producer of that flagship theater), leading a dream-team cast and cadre of brilliant designers. He’s got everything going for him.
Well, not quite. You see, McNeal has a guilty conscience. He has cheated. Big time. Indeed, he just about says it out loud in his Nobel acceptance speech. Why? Because, he explains, there is no place he wouldn’t go to win that prize. In other words: he’s plagiarized. He’s used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to write his novels. Why not, McNeal asks? After all, he says, Shakespeare plagiarized 70% of King Lear from a previous work. It turns out that McNeal even consulted AI to write his Nobel acceptance speech.
As the play unfolds, we discover that McNeal is guilty of more than plagiarism. He also caused his wife Jessica to commit suicide, according to their son Harlan (played by Rafi Gavron). In a devastating scene between father and son, Harlan accuses McNeal of stealing his mother’s own unpublished novel and using it for the new book he’s now finishing—as well as “thieving people’s lives,” stealing scenes from his son’s experiences, and those of others, to put in his work. Harlan threatens to send his mother’s manuscript to the New York Times to expose his father as a plagiarist.
Essentially, McNeal is drinking himself to death. His descent continues in a scene where he is interviewed by a reporter (Brittany Bellizeare) from the New York Times, who is writing an article about him. She ran some of McNeal’s work through a plagiarism screener and found a lot of “borrowings” (e. g. from Wallace Stevens, Norman Mailer, the King James Bible, etc.). She also discovered that Evie, the title of McNeal’s new work, was indeed stolen from his wife’s writing. At the same time, however, the interviewer is having her own problem—she actually likes McNeal’s writing.
In a subsequent scene in Central Park with Francine (played by Melora Harden), a former New York Times editor with whom McNeal was having an affair (his wife Jessica found out), Francine accuses him of writing about their affair, as well.
While all these confrontations are happening—with his physician, his agent, his son, and his ex-lover—McNeal continues to drink. During that scene in the park with Francine, things turn surreal. In a paranoid moment, McNeal hallucinates that all the characters in the play are in the park observing him, surrounding him, reciting the following limerick together:
There once was a writer named McNeal
Who thought that to write was to steal
With your pain as his plunder
He weaved tales, but he’d wonder
If any shred of his talent was real.
It turns out that, even as McNeal asks AI to compose his intended suicide note, at the same time he’s revealing to his agent that he’s written a new book in two days—with AI, of course. It’s about the crime and punishment of McNeal himself (inspired by the Dostoevsky novel, of course). The problem, as he explains in a hallucinatory stupor, is that AI won’t let him confess all his crimes and receive the “absolution and annihilation” he so desperately craves—namely suicide. “AI won’t let me. Keeps making the story resolvable. Adding some scene with his son forgiving him . . . But it won’t let me. It won’t let me kill him [meaning himself] . . .”
Why? Because, as McNeal explains, “AI knows how much we hate dying, how much we lie to ourselves about it, and it’s all too happy to help us forget the mortal truth.”
Crucial to the telling of this dramatic, traumatic story of self-destruction are scenic interludes, where the walls framing the stage of the towering Vivian Beaumont come alive with AI (set by Michael Yeargen and Jake Barton, with amazing projections by Jake Barton). We watch AI at work, as when, for example, McNeal commands AI to take the material of the greatest works ever written (King Lear, Oedipus Rex, Hedda Gabler, Madame Bovary, etc.) and rework them “in the style of Jacob McNeal.” At one point, McNeal outlines the play McNeal itself while it is still in progress, asking AI how it might end tragically! It’s one of the cleverest metatheatrical tricks I’ve ever seen. The effect is dynamite.
Under Bartlett Sher’s brilliant, assured direction, the cast shines. It includes Ruthie Ann Miles as McNeal’s able physician; Andrea Martin as McNeal’s crusty agent; Saisha Talwar as her naïve assistant; Rafi Gavron as Harlan, the tortured son; Natasha as the New York Times’ no-nonsense interviewer; and Melora Hardin as Francine, McNeal’s wounded lover.
As for the great Robert Downey, Jr., he’s everything we anticipated, and more—a fascinating, tragic, anti-hero for our times, one who utterly mesmerizes us. His performance is larger-than-life, of Richard III proportions. Like the New York Times interviewer, you want to hate him for the awful things he’s done, but at the same time you can’t help but be attracted to his complex personality. Either way, you’re totally captivated.
In the end, McNeal—or should I say Ayad Akhtar—plays a great trick on us.
I daren’t reveal it: it’s yours to discover. Suffice it to say, McNeal is a tremendous piece of writing about writing and the tsunami of torments that the writer faces in the process: juggling ambition with paying the price for it; craving success and at the same time feeling fraudulent and unworthy; loving writing and at the same time knowing it will kill you. It’s a new-age treatment of an age-old problem that, as Akhtar observes, all writers share.
The play also addresses a basic question that haunts McNeal throughout the play: is the fundamental purpose of art to tell the truth or to hide it and, instead, as he says, give pleasure? And whatever the purpose of art is, do you have the talent and the originality to create it?
Ultimately, Akhtar is raising questions about art and morality. How can the writer honor the authors of the past without stealing from them? How can the writer write about what he/she observes and experiences without hurting others?
These are profound questions, and Akhtar should be commended for having the courage to raise them with such brilliant artistry and, at the same time, expose himself as a writer in the process. Others, like Tom Stoppard and Luigi Pirandello before him, have used metatheatre to make provocative observations about writing and theater. But rest assured, Ayad Aktar’s work is original.
As for the place of this commanding new play in Akhtar’s prodigious oeuvre (he’s a playwright and novelist too), I’m reminded of my favorite moment in Disgraced (2012), his earlier play about another ambitious man in torment, where the protagonist ends up staring at himself in the portrait painted by the wife who left him . . . just as McNeal stares at himself in his writing. As a great admirer of Ayad Akhtar and his work, my only prayer is that this new play McNeal is not autobiographical.
Oh, by the way, one more thing: about that clever limerick quoted above, it was mentioned in the play that AI is very good at limericks. So, the question is: did AI write the one quoted above or did Ayad Akhtar?!
McNeal. Through November 24 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater (150 West 65th Street at Ninth Avenue). www.lct.org
Photos: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
