MCNEAL

A play gets lost in its own maze.

Jacob McNeal (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a famous novelist on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize. McNeal is also slowly and grandly killing himself with expensive liquor. We first see him at the office of his physician (Ruthie Ann Miles) who attempts to pull him back from the abyss he is flirting with falling or jumping into (in case we miss the point the production’s set supplies us with a literal abyss). Later, at his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Oslo, McNeal champions himself as a humanist opposed to Artificial Intelligence which he believes means the end of writing and writers, at least human ones. AI, says McNeal, can never be a great artist because it lacks the bodily understanding of mortality.

The speech occurs perhaps a half an hour into Ayad Akhtar’s intermission-less play which clocks in at a little over ninety minutes. If the audience thinks they now have the central conflict of the play they will be wrong. And it is to Akhtar’s credit that his play never settles for the clear conflict of man vs. machine. What Akhtar is after is trickier. His play is pursuing paradoxes. Jacob McNeal we learn is a patchwork of identities; an Irish father and a Jewish mother; Texas and Connecticut; blarney and chutzpah. He is both a liar and truth teller and Akhtar seems to be saying that in his patchwork of identities and influences McNeal is closer to AI than he realizes.

The guardrails get removed from the storytelling and in six or seven scenes the play veers from comedy to melodrama to techno-gothic horror. Some of the scenes have a satisfying snap to them like McNeal’s confrontation with his haunted, vengeful son played by the talented Rafi Gavron. Yet the play also suffers from resisting a single theme or conflict choosing instead to follow without comment its conundrum of a protagonist. It keeps leading us into blind alleys.

As McNeal, Robert Downey, Jr. seems at first like a good choice to play the trickster hero. He still has an appealing boyishness but he also has the elegant stature of an older man used to fame and comfortable with it. Downey also has a natural and attractive stage presence. But as the play progresses it becomes clear that Downey has been given a character that has been intentionally written as an enigma. A role like that requires an actor with a remarkable skill set to fill in the blanks while also honoring the playwright’s ambiguities. Peter Sellers as Claire Quilty in “Lolita” or Mark Rylance as the mad tech baron in “Don’t Look Up” come to mind.

The wonderful Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles are largely superfluous here in characters who are barely two dimensional. Although Brittany Bellizeare as the New York Times reporter who interviews McNeal gets her small allowance of paradoxes to play with and she gives a satisfying performance.

Bartlett Sher and his production team stage the material with customary style and fluidity which nevertheless feels emotionally and thematically distanced. There are some eye catching projections by Jake Barton and digital effects by ABGO. But like its main character, the production never seems to settle on what it really wants or what its main purpose might be.