McNeal, starring Robert Downey, Jr., is currently at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont. The drama by Ayad Akhtar (Disgraced), directed by Bartlett Sher, has sardonic/comedic elements. Akhtar’s work examines the successful writer Jacob McNeal under extreme duress at the pinnacle and nadir of his career and life.

As the play opens in McNeal’s doctor’s office, Doctor Sahra Grewal (Ruthie Ann Miles), reminds McNeal his relapse into drinking is killing him. From this point on, we follow the principal character on his downward journey into the abyss, after he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout, McNeal literally and symbolically dies piece by piece, brain cell by brain cell, deep fake digital projection by deep fake digital projection. Thanks to the technical team, the digital designs and projections pop phenomenally. Indeed, they place us in the bubble unreality of Jacob McNeal’s imagination, where emotional grist rarely resonates.

Ironically, the discipline it takes McNeal to win the Nobel Prize for literature, doesn’t apply when he attempts to control his alcoholism. Indeed, a conundrum of side effects from a drug slated to help him stop drinking himself to death makes his life untenable. Addicted, he continues to drink bringing on side effects which include hallucinations, pain and thoughts of suicide. As McNeal bounces between self-loathing and overweening pride, we follow him deep into the bowels of AI assisted writing. Ironically, this hazard removes him further from himself and serves as the last straw which figuratively breaks his back.

Akhtar/Sher present the glorious image of McNeal as prizewinner giving his speech at Stockholm City Hall using video, then having McNeal step forward in his tuxedo to speak to us, the Nobel audience. After this climax in his life comes the downhill crash. The playwright removes the soul of the prizewinner’s art and exposes the ugliness. Elucidated by the technical team’s sets and projections, McNeal’s mind-bending journey strikes us with wonder, thanks to Michael Yeargan, Jake Barton and AGBO. Finally, Downey Jr.’s keenly woven, provocative interactions with women enlighten us to McNeal’s deep-seated toxic masculinity and admitted feelings of inferiority.

Throughout Akhtar’s interesting work, we experience McNeal’s calm, ironic self-annihilation. Numbly, we watch his digital-symbolic, self-destruction in front of witnesses/characters who don’t understand his destructive journey as they do battle with him. These include his son Harlan (Rafi Gavron), New York Times reporter, Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare), and his former mistress, Francine Blake (Melora Hardin). These are shadows of individuals without definition which McNeal, in a brain fog, uses to pick ax his soul. Will anything be left of him after he finishes?

With sardonic, arrogant aplomb, McNeal rationalizes and accepts himself as a fraud. During each of his interactions, he charmingly employs his antic self-loathing to dismantle himself and drive through to his core truth. Through Robert Downey, Jr.’s fine performance we understand McNeal’s disgust, his masochism and self-betrayal, masked by ego, charm and pride. McNeal may have fooled the world to give him a prestigious prize, but he knows better. He cannot fool himself. And what he seeks he eventually attains by the conclusion.

On top of McNeal’s neurotic struggle to “set things straight,” we learn in horror (the writers in the audience, anyway), about his penchant for writerly duplicity. Like a kleptomaniac (a writer’s klepto), addicted to theft, we learn through his confrontations that McNeal engaged self-destructively in plagiarism to achieve his success.

However, plagiarism increases his feelings of inferiority. And it promotes a twisted cycle of repetition. We learn through Harlan’s and Blake’s attacks that McNeal stole from his son’s friend, his wife’s bad novel, Francine Blake’s life, etc.). With these he creates his successful but basely unoriginal works. All of this occurs not without consequence. For he turns from his successes and belittles his creative talent. Ironically, the plagiarism reaches an apotheosis of fraud when he employs the inferior AI program CHAT GPT. Combined with his self-immolating interactions and the drug’s side effects, his use of the program pushes him over the edge. Jake Barton’s projections fantastically convey this as he vomits up stolen words projected on the stage floor.

Interestingly, we see how he employs CHAT GPT in an earlier sequence. Inputting literary works from Shakespeare, Ibsen, Kafka, Sophocles, Flaubert, etc., he examines concepts to explore. Then employs the program to convert these inputs to the style of Jacob McNeal. Each use of GHAT GPT increases his soul sickness.

Sadly, with the exception of his doctor and his agent Stephie Banc, the always wonderful Andrea Martin, no one knows he’s dying. In a strange self-satisfaction he is comforted that the other characters, especially his son, find him as loathsome as he finds himself. Thus, they can offer little comfort which he wouldn’t accept anyway.

In the last scene, McNeal confides in his audience eloquently after striking layers of his fraudulent self against the sharp criticisms of his son, the reporter and Blake. Only then does he attempt to speak in his true voice. But once more, he applies AI, this last time inspired by Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. How can we trust his narrative? Does anyone reliably, truthfully relate their own story? Robert Downey, Jr. makes a convincing case for our straddling the fence of incredulity, then leaping into the last artifice with him.

Bartlett Sher’s integration of the digital imagery and projections to illuminate McNeal’s imagination and world is spot-on. Likewise, the ensemble, integral players in McNeal’s journey through self-torment, charges the play’s energy. Robert Downey Jr.’s sustained performance gives one pause and intrigues as Akhtar’s confounding character, McNeal.

Though the playwright uses AI as an object lesson and/or bête noire, more importantly, he reveals the kinds of writers who might employ it and why. Lastly, the tragedy becomes that McNeal separated himself from himself in alienation. AI also becomes a symbol or instrument of death, the death of creativity and originality, despite McNeal’s clever justifications for using it.

McNeal runs one hour forty minutes with no intermission at the Vivian Beaumont. It’s a pleasure to see Robert Downey Jr.’s superb performance. https://www.lct.org/shows/mcneal/