NEW YORK – This has been the year of Robert Downey Jr.
After winning an Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer in March, the mega-star earned an Emmy nomination for HBO’s The Sympathizer and racked up an eye-popping paycheck for two more Marvel movies. His showbiz ubiquity continues with “McNeil,” a provocative but awkward new Broadway play that opened Monday at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Shame”), the drama follows a man named Jacob McNeil (Downey) who has just been diagnosed with end-stage liver failure when he receives a call to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Draw a fierce person. This prestigious award coincidentally coincides with the impending release of his next book, Evie, which Jacob cautiously agreed to promote in his New York Times Magazine profile. I am doing it. But accusations that he plagiarized the entire novel threaten to implode the publication, as do Jacob’s public misdeeds.
Often the play feels like a 90-minute rant on Bill Maher. He shakes his fist on Instagram and in slang text messages, mocking kids for not reading anymore. He gains attention for his racist jokes about a young assistant of South Asian descent (Saisha Talwar), then tries to provoke a bright black journalist (Brittany Belizere), calling her a “diversity hire” and drinking alcohol. Lifting up Harvey Weinstein during a soaked interview. . (“Guys like him got what they wanted,” Jacob suggests with a smile.)
If you’re not making a fuss about the malleability of truth, you’re lamenting the good old days when politicians like Ronald Reagan “at least tried to say something.” And when his estranged son (Raffi Gavron) and ex-girlfriend (Melora Hardin) confront him about plundering their most painful personal memories for a novel, he ruthlessly reveals their I shot down my dissatisfaction. (“Fuck the genocide,” he declares. “I’m doing God’s work.”)
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The problem isn’t that Jacob is inherently unlikable. Many of pop culture’s best recent creations, like Lydia Tarr in Tarr and the Roy family in HBO’s Succession, are morally bankrupt and viciously uncompromising. But unlike those characters, we rarely get a glimpse of his self-loathing or heartache. Rather, he’s a tiring person to spend a lot of time with, and Downey’s natural charisma is limited in offsetting Jacob’s insufferable nature.
“McNeil” will be Downey’s first Broadway appearance after his short-lived 1983 off-Broadway musical “American Passion.” It is to the actor’s credit that while most celebrities of his stature would choose a proven work for their debut, he chose a new work that aims to both resonate and push buttons.
Artificial intelligence and the concept of whether we should fear it or embrace it are loosely woven throughout the story. Many of the play’s interstitial scenes take place in the ‘clouds’, vividly brought to life by Jake Burton’s sophisticated projections and set design with Michael Yeargan. A giant iPhone screen and an eerie AI portrait of Downey tower over the proceedings at various points in the show.
Jacob criticized chatbots from the outset, slamming them for telling us only what we want to hear and numbing us to the cruel facts of life like illness and death. To test both AI and his own humanity, he ultimately decided to use ChatGPT to “write” a new book, but the thorny questions it posed were largely unconsidered. .
“McNeil” commits the cardinal sin of wasting Broadway’s treasure. Andrea Martin and Lucy Ann Miles appear briefly as Jacob’s overzealous agent and concerned doctor, respectively. Even more ironically, this is exactly the type of play that Downey’s self-righteous title character would lament, all empty provocation and not an ounce of soul.
“McNeil” will run at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (150 W. 65th Street) in New York until November 24.