Robert Downey Jr. Almost Survives His Debut

Maybe you’ve had this experience. You follow a reporter’s work in a magazine or newspaper and are impressed by his or her articles. Then this writer covers a subject that you know something about, and he or she gets it completely wrong.

That’s how I felt watching Ayad Akhtar’s new play “McNeal,” which had its world premiere Monday at LCT’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. I much admire the playwright’s previous plays “The Invisible Hand” and “Disgraced,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. The one play is about options and derivatives on Wall Street, the other about two straight couples who get into a fight over Islamophobia (Full disclosure: I know next to nothing about finance and heterosexuality).

“McNeal” is another story. Akhtar’s new play is about the world of book and magazine publishing, and frankly, I consider myself something of an expert on the subject. Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut as the title character Jacob McNeal, who has just won the Nobel Prize in literature. His acceptance speech in Stockholm focuses on the challenges of AI and, as we soon learn, McNeal knows the subject first-hand, having dabbled in using the bot to write one or more of his books. Much more disturbing to me is that Akhtar seems to believe, if “McNeal” is any proof, that using AI to write a novel is akin to writers using lived experiences to write a novel.

McNeal’s son (Rafi Gavron) is pissed off at Dad because when the kid was 10 years old he told his father an innocuous story — and the anecdote ended up in one of his novels!

Meanwhile, McNeal’s erstwhile girlfriend (Melora Hardin) is pissed off at him because she got a condiment stain on her blouse one day over lunch — and the anecdote ended up in one of McNeal’s novels!

These two scenes can be dismissed as featuring cranky characters, if not for the fact that Akhtar definitely takes the side of the whiny son and the equally petulant girlfriend. To be fair, the son’s ire hinges on a much bigger dispute with his father, one that we’re only told about. It took place years ago, and is far more dramatic than anything that transpires on stage in “McNeal,” which is almost devoid of drama.

For anyone who knows something about publishing, two other scenes are downright risible. They feature McNeal’s agent (Andrea Martin) and a reporter (Brittany Bellizeare) who’s doing a profile on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist for the New York Times Magazine. First off, the Times needs to fire this reporter ASAP. A worse interview of a subject I have never encountered, and I’ve sat through hundreds of round-table interviews at movie press junkets — and there is nothing lower in the world of journalism than round-table interviews at movie press junkets… until I saw Bellizeare’s character not do her job. This reporter tells us more about herself than she gets McNeal to reveal about himself. She’s so incompetent that she reveals to him her every thought during the interview and what the angle/slant of her profile will be.

Almost as awesomely inaccurate is Martin’s agent. She not only helps McNeal with notes from his copy editor, she has a key to his apartment to make occasional check-up calls because she likes his espresso machine. I can hardly think of a more bogus set-up in any play, movie or TV show in recent memory.

Bartlett Sher directs and he pushes each of these supporting players to overact to the extreme, while Downey Jr. delivers an oddly staccato performance. It’s as if he’s trying to distance himself from the character with his tick-filled delivery of the lines. However, as this 90-minute play progresses with its over-the-top performances from the supporting actors, Downey Jr. begins to emerge as the calm eye of the angry storm raging around his character. He wins our sympathy by default.

“McNeal” is now playing through Nov. 24.