As artificial intelligence increasingly hones its simulation skills to razor sharpness, it could prove challenging to separate data and neural networks from flesh and blood. Naturally, that’s a threat that is twisting the knickers of more than a few artists these days.
Not so for the booze-addled scribe at the core of McNeal, acclaimed playwright Ayad Akhtar’s 2024 work that compelled Robert Downey Jr. to star in its Broadway debut. It is now primed for a riveting run at Cannon Street Arts Center, via PURE Theatre’s well-paced new production that is its U.S. regional premiere.
Showing through Feb. 7, it is directed by co-founder and artistic director Sharon Graci in a production featuring core ensemble members as well as some standout newcomers to the company.
OK, hold it right here.
And now back up to this review’s preamble. Can you say with certainty that this critic penned the words above? Maybe it was farmed out to A.I., with a command to produce a paragraph or two “in the style of Maura Hogan.”
As McNeal ominously demonstrates, such a scouring of past writings could cull this critic’s syntax and cadences, and might even be able to sufficiently glean her artistic leanings to voice a convincingly authentic thumbs up or down.
All right, now let’s circle back to the play. Jacob McNeal is a writer with a grim health prognosis and a Nobel Prize in his hot writerly hands. (And, yes, while this play predates some similarly-focused current events, those two factors do deliver added chill).
In the throes of his heady, prize-swelled 15 minutes, McNeal feels the level pressure of his agent, who is keen to make hay, pressing him for his next work. With that Damocles’ sword over his head and a wavering pen in his hand, he opts for artificial intelligence over the muses, which amiably spits out discomfitingly plausible prose.
The rest, as it would happen, is not history — but herstory. Come to find out this is not the first time McNeal has outsourced his inspiration. To avoid spoilers, let’s leave it at that, and focus instead on PURE’s production.
Naturally, all hinges on the central character. PURE newcomer and seasoned actor David Whalen nails this hot mess of hubris, clutching his pickled liver and feverishing clawing for the brass ring while training one eye on whatever fresh female meat crosses his sightline. He goes so far as to sing praises of Harvey Weinstein, drunkenly absolving the #MeToo poster monster during an interview.
Aside from his anguished son Harlan, credibly portrayed by Andrew Puckett, the remaining cast members are women. The guardrails attempted by his quick-witted physician (the nimble Sam Smith) and longtime editor (the well-matched Joy Vandervort-Cobb) can’t keep the author in check.
On scenic designer Jay Olvera’s economic set, these characters and others spin onstage and off, wheeling in requisite set pieces while images on a large screen complete each scene, from patient room to publishing agent office to a cavalcade of words, words, words, in a whirring, shifting blur of human data rip for the author’s picking.
Throughout, both A.I. and the opposite sex have inappropriate agency in the creation of McNeal, the man and the literary myth, with the former engaging more willingly than the latter.
The impulse to appropriate when talent or time fall short may have new temptations with new tools, but ask most women. Such intellectual entitlement is as old as original sin.
And as McNeal himself glibly references past lions like Saul Bellow and fiends like Weinstein, he also circles the artist’s aim of getting to the truth of the matter. In his own moral Upside Down, he does so by whatever means possible, snatching the stories of loved ones and running vague notions through software to fabricate art.
So was this review written wholly by human hand? If we leave it to current sketchy guardrails, neither A.I. nor its closet abusers may likely never tell. But this review will cop: This riveting, cautionary work, in PURE’s sharply executed production, gets a flesh-and-blood thumbs up, while the giving is good.
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