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This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.
He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.
“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar said. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there.”
Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot’s lines. But his attempt to mimic A.I.-generated text — an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny effect: Downey’s delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.
“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the whole play,” Downey said, sitting on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage, where he, Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, gathered recently to talk about “McNeal.” “The only thing that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the final speech.”
“It was given an opportunity to enhance it,” Downey added, “and there is a tiny little wabi-sabi piece of it in there.”
“McNeal,” a Lincoln Center Theater production running through Nov. 24, is meant to be a bewildering, unsettling experience, and some critics have concluded it over delivers on that promise. The play, set in the near future, centers on an entitled, self-absorbed, hard-drinking novelist named Jacob McNeal, who, having reached the apex of his career, proceeds to unravel.
Based partly on larger-than-life literary giants like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, McNeal seems bent on self-immolation. He passes his dead wife’s manuscript off as his own. He mixes staggering amounts of alcohol with prescription drugs, triggering hallucinations. He gives a disastrous and shockingly candid interview to a New York Times Magazine reporter and suggests she might be “a diversity hire.”
In his ultimate act of creative defiance, McNeal turns to a chatbot to produce an autobiographical novel by feeding the program his own books and other material by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Kafka, Ibsen and Flaubert. “Watching those pages come out of the printer was like seeing the last chunk of Antarctic ice fall into the ocean,” McNeal tells his literary agent. “There’s no turning back.”
Akhtar, a novelist and playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Disgraced,” said the idea for “McNeal” came to him early last year after he had been toying around with large language models.
“When I saw the story technology for the first time, I was deeply alarmed,” he said.
But the more he experimented with chatbots, the more he saw them as collaborators or creative tools, and often somewhat clumsy ones.
“I’ve gone from feeling like it was an apocalypse in the making, to feeling like it’s an inevitability where our participation as creative writers is going to be central,” he said. “I don’t think its going to replace us, but I think it’s going to make us better, and it’s going to make us worse.”
A.I.’s incursion into the book world is not yet as total as the picture Akhtar paints in “McNeal.” But the publishing industry is already facing disruption. Books generated by A.I. are flooding the internet, clogging up an already crowded online marketplace, and advanced chatbots can spit out prose in the voice and style of popular writers. Last year, a group of prominent authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, arguing that using their books to train Chat GPT’s chatbot without licensing the rights amounts to copyright infringement. (The New York Times has filed a similar suit against OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues associated with its published work.)
Some writers and publishing professionals who have seen the play say it captures their industry — and the tensions around artificial intelligence — with an almost uncomfortable degree of accuracy.
Jonathan Karp, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said that he was “rapt” while watching “McNeal” on its opening night and that Akhtar “should win an award for verisimilitude.”
He was unnerved, he added, by a scene in which McNeal’s agent asks him to sign off on a new contract clause affirming he has not used A.I., which McNeal refuses to do. “I thought, maybe our contracts division should be paying closer attention to this,” Karp said, only partly joking.
Some authors said “McNeal” resonated with them not only because it reflects their anxieties about A.I., but also because the plot raises broader questions about creativity and whether originality is even possible in our hyper-information-saturated age.
The writer Andrew Solomon, who saw “McNeal” on opening night, said he was riveted and unsettled by the play’s exploration of the morally gray aspects of writing — like the ways writers ruthlessly ransack other people’s lives for material.
“I kept identifying with it very deeply, and it touched on things that scared me,” said Solomon, the author of critically acclaimed books like “Far From the Tree” and “The Noonday Demon.” “It’s meant to disorient and discomfort people.”
The German novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, who read a draft of the play and has seen it twice, said he was stunned by how Akhtar created the illusion that A.I. was writing the play.
“There is this very profound conversation in it about A.I. and what it does to literature,” said Kehlmann, who translated “McNeal” into German for a production that will premiere in Vienna in March. “The big question everybody is worried about is, is A.I. going to write better books than the really good writers?”
For Akhtar, a key challenge in writing “McNeal” was figuring out how a chatbot would write it. To convincingly simulate A.I.-generated text, Akhtar experimented with several programs, including GPT, Gemini and Claude, feeding them scenes and asking the bots to rewrite them in different styles.
He soon discovered the chatbots’ limits. Whenever he tried to get the program to write something that violated its content policy, like descriptions of suicide or incest, it refused — an obstacle that he used as a plot point in the play.
Once he had a draft, Akhtar showed it to his agent, who suggested Downey for the lead. Akhtar doubted they would land Downey, a global star who played Iron Man in multiple Marvel movies and who drew accolades — and later an Academy Award — for his performance in “Oppenheimer.”
Downey was also skeptical about taking on a theatrical role. He had not performed in a play since 1983, when he appeared Off Broadway in “American Passion,” which was poorly received by some critics and closed the same day it opened.
He relented when his wife, the producer Susan Downey, insisted that he read the play, he said.
“She said, ‘I know you said theater is dead, and leave me alone, and I know they call every couple of years and say, can you do this, and you say no, but if nothing else, you just have to read this,’” Downey recalled. After 22 pages, he said, he was in.
Part of the play’s appeal was its provocative and somewhat equivocal stance on A.I., which Akhtar treats not as an existential threat to human creativity, but as a potential prosthetic enhancement to it.
“Doing a play that addresses this, I think that’s how we wrest back something like control — control is the wrong word — but something like comfort,” Downey said. “This is simply an information age phenomenon, which will be reckoned with one way or another.”
At the same time, wrestling with these ideas through theater — a medium that, because it’s built on live human performances, seems more resistant than others to the onslaught of A.I. — felt appropriate, and exciting, said Sher, the play’s director.
“Somehow, performing in a theater with other human beings is the best place to address this incredibly complex issue,” Sher said. “It’s a weird kind of connection between one of the oldest art forms and all the new things.”
Still, some question whether “McNeal” works as a theatrical experience, or is more of a tangled thought experiment.
When it opened in September, “McNeal” was mostly panned by critics who dismissed it as “a high gloss mess,” “nerveless” and “provocative yet cumbersome.” “Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama,” Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times. One of the more positive takes came from a critic who asked ChatGPT to review the play (the chatbot gushed that the play “blends the technological and theatrical in disorienting and thrilling ways.”)
The audience feedback has been more reassuring, Akhtar said. The show has had a sold-out run, and demand remains high.
Though McNeal comes to embrace A.I. wholeheartedly by the final act, after writing the play, Akhtar remains more ambivalent.
Part of him still doesn’t fully trust the technology. Even when he was trying to coax a chatbot to write McNeal’s final speech, Akhtar stopped short of uploading the full text, he said.
“I was leery of putting the whole play into the large language model,” he said. “Maybe I was scared that it would understand it better than I wanted it to.”
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