Artificial Theatrics

Ayad Akhtar's play about AI is missing a human touch.

- JACKSON MCHENRY

HERE'S AN AI PROMPT: Write me a vehicle for a movie star intent on making a debut on Broadway. Let's say he's a veteran of superhero flicks, so we want a character akin to his persona and a subject that comes with some contemporary relevance; maybe, because he played a tech genius onscreen, we have him wrestle with the vanguard of technology onstage. He's also acclaimed as a dramatic actor, so let's throw in a few hefty themes: addiction, suicide, adultery, trauma, and, for that genuine "flawed great man" zing, a pinch of misogyny.

If you plugged that prompt into a large language model like ChatGPT, it might spit out something a little like McNeal, but you could also spare the climate a few glugs of processing power and simply imagine the thing yourself. The end product, written by Ayad Akhtar and directed by Lincoln Center Theater's Bartlett Sher, doesn't stray far from what is algorithmically plausible based on past inputs. Robert Downey Jr., on shore leave between being Iron Man and winning an Oscar for Oppenheimer before returning to the CGI fold to play Doctor Doom, is in New York to star as an acclaimed writer named Jacob McNeal, or, rather, to stand tweedily in the center of the vast Vivian Beaumont stage, just below a projection of a giant iPhone screen (the design is by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton, and Barton did the projections). McNeal is fretting about getting a call in the midst of a liver checkup, paying little attention to his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles, underutilized here but always nice to see) as she tells him to stop drinking. The iPhone shows that the date is early October, a time of year he dreads because he keeps not winning a Nobel Prize.