AI meets art in McNeal: Akhtar's play challenges limits of creativity

In McNeal, Ayad Akhtar explores the way AI is disrupting the literary world and raising questions about creativity

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 AI-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. 

McNeal, 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, centres 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. 

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 it’s going to replace us, but I think it’s going to make us better, and it’s going to make us worse.” 

AI’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 AI 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 AI, 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 AI, but also because the plot raises broader questions about creativity and whether originality is even possible in our hyper-information-saturated age.

For Akhtar, a key challenge in writing McNeal was figuring out how a chatbot would write it. To convincingly simulate AI-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 sceptical 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. After 22 pages, he said, he was in. 

Part of the play’s appeal was its provocative and somewhat equivocal stance on AI, 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.” 

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.” 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 AI 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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