“Misshapen identites,” by Kyle Smith (original) (raw)

Mediocrity has a new name on Broadway and it’s McNeal (at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center through November 24), which marks the Main Stem debut of Robert Downey Jr., who in several recent years has been listed as the best-paid movie star on Earth. I liked Downey’s screen work both before and after his notorious late-Nineties drug-fueled meltdown, and though he apparently isn’t done with interplanetary super-powered conflict (his next major screen role is someone called Doctor Doom), an artist of his gifts has got to be more than a little interested in the purity of the stage.

Yet Downey seems to be addicted to spectacle: the high-tech production of this new play is so dazzling (or, if you like, meretricious) that it feels like an extended audition for a film adaptation. Ayad Akhtar—a Pakistani American who won the Pulitzer for his first produced play, a drama about the much-discussed but seldom observed mind-plague called Islamophobia entitled Disgraced (2012), and later took on the Michael Milken era with a splashy Lincoln Center play about nefarious financiers called Junk(2017)—this time has retreated into the well-trod territory of politically incorrect middle-aged novelists. Jacob McNeal is yet another of Downey’s many witty, likable rogues and therefore not much of an exercise for him. The play is strenuously up-to-the-minute (it’s set in the “very near future”) with its discussions of the #MeToo movement, plagiarism (now making more appearances than ever in the headlines), and especially artificial-intelligence chatbots, and