"McNeal" at Lincoln Center with RDJ

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 03 October 2024 13:53

Written by Jack Angstreich

Robert Downey Jr. & Brittany Bellizeare in "McNeal". Photo by Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman

At Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, on the evening of Saturday, September 30th, I had the privilege of attending a preview performance of McNeal, the latest play—about an American novelist that wins the Nobel Prize for Literature—by the outstanding playwright, Ayad Akhtar, starring Robert Downey Jr. and directed by Bartlett Sher.

Akhtar first drew my attention with his fine, second produced play, Lincoln Center Theater’s The Who & The What which premiered in 2014 and is informed by the author’s Muslim background. This featured too in the even more remarkable and provocative Disgraced, which premiered at LCT in 2012 and was restaged on Broadway in 2015. Another LCT production, Junk from 2017 was just as topical and even more dazzling. McNeal, which addresses sexual politics, as did Disgraced, seems to be a new departure for the writer in its narrative ambiguity, with dream, hallucination and fantasy interlaced with contemporary reality.

Akhtar’s drama is effectively orchestrated by Sher, who first became prominent in New York with LCT’s celebrated—if to my mind problematic—2008 production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which had a stellar cast that included Paulo Szot, Kelli O’Hara and Matthew Morrison—he did not succeed in overcoming the flaws in that musical’s book even as it was a vivid theatrical experience for its incredible singers. Sher’s commercial and critical success led to an invitation by Peter Gelb to direct for the Metropolitan Opera although I was ambivalent about his stagings of The Barber of Seville, Tales of Hoffmann, and Le Comte Ory, the pleasures of all of which nonetheless transcended failures of conception. I was more impressed by his realization of Nico Muhly’s Two Boys in 2013 and was enthusiastic about LCT’s marvelous production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I in 2015 starring O’Hara and Ken Watanabe. Also delightful—apart from an awkward if easily overlooked ending—was the 2018 revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady with Harry Hadden-Paton and Laura Benanti.

Downey, still exceptionally handsome as he approaches sixty, has been one of the most prominent stars in Hollywood since the success of the Iron Man films. My appreciation of him began with Robert Altman’s Short Cuts from 1993. He was also memorable in James Toback’s underrated Two Girls and a Guy from 1997–he had previously worked with the director in The Pick-up Artist—and appeared in such distinguished movies as Altman’s The Gingerbread Man  from 1998 and Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys from 2000. Especially compelling was his turn in David Fincher’s amazing Zodiac from 2007. His work in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer from last year seems to me his crowning achievement as an actor but his ultimately moving performance in McNeal is nonetheless something of a tour de force—his likability and charisma create a rewarding dialectical tension with the apparent moral turpitude of his character. He is ably supported by a uniformly fine secondary cast including Andrea Martin—who was notable in James Lapine’s persuasive adaptation of Moss Hart’s Act One at LCT in 2014–along with relative unknowns Brittany Bellizeare, Rafi Gavron, Melora Hardin, Ruthie Ann Miles and Saisha Talwar. (Bellizeare is particularly effective in one of the most interesting roles in the play and her long scene with Downey is probably its strongest.) Among the technical credits, the relatively minimal sets by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton and the lighting by Donald Holder are especially striking, while Barton’s video projections are simply superb.

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