Ayad Akhtar Needs No Help
In which I show some love over at the Brown History newsletter
Ayad Akhtar Needs No Help
In Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar’s new play “McNeal,” a famous novelist grapples with AI and life’s problems.
“McNeal,” Ayad Akhtar’s play that just opened at Lincoln Center, stars Robert Downey Jr. in the role of a novelist named Jacob McNeal.
The set is bathed in the soft blue glow of an iPhone screen. In fact, when the play starts in the dark, the backdrop is a phone screen on which with the tapping sounds of an iPhone keyboard we see the moving cursor form the following question: “Who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year?”
The GPT responds: “The selection process for the Nobel is highly secretive…. As an AI language model, I cannot accurately predict the recipient of the Nobel Prize or any other future event. I’m sorry.”
The person typing these words is, of course, the play’s protagonist himself. A prominent novelist in his sixties, Jacob McNeal. He is about to arrive at his doctor’s where he is being treated for Stage 3 liver disease. He has gone back to drinking because the month of October, when the Nobel is announced, is a tough month for him. He’s in serious trouble, the doctor says; the AI model called Suarez that tracks liver function has McNeal ending with liver failure within three months.
I must pause here and note a couple of things. I am a novelist who was watching on stage a novelist displaying, among other things, anxiety, self-destructive behavior, and a feeling that was, or could be mistaken for, hubris. Second, particularly as a novelist, I was conscious of the way in which in a play, or in Akhtar’s plays anyway, the stage is immediately set alight with action. I envy this. I often think of the opening page or two of Akhtar’s play “Disgraced,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which from the moment it begins captures our attention with its portrayal of conflict. A South Asian man in an Italian suit jacket and underneath a crisp, collared shirt, and wearing only his boxers is being sketched from the waist up by his white American artist-wife. Their conversation is about Velazquez’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja,” and whether to call the latter his “assistant” or his “slave.” And the conversation is also about an encounter that had taken place the previous night at a restaurant, where the waiter was racist toward the South Asian man. We have been plunged, within the first couple of minutes, in a cauldron where you can instantly feel the heat of long-simmering tension. A novel would have taken probably fifty pages.
I had barely recovered from the boldness of McNeal’s query about the Nobel — and, like the rest of the audience, laughed at the questions that followed “What is the likelihood that Jacob McNeal will win the Nobel this year…” to which the GPT reasonably responds: “While I can’t make accurate predictions, I can offer speculation on candidates who could be considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Haruki Murakami. Margaret Atwood. Anne Carson. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I hope this was helpful.” — when the fact of his addiction and liver disease was brought up in the next breath. A cutting to the chase with death itself, the high stakes where the opening carries the blast of the ending, only so that the story can do more serious work than simply answering the question of how it will end.
This is not a review. Instead, I want to record the ways in which I see Akhtar responding to art and politics across several of his works. The admiration I’m expressing here — “setting fire to the page” — has long been an obsession of mine: you can hear me talking to Ayad Akhtar in this Yaddo podcast about writers who want something to happen in their books and those others who only want to capture a mood.
So, what is it that happens in “McNeal”? The writer tells his doctor in that opening scene, “This thing has become the bane of my existence, Doc…” He is holding up his phone.
In the very near future in which the play is set, the smartphone as an instrument of torment or torture. Not simply because it demands attention or leads to greater anxiety for McNeal but because it is a tool for accessing AI. In a speech, McNeal rails against the practice. “Digital machines are not only remaking our stories. They are remaking us.” Three books on the current New York Times Bestseller list, he says, were avowedly written using artificial intelligence. This is a problem because machines can predict what we want to hear. McNeal’s own instincts, as a writer, are to not to play along with the lies we tell ourselves or to each other but to confront them. He is a truth-teller. “Literature, distinguished guests, doesn’t play along.”
This is a characteristic Akhtar turn and perhaps it is the one I envy even more than his ability to ignite conflict zero-to-sixty-in-sixty-seconds. McNeal voices what is perhaps present in the minds of some in the audience when he says “Do not even go there…” And then says things which he rounds off by once again ventriloquizing his readers “Did he really just go there?”
In “Disgraced,” Akhtar had done this famously when he had his South Asian protagonist, a Muslim lawyer named Amir, express an admiration for the hijackers who flew into the Twin Towers on September 11: “… And so, even if you’re one of those lapsed Muslims sipping your after-dinner scotch alongside your beautiful white American wife — and watching the news and seeing folks in the Middle East dying for values you were taught were purer — and stricter — and truer … you can’t help but feel just a little bit of pride.” To his shocked dinner guests, he explains, “It’s tribal… It is in the bones.” And, going further, Amir turns to the guest who is Jewish and says, “I’m sure it’s not all that different than how you feel about Israel sometimes…”
The dinner I’m describing above descends into something even more disturbing and violent. It is all brilliantly provocative. I have taught the play in my postcolonial literature classes: opinion is always divided but the real thing is that no one is left disengaged or bored. Also, if you want to have debate in class and the sharing of opposed views, “Disgraced” is a good play to read or watch. I once walked into a bar with a friend in downtown Manhattan after watching another of Akhtar’s plays, “Invisible Hand,” and ran into the actor Aasif Mandvi. Two years earlier, Mandvi, of course, had played the lead in “Disgraced” when it had premiered at Lincoln Center. With a gesture that suggested he was reaching for my windpipe, Mandvi said that he admired Akhtar for the direct way in which he addresses the issues at hand. He called Akhtar a “great American playwright.”
My friend said to Mandvi that Akhtar’s plays showed Muslims fulfilling all the stereotypes about them: they were portrayed as religious, violent, misogynist. Mandvi disagreed. He thought that Amir in “Disgraced” spoke his truth — and got lynched for it. I pointed out that love of martyrdom was another Muslim stereotype. But Mandvi was undaunted. He said, with a comedian’s sense of irony, “As Muslims, we aren’t allowed even to have our stereotypes.”
In his new play, Akhtar has his protagonist (who could arguably be described with the cliché “privileged white male”) express a degree of envy for Harvey Weinstein before the scandal broke. It is not a secret confession: McNeal admits this, in a spirit of honesty, to the reporter from the New York Times who is writing his profile. He insults her earlier by asking the reporter, who is Black, if she was a diversity hire. The reporter doesn’t balk. We are given to understand that the profile she ends up writing isn’t entirely flattering. Nevertheless, it contains this singular sentiment about the subject: “If you thought Jacob McNeal wasn’t relevant, think again. When you’re ruthless with the truth, you are always relevant.”
When I heard those lines uttered on stage, I thought they might well apply to Akhtar himself. I was also thinking of a few lines from Akhtar’s last novel, “Homeland Elegies.” Late in the novel, the narrator, who is a playwright named Ayad Akhtar, describes the contemporary cultural scene: “Art, like everything else, was drowning in the tidal wash of ubiquitous and ascendant anger. Authenticity was measured now in decibels. Every utterance, every expressive gesture, was read as a pledge of allegiance to some discernible creed.” Every work of art, and each artist, is supposed to take a side. Akhtar excels at ratcheting up the tension by not denying any side a voice. This exercise can be freeing, aesthetically and politically, because it opens up space for discussion — at least the kind of discussion that my friend and Mandvi were having in the bar.
No one in Akhtar’s writing is plainly virtuous or purely villainous. It is a democratic vision, morally speaking. Everyone is complicated. In “McNeal,” this is also true of AI.
When the play begins, we have the writer railing against AI; on the other hand, we later discover that the writer is himself using GPT to write his books. Differences blur. It is not only AI that plagiarizes, it is McNeal himself who is pillaging other works and other lives. The feted writer Jacob McNeal, Akhtar wants to tell us, is a rather flawed human being. The lesson is less about AI and more about people. We understand that McNeal isn’t exactly to be liked. (As the writer tells his doctor early in the play: “The good thing about literature — it’s not about liking the people in it. That’s the movies. TV. That’s these new computer generated stories flooding the one like odorless sewage….”)
One small problem with executing this idea fully is that because McNeal is played by Robert Downey Jr., who has a charm linked to a certain kind of vulnerability that comes from honesty, you (or I) can’t quite come to fully dislike McNeal. In fact, I wish Akhtar hadn’t worked so hard to make McNeal so utterly human. At the same time, one cannot but applaud Akhtar’s drive to show us an artist who resists not just mediation but also medication. At one point, when McNeal expresses a sexual thought, his agent, played by the spirited actor Andrea Martin, asks whether McNeal is taking his meds. Which meds, asks McNeal. Lexapro, the agent replies. And McNeal says, memorably, “I went off that three years ago. I hated how it made me feel. The lows weren’t as low, sure — but it killed the highs. I realized something while taking it: Every idiotic social expectation started to make sense to me. I should go to the book parties. I should write reviews for The Times. I should be dating. I should, I should, I should. Effervescent flatness. The meds were a delivery device for the mediocre logic of the world.”
I was thrilled to the core when I heard those words. And I understood at once that this was a freedom manifesto — for humans and for artists. Reviews were no doubt going to suggest that this play was about the challenge of AI and about a famous writer taking help from Chat GPT. Our doomed future, etc. But that wasn’t really the writer’s struggle, and he didn’t really need help. McNeal wasn’t ever going to pretend. When the reporter from The Times asks whether he was going to keep drinking bourbon during their interview, McNeal counters, “Unless you want me to play the puff piece charade.”
Ayad Akhtar also needs no help. No puff piece charades. He is here to mock the idea of help, including the help provided by AI. When McNeal uses Chat GPT to write his final work, a work about death called “Swiss Clinic,” he realizes that the app doesn’t allow him to behave with adequate freedom. (I guess one could say it is a free speech issue, something that Akhtar has advocated for in the past.) When McNeal tries to take the story forward to address various crises, the app “keeps making the story resolvable.” When he attempts to plot an act that lets his protagonist kill himself, the app doesn’t understand “story or death or heartbreak.” It keeps telling him “you need help.”
Hello. Can I help you?
No, the play is saying. No, thank you. Not just to AI but to everything that would restrict our freedom.
Credits:
Amitava Kumar is the author of several books of nonfiction and four novels. His latest novel, My Beloved Life, was published earlier this year by Knopf. Kumar’s Substack entries can be found here and his drawings can be seen here.
[Huge thanks to the Brown History newsletter for which this piece was written.]
Loved it.
It's always so engaging to read your reading of another writer.