MCNEAL

About the show

Jacob McNeal is the epitome of the proverbial old white man and virtually a prototype of a masculinity that is increasingly branded as toxic today: a famous US writer in his late 60s, a charismatic figure with a drinking problem and somewhat uncouth manners, an honest soul, prominent, successful, and larger than life. Over the course of his life, he has worked hard to earn his education, his linguistic power, and his place in his country's literary history, exploiting and ruining himself, his relationships, and his health without regard for the consequences. At the height of his fame (Nobel Prize for Literature) and at the end of his life (cirrhosis of the liver), his past catches up with him and he is overtaken by a technology that threatens him as an author: artificial intelligence. In terms of both content and form, the play varies one of the great poetological problems: the fact that literature is rarely entirely original and that every author is always first and foremost a reader. As such, he or she consciously or unconsciously works through other works in their own writing, just like AI, which must also be fed texts and data in order to write something. Ayad Akhtar, the author of this play, spent two years intensively training an AI with investigative curiosity until it was able to write this play—in his style, in his meaning. In the process, he encountered problems, including the fact that AI does not develop a literarily interesting relationship with death, which is one of the burning issues of humanity. How will AI change our lives and thinking, our society and our art? Can theater, as one of the last places of analog community, hold its own against the digital isolation that is already rapidly spreading and leading to a whole new form of loneliness and susceptibility to influence? And what will AI be in the context of art in the future: a toy, an assistant, or a serious competitor?