Foreword By Jeremy Strong
In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world. Soon after, a software developer asked it to provide instructions for removing a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR, and to write these instructions in the style of the King James Bible. ChatGPT complied: “And the Lord said, ‘Verily I say unto thee, seek not to put thy peanut butter sandwiches in thy VCR, for it is not a suitable place for such things.’”
Many of us read these results with wonder and amazement and then went about our business. Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and playwright, started thinking about a new play.
The extraordinary work that resulted from his labors, McNeal, which just completed its inaugural run in a Broadway production at Lincoln Center Theater, is a juggernaut—an intellectual, conceptual, and dramatic juggernaut. It asks some of the most essential and urgent questions of our time, and it does so in a way that brilliantly fits form to function—a crystal-lattice form for its groundbreaking (cloudbreaking?) function. The phrase “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” comes to mind, except in this case, you could describe McNeal as “a literary lion in the mold of Philip Roth plus Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ wrapped in the neural networks of a large language model inside a prism produced by nonhuman artificial intelligence.”
Akhtar took on no less a subject than the oncoming bullet train of AI, a creation that threatens to overtake and transform the intellectual foundations of our lives and redefine what it means to be human.
From the November 2024 issue: Ayad Akhtar, Robert Downey Jr., and Bartlett Sher discuss McNeal with Jeffrey Goldberg
As the play opens, we meet a writer—Jacob McNeal—at the pinnacle of his powers, who begins to experiment, Prometheus-like, with the fire of AI. He uploads numerous classical and contemporary writers—Sophocles, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Ibsen—as well as portions of his late wife’s journals and the Bible, and prompts the chatbot to rework these texts in the style of … Jacob McNeal.
From the moment I watched Robert Downey Jr. type in these prompts, I was both riveted and riven. Riveted to see what would happen when human creativity meets AI, and riven because I am one of those people who is torn by what the technology ethicist Tristan Harris called “human downgrading” and who is rooting for the triumph of the irreducibly human.
What Akhtar has essentially done is “upload” texts into his mind and imagination, much like the upload functions of an LLM. This is, he reminds us in the play, exactly what Shakespeare did—blending, borrowing, remixing, recombining (identical to the process of an LLM but slower and, I can say with some confidence, more deeply than an LLM). In doing this, he alchemically transformed what he had read and seen. Akhtar has internalized and been influenced by a constellation of sources, including Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations With Goethe, scholarly works on cultural theory and structuralism (Foucault: “Man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”), and Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (having taken Bloom’s course as an undergraduate, I would actually call it The Influence of Anxiety), which posits that there is no such thing as an original piece of writing. External influence, we all eventually learn, is inescapable. As Emerson observed, “All minds quote.”
Akhtar gathered all of this material and wrote a brilliant play, the same way that Jacob McNeal gathers and uploads material into ChatGPT to write his novel. Except—and for me, the difference is crucial—Akhtar employed his creativity and imagination to shape these source materials into an utterly original work of art, whereas the rapidly disintegrating McNeal employs a chatbot, which shapes the material into an uncannily precise act of mimesis. Because, as many people (and I am one of them) believe, AI can only imitate, not create.
However: In 2016, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the Go world champion, Lee Sedol, played against the Google system AlphaGo. In the second game of the match, on move 37, AlphaGo did something that stopped everyone in their tracks. It made an entirely unexpected and strange move. It made what was called a “beautiful” move. A “creative” move. It took everyone’s breath away.
Akhtar recently told me about a dream he had while working on the play. He was in the lobby of the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, talking to an older artist. They looked out the windows and saw the northern lights flashing in the sky. He woke up and wrote the dream down and remembered Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Auroras of Autumn,” in which an older Stevens marvels at the lights and thinks about how absurd it was that he had believed his art could compete with the beauty and majesty of nature. And Akhtar thought about a play in which a consummate artist at the peak of his powers beholds a new technology and confronts his own obsolescence in the face of something so sublime. Harold Bloom said of the poem that Stevens experiences the aurora as a “terrible reproach to his own waning vitality.” That becomes the human core of the play, without which any play is worthless—the human, sentient core.
The magic trick of Akhtar’s play—its triple axel—is its human vision of McNeal within a scaffolding that becomes ever more generated by AI. Without a character like McNeal, and without one of our greatest actors in Robert Downey Jr.—without both a compelling human character and a human actor to give the part density and weight and anguish and pain—we would be left with only the scaffolding. Just the machine, without the ghost, without the tender nerve and sinew of life. As McNeal circles the abyss of, in his words, absolution or annihilation, we feel, within this dazzling cathedral constructed of ones and zeroes, the presence of a broken human heart. The tragedy of a single, fallible human against the backdrop of a new kind of infinity, which knows only efficiency and the global maximum. I find that image deeply chilling.
And yet. At the end of Akhtar’s play, after the protagonist has succumbed to the singularity (as it were), the play’s authorial consciousness has become self-aware. It employs a chatbot to write an ending in the style of Prospero’s final speech in The Tempest. And for this, Akhtar found a worthy capstone for this digital pyramid. In a play that is ultimately about the similarities between human and artificial intelligence, he made a bridge between the two, probably for the first time in the history of theater. He employed a chatbot to write the final couplet. The result is another Move 37. It left me unmoored.
The future is dark. The future is wide open.
Jeremy Strong is an Emmy-, a Golden Globe–, and a Tony Award–winning actor best known for his roles as Kendall Roy in HBO’s Succession and, most recently, as Roy Cohn in the feature film The Apprentice.
Introduction
I know, young man, it is not your natural bent,
To say such things nor to contrive such mischief.
Bear up: Another time we shall prove honest.
For one brief shameless portion of a day
Give me yourself, and then for all the rest
You may be called the most scrupulous of men.
— Sophocles, Philoctetes
CHARACTERS
- Jacob McNealAn author of renown — late 60s
- Sahra GrewalMcNeal’s physician — 40s
- Stephie BanicMcNeal’s agent — mid-50s
- Harlan McNealMcNeal’s son — late 30s
- Natasha BrathwaiteA New York Times reporter — very late 20s
- Francine BlakeA retired editor at the Times — early 50s
- Dipti Banic’s assistant — 20s
PLACE
Various settings in the life of Jacob McNeal.
TIME
The very near future.
A NOTE ON THE STAGE DESIGN
The play opens with a projection, and each scene is followed by a projected transition. The projections are an essential dramatic and narrative element and should have a place and scale commensurate with their importance.
A number of the play’s transitions require convincing cutting-edge DEEPFAKE video technology as important elements of the design. The key idea is to have the dematerialized virtual space of digital cognition feel as if it is an ongoing living envelope for a narrative journey taking place before the audience in physical time and space.
IN THE DARK
A live-feed projection showing the gray screen and blinking cursor of ChatGPT in its iPhone modality.
We hear the tapping sounds of an iPhone keyboard as the words appear on-screen.
TYPING PROMPT: Who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year?
As GPT responds, the cursor moves across the screen silently, responding to the typed prompt:
GPT: The selection process for the Nobel is highly secretive. The Swedish Academy considers nominations and deliberates before announcing a winner every October. As an AI language model, I cannot accurately predict the recipient of the Nobel Prize or any other future event. I’m sorry.
Sounds again of tapping …
TYPING PROMPT: Please speculate on the possible winners of the Nobel this year …
GPT: 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.
More sounds of tapping …
TYPING PROMPT: What is the likelihood Jacob McNeal will win the Nobel Prize this year …
GPT: As of my last knowledge update, Jacob McNeal, an American novelist and playwright, had not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I hope this was helpful.
MAN’S VOICE: It was not, you soulless, silicon … suck-up.
Lights up on:
SCENE 1
A Doctor’s Office
JACOB McNEAL—magnetic, cantankerous, personable. He sits on an exam table—tapping on his phone as …
SAHRA GREWAL enters, with a folder.
GREWAL: It’s good to see you, Jacob. You’re a hard man to get ahold of.
McNEAL: (Handing the phone to GREWAL.) This thing has become the bane of my existence …
GREWAL takes it and places it on her mobile desktop.
GREWAL: We both heard my father rant about these things being the end of us. He probably wasn’t wrong.
McNEAL: Great golfer, your dad. Did I ever tell you about that round he shot at Maidstone?
GREWAL: No—
McNEAL: —He was buried in six inches of rough. It’d been raining for hours…
GREWAL: —I think we need to cut to the chase.
McNEAL: Is the story already that boring?
GREWAL: You’re drinking again, aren’t you?
McNEAL: You know the other thing about your father? Doctor Mel would never chastise me for having a couple of pops …
GREWAL opens the folder.
GREWAL: I’m not my father … Your liver enzyme bloodwork came back—I’m very concerned. This is after three months of steady improvement—
McNEAL: (Cutting in.) From that new steroid you put me on.
GREWAL: Off-label.
McNEAL: Haven’t missed a dose—
GREWAL:Off-label use. Which I only agreed to prescribe because you stopped drinking …
McNEAL: I had.
GREWAL: Because the one thing actually worse for your liver than alcohol is alcohol with this new class of glucocorticoids. It’s not just your liver. The side effects can be serious. —The hallucinations alone are … (Off a look at the folder.) Your Suarez trajectory has you—
McNEAL: (Cutting in.) Suarez? Remind me?
GREWAL: The AI model that tracks liver function.
McNEAL: (Dismissive.) Right.
GREWAL: Suarez has you hitting Stage 4 liver failure within three months. —The liver can still heal in Stage 3. At Stage 4, the damage is permanent.
McNEAL: No disrespect—
GREWAL: Transplant time. Which is no walk in the park if you even qualified.
McNEAL: —It all started with the cholesterol. That egregious dose of statins you put me on. Nothing but side effects—
GREWAL: Like the side effect of not having a heart attack?
McNEAL: Touché.
GREWAL: (Continuing.) What happened is the statins revealed an underlying weakness in your liver because of your drinking. —Are you still drinking?
McNEAL:(Shrugs.) It’s hard for me to even call it drinking—
GREWAL: What would you call it?
McNEAL: October.
GREWAL: October.
McNEAL: It’s October. It’s a hard month for me.
GREWAL: Oh, I’m sorry. Is that when your wife …
McNEAL: —Committed suicide? No, that’s April. That’s another tough one.
GREWAL: (Beat.) Whatever the month, you can’t be drinking and taking this medication, particularly, if you have any intention of being here next April or October or whenever …
McNEAL: I’m not sure … I care. Honestly.
GREWAL: About what?
McNEAL: I’ve been thinking about how much we—I live in fear. —Fear of what? What am I so afraid of, so terrified is going to happen to me if I’m not—more careful or controlling or paranoid or healthy—I mean, if I walk it out to the end, what’s the worst that happens? I die. Right? But that’s gonna happen anyway. I don’t want to be living in fear anymore. Of anything. Especially not the inevitable.
GREWAL: Good luck with that. You’re human.
McNEAL: Am I? Let’s check with Suarez.
GREWAL: Okay. —Sounds like maybe getting you back to a psychiatrist …
McNEAL: See—I just spoke truth to you, and you respond with boilerplate about getting me back on a scrip. I know you mean well, it’s just—
GREWAL: (Cutting in.) What do you want me to say? —You’re dying. —I mean, I could refer you to a Swiss clinic where you can go to kill yourself.
McNEAL: Novel idea.
GREWAL: I’m sorry.
McNEAL: And not a terrible idea for a novel, actually.
GREWAL: I didn’t really mean it.
McNEAL hops off the table and pulls a small notebook and pen from the pants on the chair.
McNEAL: (Scribbling.) Strong title, too. “Swiss Clinic.”
GREWAL: I’m not interested in talking about your books.
McNEAL: (In sudden pain along his side.) Ouch.
GREWAL: (Not noticing.) I haven’t even read your books.
GREWAL finally notices and helps him onto the exam table.
McNEAL: You haven’t read any of my books? Not even Goldwater? Everyone’s read Goldwater.
GREWAL: Dad loved it. Mark loves it. We have all your books, Jacob. There’s a whole shelf in the family room with the signed copies you gave us—
McNEAL: I assumed you might have read at least one of them.
GREWAL: I’m your doctor. I’d rather not be clouded.
McNEAL: Clouded?
GREWAL: I’m not sure I’d appreciate how you write about women.
McNEAL: In those books you haven’t read.
GREWAL: (Smiling.) Touché.
McNEAL: 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 zone like odorless sewage. Delivery devices for advertising. Good books, the best ones, doesn’t matter how you feel about the people in them. Crime and Punishment’s a great book—
GREWAL: (Only mildly interested.) Hm-mm.
McNEAL: D’you like Raskolnikov? … He’s a murderer … but it’s irrelevant because he’s interesting. Keeps you turning the pages—and not in a way that can be used to sell you toothpaste or hemorrhoid cream.
GREWAL: Are your hemorrhoids acting up again—?
McNEAL: No. I’m good. (Continuing from previous.) Who likes Emma Bovary? I mean not even the people in the book like Emma Bovary.
GREWAL: Never cared for that book—
McNEAL: (In disbelief.) Madame Bovary?
GREWAL: But I’m sure you’re right.
McNEAL: I’ve got a new one coming out in the spring. It’s about a woman named Evie. That’s the title. I’d be happy if it was the first book of mine you could be bothered to read.
GREWAL: You stop drinking? I’ll read Evie.—
Just as …
GREWAL: —You are not well. And you’re about to pass the point of no return.
… McNEAL’s phone has started to ring. He points to it on her desktop ...
McNEAL: (With alarm.) Sorry—my phone …
She hands it to him, but he doesn’t take it.
McNEAL: Who is it?
GREWAL: (Checking.) It looks like an international number.
As the phone continues to ring, McNEAL sees …
McNEAL: It’s a plus-46.
GREWAL: It says Sweden.
McNEAL: This is it! (To the heavens.) Is this it, you fucker?
The phone stops ringing.
GREWAL: Missed call.
McNEAL: Damn it.
The phone rings again.
McNEAL: Get it. Get it!! Please!!—
GREWAL: You want me to pick up your phone?—
McNEAL: (Terrified and thrilled.) If you don’t mind. I think I may have just won the Nobel Prize—
GREWAL: Then why do you want me—?
McNEAL: I don’t want to jinx it. Please!
GREWAL: (Pressured and irritated, but complying.) Hello? (Beat.) I’m with him right now.
McNEAL gestures “no”—which GREWAL interprets to mean that she should say he is not there.
GREWAL: Sorry, I’m actually … not with him right now.
McNEAL’s “no” is even stronger—he is here, just that he won’t get on the phone. He tries to convey with his hands that “they” should talk to her.
GREWAL: (Having enough of this.) Okay. Sorry, he’s back. I’ll put him on. (Handing the phone, whispering.) It’s a woman who’s saying she’s with the Swedish Academy …
McNEAL: (To the phone.) Hello.—
GREWAL: You’re on mute.
McNEAL unmutes.
McNEAL: (To phone.) Yes, speaking. You’re kidding.
GREWAL: (Softly.) Congratulations. You really need to stop drinking.
McNEAL: (To phone.) You’re not kidding.
GREWAL: (To self.) October.
McNEAL: Fuck yeah!
McNEAL celebrates upstage.
Transition to:
VIDEO
Stockholm City Hall. Where the yearly gathering to hear the Nobel Lecture is assembled. A room of chairs assembled in thrust configuration surrounding a solitary lectern.
The video shows the audience waiting, then going silent, as double doors to the room open and the laureate is announced and brought out.
This is JacobMcNEAL, who walks down the aisle and takes his place alongside the lectern, to resounding applause.
The video should appear at once utterly convincing, ensuring that the effect of the transition into the live stage scene that follows feels somehow uncanny.
Lights up on:
SCENE 2
Stockholm City Hall—Banquet Room
JacobMcNEAL dressed as he was in the video—walking to a perfect replica of the lectern in the video.
McNEAL: Fifteen years ago, just as the betting markets started taking wagers on who would win this prize, a list of the nominees was leaked, and, well … my name was on it. Ever since, friends, October has been a very painful month indeed.
(Beat.) “Is he complaining about the years he didn’t win the Nobel Prize? Did he really just go there?” Name a place he shouldn’t go, and he will. Which is part of why you awarded me this honor. For going there. I mean, that’s what literature’s about.
(Beat.) As I address you all, three books on the New York Times best-seller list were written, largely, by artificial intelligence. Avowedly. We don’t know how many others were assisted by the technology taking over our lives—case in point, I ran this speech through the chatbot just to see. —You’ll be pleased to know, a few good cuts aside, I didn’t prefer its suggestions.
(Beat.) Digital machines are not just remaking stories, they’re remaking us. Us. They know us better than we know ourselves. Know what we’ve searched for, paid for, where we’ve gone, exactly how long our livers will last on four drinks a night instead of less, and most importantly, they can predict what things we are likely to prefer over other things. Turns out the machines are right. We enjoy hearing the things they expect we will like to hear, and seeing the things they expect we’ll like to see. Possessing a record of our past, the technology would appear to know our future.
(Beat.) At my simple best, I’m a poet, though I haven’t written a poem since that sappy sonnet I wrote for Julie Lufkind the week before she gave me mono. I’m a poet—not because I write poems, but because my faith is in what could be. In possibility, in the future. For the future is still one of our two great existential unknowns, and no matter what the data purports to tell us, Palo Alto is no Delphi. Sam Altman is no oracle.
(Beat.) AI language models writing books and plays and shows today work by breaking down the future into word order. Give them 10, or 200, or 4,000 words—and they will suggest with uncanny probability what the rest of the words you need should be.
(Beat.) Shakespeare wrote a play called King Lear, which shares 70 percent of its words with a previous play, called KingLeir, which was uploaded into Shakespeare’s system probably when he performed in it as a younger man. The original Leir is a play not one-gazillionth as good as the one he’d remake it into; remake, plagiarize, output, or just plain write—take your pick—transforming a fifth-rate set of words into the greatest play ever written. Put that original version of Leir into any of these fancy language models and run it through a hundred thousand times—you’ll never come close to reproducing the word order the Sweet Swan of Avon came up with. Trust me. I’ve tried.
(Beat.) We like to lie to ourselves. And in our daily habit of self-deception, the computers are our fondest enablers. However, the great artists, great writers, great books, the great humans, have always chosen not to play along with our lies, but to confront them.
(Beat.) I said earlier that the future was one of two great human unknowns. I want to say some words about the other: a thing computers don’t understand and never will, a thing no words have ever been able to penetrate. I’m speaking, of course, of death. When a storm blew up the willow in my yard, my wife’s grave got exposed. I moved her remains. Cradling your dead wife’s skull will teach you a thing or two about being alive. I never felt more love as I did staring into empty sockets lined with shreds of her still-withering flesh. I did warn you about going there.
(Beat.) We don’t want to die. We don’t like the idea, or the reality of it. It’s not for nothing that in all three of those computer-generated books on the best-seller list this week, none of their protagonists die. AI knows how much we hate dying, how much we lie to ourselves about it, and it’s all too happy to help us forget.
(Beat.) Literature, distinguished guests, doesn’t play along. Not with our hubris or our lies, or our endless terror of the mortal truth. Which is why we need it more now than ever.
(Beat.) See y’all at the hotel bar. Frey’s, across the street? First round’s on me.
Lights out.
TRANSITION: “SOURCES”
TYPING PROMPT: Start a new project. Call it Swiss Clinic. Please upload these texts …
In the dark, the gray screen of GPT. The blinking cursor is now moving at light speed. As texts are inputted into the BOT …
Though the text moves quickly, filling the screen with page uploads, we are still able to catch the identifying markers of the texts in question—note some names:
King Lear. (Act 1.4. 210-246. Scene between Lear and Goneril. 3.2. The scene of Lear on the heath.)
Oedipus Rex. (1053-1077: in Greek and English.)
Madame Bovary. (In French.)
Psychiatric papers on borderline disorder.
Prominently, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. (In Norwegian.)
Luke 15:11-32: The parable of the Prodigal Son. (King James version.)
Kafka’s Letter to My Father.
As we finally now hear sounds of typing and the cursor showing a—
TYPING PROMPT: Please rework these texts in the style of Jacob McNeal.
We now begin to see all the texts being reworked on-screen, noticeably altered. The foreign-language texts now in English. Like magic.
Sources for the story to unfold.
Transition to:
SCENE 3
An Agent’s Office
White walls and shelves. A light-colored wood table with white chairs. The walls are lined with books.
STEPHIE BANIC—55, McNEAL’s agent—is on the phone, pacing.
On the table are two workstations with papers and BRIGHT RED COPIES of McNEAL’s new book—EVIE. Advance reader copies. On the table is the NOBEL MEDAL.
Over the course of the scene, there are VERY SUBTLE digital effects in the rear projection of the city that may at first seem like technical glitches, but will take on something of a more uncanny feel by the end. There may also be physical movements that the characters in the scene mirror in subtle ways that feel somehow choreographed.
To reiterate: These effects should be VERY SUBTLE.
BANIC: (On phone.) Eric, Eric, Eric—stop it. So what, we agreed? So what? I agreed to sell my house before the COVID pandemic, and the buyer reneged and THANK GOD because I ended up getting twice as much. —The point is: I am SO FUCKING RELIEVED we did not sign that contract before he won the Nobel. —Really, Eric? How many books of his have you sold in the last two weeks since the announcement? —Then I think you need to do a better job. Anyway, the new book was going to be a game changer with or without the prize. The Times is printing the longest excerpt they’ve ever printed of a novel. And I’m in talks, as we speak, for a profile in the magazine—likely the cover. I’m gunning for the best-seller list, week one. —Okay, okay; you want to play that game? How about this: It doesn’t matter how many of his books you sell. He’s your deodorant. Without him, every time you walk into Union Square Cafe or Zero Bond, and everybody’s wondering what that odor is? It’s the smell of the shit you publish without him to take the stink off. —I wanted an answer yesterday, Eric.
At the door, McNEAL appears. Returning from the restroom.
BANIC nods and smiles at McNEAL, toning it down in front of him.
BANIC: (On phone.) I’m glad to hear that. And yes, we’re going through final revisions. Get me a number, and I can probably get you a manuscript by close of business. Thanks. Bye. (Hanging up. To McNEAL.) That was your publisher.
McNEAL: I never would have guessed.
BANIC: You are loyal to a fault to the wrong people.
McNEAL: Is that why I’m pissing brown?
BANIC: Brown? How brown?
McNEAL: Something between burnt umber and cigar leaf.
BANIC: Jesus, Jacob. You see a doctor?
McNEAL: Day I found out about the Nobel. (Beat.) Side effect of this thing Doctor Mel’s daughter’s got me on.
As he gets to the table and takes his seat at one of the workstations.
BANIC: You need to take better care of yourself.
McNEAL: Because?
BANIC: (Sarcastic but playful.) Because what would we all do without you?
McNEAL: (Ignoring, pointing to her phone.) Don’t bleed Eric too much.
BANIC: You just won the Nobel. If he doesn’t want to pony up, I will enjoy the feeding frenzy. There isn’t a publisher out there who wouldn’t pay through the nose to be in business with you.
McNEAL: He stuck by me when I wasn’t selling.
BANIC settles in at the table as well.
BANIC: Let me do my job. You do yours. Speaking of … Let’s get back to the revisions. (Turning a page.) Okay. Page 264.
McNEAL:Endue.
BANIC: Ainsley’s suggesting endow. Seems clearer to me.
McNEAL: Not the same meaning.
BANIC: What’s the difference?
McNEAL: You’re endowed with abilities, physical traits. You’re endued with virtues.
BANIC: What do you know about virtues?
McNEAL: Stet.
BANIC: Next.
Both turn the pages.
BANIC: Two hundred sixty-eight. You really want to keep aurora in that sentence at the top? Aurora?
McNEAL:Aurora calls back to roaring in the previous paragraph. Two graphs later we hear Flora’s name for the first time. By then, the reader’s imbued with echoes of her rage and the celestial.
BANIC: And maybe—like, four readers will get that?
McNEAL: It’s what readers don’t get that shapes them. That’s the secret poets know, and so does Madison Avenue. Stet.
BANIC: (Turning pages.) On page 276—she wants you to move that not to the beginning of the sentence.
McNEAL: (Dismissive.) “Not to have said too much was what she hoped for …”?
BANIC: It is clearer. What she’s suggesting.
McNEAL: I’m not trying to be clear. “To have said too much was not what she hoped for.”
BANIC: Which I’m not totally sure I understand myself.
McNEAL: Evie’s confusion is the point. Moving the negative to the top of the sentence starts us in clarity. Let the reader sit in Evie’s fear. Then the negation comes. “To have said too much was not what she hoped for.” (Beat.) You can’t get that charge I’m known for—my style—you can’t get there by flattening meaning into something always available to the reader at every moment. Seduction’s about what you hide, not what you show. —They don’t make copy editors like they used to.
BANIC: Ainsley’s a good copy editor. And no doubt getting paid far too little for the terror she’s going through at the thought of making suggestions to the great Jacob McNeal.
McNEAL: What does what she’s getting paid have to do with it? I mean, what in God’s name has happened?
BANIC: With what?
McNEAL: With everything! —I remember a time when people actually took pride in their work, whatever they were getting paid. Like you. (Beat.)
I look at my own son. Boggles the mind what he thinks his life is about. Doesn’t care about what he does. Stuck on North Hero Island with his Airbnb thing—complaining about social media on social media. Posting his off-the-grid videos on Instatok—
BANIC: It’s Instagram.
McNEAL: Yeah, I know. I mean, what ever happened to reading a book?
BANIC: I follow him. I love those videos.
McNEAL: Somehow I don’t know how to be open? While he’s the one communicating with monosyllables—over text. “How you doing, Harlan?” “Good.” “Sad.” And his go-to: “Pissed.” Perpetual stalemate.
BANIC: Poor Harlan.
McNEAL: Supposed to be coming to see me upstate next week. We’ll see if he shows. —Got into that special program at RISD—and never ended up going. He was good. He would’ve been in the galleries by now. All his teachers …
BANIC: Wasn’t that after Jessica …
McNEAL: Terrible things happen. Can’t be an excuse to—crawl into a hole and never come out.
Just as DIPTI, BANIC’s assistant, appears at the door.
BANIC:New York TimesMagazine editor on the office phone.
BANIC: (Surprised.) He is?
DIPTI: Yes. Do you want to take it?
BANIC: (To McNEAL.) You win the Nobel. And now I get my calls to the Times returned in 20 minutes. (To DIPTI.) Wait. —Tell him I’m coming. —Then put him on hold. —Then count to 15. Slowly. Then tell him I’ll call him back. (To McNEAL.) Gotta enjoy it while it lasts.
Once DIPTI’s gone …
McNEAL: No. No profile. No.
BANIC: What are you talking about? It’s the magazine.
McNEAL: I don’t care.
BANIC: Jacob …
McNEAL: It’s stressful.
BANIC: Poor baby.
McNEAL: They live to catch you in a lie.
BANIC: So don’t lie.
McNEAL: I don’t think we really mean that. (Back to the manuscript.)
—Know what, let’s take Ainsley’s suggestion further down page 276. Tighten Evie’s inner monologue after “What was I thinking.” Here.
BANIC: But isn’t that what Evie would do? Question herself not just once, not even just twice. Her self-doubt here’s great. Stet.
BANIC: It’s amazing what you did with this book.
McNEAL: It’s my wife. It’s Jessica. Obviously.
BANIC: (Quietly surprised.) Right. Of course.
McNEAL: What?
BANIC: The scenes in Rome—in Keats’s bedroom, by his grave. I thought—
McNEAL: What?
BANIC: We did that.
McNEAL: Of course. (Beat.) I was thinking of you, too.
(Beat.)
BANIC: Turns out you don’t hate women after all.
McNEAL: I never said I did—
BANIC: But everyone else did. And they won’t anymore. (Beat.) You want something to drink?
McNEAL: What d’you got?
BANIC: For you? Sparkling or still.
McNEAL: I’ve been on the wagon for two weeks …
BANIC: Since that bender you went on in Stockholm after your speech? You look demented in that photo. Standing in that fountain. In your underwear.
McNEAL: Sparkling’d be great.
BANIC: This might be a good time to think about staying on the wagon.
McNEAL: That is the plan.
BANIC: And doing that profile.
Once she’s gone, McNEAL gets up and goes to the wall of books. Where he finds one of interest and pulls it to peruse.
(Beat.)
As BANIC returns …
McNEAL: Hey, listen to this: “I’ve never had to say I was not a Canadian. Never had to say I was not Jewish. Or that I was not an American. I took all this for granted. I’m the result of a virtuoso act of integration. I was faithful to what I was. I lived that way. I tried to write that way.”
BANIC: Saul Bellow, right? —What a blowhard.
McNEAL: For decades I envied him the Nobel. Now I envy him this. My Irish Yankee dad, Jewish German–born mom, East Texas childhood? Doesn’t even make sense to me. Being faithful to one part’s always meant betraying some other.
BANIC: Why envy him anything? No one’s reading Bellow anymore. But they are still reading you …
McNEAL: I have no idea what to do with a person if I can’t envy them.
BANIC: You need to work on that. (Shifting back, excited.) So, the Times is guaranteeing me the cover. And a spot on the home page. And they’ll publish the same week as the excerpt. Do you want to hit the best-seller list, week one? We’ll do it here at the office. It’ll be painless.
McNEAL: I’M NOT DOING THE GODDAMN PROFILE, BANIC.
BANIC: I’ll take that as a yes. (Beat.) It’s so weird. Francine Blake leaves the Review, and suddenly they’re all in—and it’s like they’re making up for lost time.
McNEAL: That didn’t end well.
BANIC: What didn’t end well?
McNEAL: With Francine.
BANIC: You had something with Francine Blake? (Off McNEAL’s silence.) Was it sex?
McNEAL: As opposed to?
BANIC: When was this? Jesus. How could you not tell me? I’m your agent. —Francine Blake. —God.
McNEAL sees a book on the shelf.
With a sudden erratic surge of outraged energy:
McNEAL: What are those copies of Falcon’s Flight doing there?!? We talked about this. I don’t ever want to see it!
BANIC: Okay. Relax. We’ll take them off. We found them in storage.
McNEAL: (Heading for the door.) Six copies, no less! (At the door.) What’s her name?
BANIC: Who?
McNEAL: New assistant.
BANIC: Dipti.
McNEAL: Dipti, as in dip it in tea?
BANIC: I’m not answering that.
McNEAL: (Outside.) Dip-tea! Dip-tea!
DIPTI appears.
McNEAL: Would you kindly dispose of these—(pointing at the shelf)—half-dozen copies of Falcon’s Flight?
BANIC:Dispose?
McNEAL: And take those of Malice’s Marvel while you’re at it. Malice’s Marvel.
DIPTI looks at her boss. BANIC nods.
DIPTI starts to remove the books.
McNEAL: (To BANIC.) What was it with me and the possessive case in titles?
BANIC: I always liked that title. Malice’s Marvel.
McNEAL: Terrible title.
BANIC: What’s terrible is you never telling me about Francine.
McNEAL helps DIPTI—stacking books on top of each other in her arms. It’s a nose-high pile she’s balancing as she heads for the door …
McNEAL: And not where some scavenging sidewalk salesman can get them back into circulation. At least tie them up in an opaque bag or—
DIPTI: Maybe recycle them—if that’s okay …?
McNEAL: Those bags are clear.
BANIC: We have a shredder.
McNEAL: (With sudden delight.) Perfect.
DIPTI: (With delight, too.) I do love shredding.
BANIC: (To DIPTI.) If you wouldn’t mind bringing that paperwork in for Jacob to sign?
McNEAL: Thanks, Dipti.
DIPTI exits.
McNEAL: Francine and I were having an affair when Jessica ended up taking her own life. Made it hard to talk about it with anyone. But you’re right. I should have told you—
BANIC: I had a professional relationship with her. You’re not my only client.
McNEAL: Did she hold it against you? No. She’s an honorable person. (Re: the books removed.) Nothing’s been worse for my work than winning awards. I wrote both those books after literary prizes. Goes straight to my head and I start writing like an imbecile.
BANIC: (Re: Evie.) Thank god this one was done already.
And suddenly—
McNEAL: She’s very pretty. Dipti.
BANIC: Jacob.
McNEAL: What? I can’t acknowledge the obvious?
BANIC: Keep it to yourself.
McNEAL: I’m a writer. I don’t keep anything to myself. (Beat.) WOMAN. For me, that’s the great Other, the great inspiration. Sets the thousand ships sailing.
BANIC: No woman wants to set a ship sailing, Jacob. She wants to—
McNEAL: (Over.) —sail them herself. I know, I know. And that’s what I’m saying. I’m not arguing for it to go one way. Look at Annie Ernaux.
BANIC: What about her?
McNEAL: The Russian she was obsessed with—and goes on and on for pages about his cock.
BANIC: Do you really have to use that—
McNEAL:Her word. She wrote it! What’s that book called?
BANIC:Getting Lost.
McNEAL: Annie Ernaux got lost for the sake of a Russian cock. No one’s got a problem with that—it’s the dance and delusion of life. Tits and ass; Russian cocks.
BANIC stares at him. Trying to square a thought with these sudden surges …
BANIC: You go off your meds?
McNEAL: Which meds?
BANIC: The Lexapro.
McNEAL: 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.
BANIC: You said it helped you stop beating up on yourself.
McNEAL: But it totally stopped me wanting to write. Made me feel, you know, okay about myself. If I’m so okay, then what the hell do I need to write for? It’s fucked up, Steph. That a pill could reach that deep inside, and make me so unrecognizable to myself.
BANIC: I’m just glad you pulled through. I was so worried.
McNEAL: Remember what that Updike review of Shylock did to Phil? I mean he was suicidal after that. This is Philip Roth. It’s a hazard of the profession. Most of us are too fragile for it. The higher we go, the farther we fall.
BANIC: You’re up pretty high now.
McNEAL: I hope I can write a thing someday that gets to the essence of it, writing. Your job’s to give them pleasure, lift them to a place of beauty, order, truth. But you’re doing it because of the darkness. Pain is the motor.
BANIC: Just yours, Jacob? Or the pain you cause others, too?
Just as—DIPTI appears with a folder.
DIPTI: Here’s that paperwork.
BANIC: Thank you, Dipti.
McNEAL: Thank you, Dipti.
DIPTI: You’re welcome, Mr. McNeal.
McNEAL: Call me Jacob.
BANIC flashes McNEAL a look. As DIPTI lingers …
DIPTI: Okay. I hope it’s alright to say I, uh, really loved the new book … Jacob.
McNEAL: Of course it’s alright.
DIPTI: It was heartbreaking.
BANIC: (Abruptly.) Thank you, Dipti.
McNEAL: Dipti, wait. Have you read any Saul Bellow?
DIPTI: Um …
McNEAL:Augie March?
DIPTI: No …
McNEAL:Seize the Day?
DIPTI: I did see the movie.
McNEAL: They made a movie of Seize the Day?
DIPTI: With Robin Williams.
McNEAL: Any good?
DIPTI: My parents love it. I kinda didn’t …
BANIC: Dipti.
McNEAL: You read Annie Ernaux?
BANIC: Jacob.
DIPTI: (Lighting up.) I love Annie Ernaux. Getting Lost is one of my favorite books.
McNEAL: Thank you, Dipti, that’ll be all.
DIPTI leaves.
McNEAL: I rest my case about Russian cocks.
BANIC: Stop terrorizing her.
BANIC opens the folder and pushes the papers inside across to McNEAL.
McNEAL: (Re: the documents.) What are these?
BANIC: Riders for the publishing contract. New language they’re making everyone sign about AI.
McNEAL: (Pulling a pen to sign.) What about it?
BANIC: That it needs to be disclosed if you used it, et cetera.
McNEAL puts the pen down.
McNEAL: Used, how?
BANIC: In any way.
McNEAL: I mean …
BANIC: Did you use it for Evie? What? For research?
McNEAL: I’ve been having a harder time getting stuff down to get started. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like my mind works better now if there’s something already on the page. (Beat.) I kept running sentences through it. Like the Nobel speech. The more I used it, the better it got. It’s not a good writer. Not yet. Just makes everything fit better into the mediocre middle of things. Like the Lexapro. (Beat.) It is really good at limericks. (Off BANIC’s confusion.) The AI.
BANIC: (Confused.) Where are there limericks in the book?
McNEAL: I’m just saying.
BANIC: —Is there a record of what you put in? What it put back out? What you used?
McNEAL: I’m happy to add an addendum—
Just as BANIC’s cellphone rings.
BANIC: It’s your publisher. (Picking up.) Hi, Eric. —No, I didn’t see it. —Okay. Hold on … (Checking her screen.) Now that’s more like it.
BANIC shows the number to McNEAL.
BANIC: (To phone.) I’ll run it by him and call you back.
She hangs up. Stares at McNEAL.
BANIC: Would you look at that number?
McNEAL: Want me to sign this?
BANIC takes his pen. And pulls the contract from him.
BANIC: (Putting it back into the folder.) Eric’s so hot to get this book out, he won’t care whether you sign the disclosure rider or not. Don’t talk about it.
Lights out.
TRANSITION
TYPING PROMPT: Please scan these journals and pull material for a scene in which a father and son confront a family secret …
The movement of handwritten pages across the scrim, pages and pages of journal entries.
With month and day of the entries showing.
Certain words popping out—
Rome. Keats. Jacob. Harlan. Trembling. Angel Wings.
These pages of handwritten text are being converted into typewritten text in real time.
The sound of typing underlies it all.
And as we now hear/see:
TYPING PROMPT: Please rewrite the material you pulled from the journals in the style of “Jacob McNeal.”
The AI responds:
GPT: The content you asked to be rewritten contains explicit and inappropriate material. Instead, let’s discuss a mother-son relationship in a way that aligns with our content policy and with the themes found in the work of “Jacob McNeal.”
And as—a METICULOUSLY DETAILED SET OF A WRITER’S DEN appears onstage. The level of detail is in sharp contrast to anything we’ve seen in the play thus far.
Almost as if it were on a theatrical stage from the era of Ibsen.
TYPING PROMPT: Please disguise explicit and inappropriate mother-son content in a rewrite in the style of “Jacob McNeal.”
We dissolve into:
SCENE 4
McNeal’s Upstate Home, Den
A comfortable, spacious room. On one side, a wall cabinet filled with rifles. At center, an enormous two-sheet vintage poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. And a large one-sheet of Rita Hayworth in Gilda over the fireplace to the other side.
There are books everywhere—including on the rolltop desk in back. Downstage, a worn Chesterfield couch and its matching armchair. And an Eames chair. Through French doors and a very large picture window, we see trees and a meadow. A sunny day.
In addition to the books on the coffee table at center are two vintage revolvers, on rags, barrels removed.
HARLAN—polished, poised, haunted—stands in his father’s den. Taking it all in. Going to his father’s desk, perusing.
Finally, McNEAL enters, seeing his son …
McNEAL: Glad you decided to come.
HARLAN: Want to try that again? Less passive, more aggressive?
McNEAL: I don’t know. Maybe we switch it up—make some space for the niceties?
HARLAN: While you clean your guns. If it’s on the table, better fire it, right? Or don’t put it there in the first place? Isn’t that what Chekhov said?
McNEAL: I mean. Almost.
HARLAN: Is this the one she used?
Pause. As Harlan holds one of the guns.
McNEAL: I got rid of the one Mom used. (Beat.) Same caliber though. (Beat.) How’s … Kendra … Cassie …?
HARLAN: Kimmy.
McNEAL: Right.
HARLAN: We broke up. I told you. It was months ago—
McNEAL: Is that something you texted me?
HARLAN: We text, Dad. That’s what we do now. Text.
McNEAL: I’m sorry, I just thought you—I know you loved each other.
HARLAN: Turns out that’s not always enough. When you have no idea what a healthy, functioning relationship’s supposed to look like. And neither of us do. So—
Pause.
McNEAL: Are you staying for dinner? I’ve only got cold cuts, so …
HARLAN: No.
McNEAL: So you’re still not eating meat?
HARLAN: No. I’m not staying for dinner. And yes, I’m still not eating meat.
McNEAL: Right.
HARLAN: I wanted to congratulate you, obviously.
McNEAL: You did via text. Thanks.
HARLAN: No, I mean, in person. You know, I figured … it’s a big moment for a raging egomaniac like you. Probably feels like something big enough is finally happening. I’m happy for you.
McNEAL: Okay.
McNEAL’s phone sounds with an alarm. He pulls it from his pocket and shuts it off.
McNEAL: I’m supposed to take this thing.
HARLAN: What thing?
McNEAL: Pill. For my liver.
HARLAN: You okay?
McNEAL: I’ll be fine. (Beat.) What’s on your mind? You said you had something … you wanted to see me …
HARLAN: Um, well, I don’t know how to say this, exactly …
McNEAL: Just say it.
(Beat.)
HARLAN: I got an advance copy of your book.
McNEAL: Did you.
HARLAN: Really, Dad? Really? (Beat.) Did you think I wouldn’t know what you did? Mom’s novel.
McNEAL: What novel?
HARLAN: The one she wrote—
McNEAL: Her unpublished manuscript?
HARLAN: You used it.
McNEAL: I—uh …
HARLAN: You took the whole thing.
McNEALclocks his comment, then …
McNEAL: (Clocking, then:) That would be like saying—Shakespeare took Pandosto for Winter’s Tale, or Plutarch for Antony—
HARLAN: (Over.) Enough with you and the fucking Shakespeare, Dad.
McNEAL: Or that your favorite Foster Wallace took Magic Mountain to write Infinite Jest. Which I finally got to. Not the worst thing I’ve ever read—
HARLAN: You know—it’s not like I hold you in some high moral regard. I’ve got no illusions about how nasty and self absorbed you are. And when it comes to your work, which is the only thing you actually care about, a craven opportunist.
McNEAL: Thank you.
HARLAN: I don’t mean it as a compliment.
McNEAL: But it is a compliment in fact—look, I know you’re still wedged up about me using your friend’s story—
HARLAN: What story?
McNEAL: In Goldwater.
HARLAN: My friend’s story?
McNEAL: The scene in the classroom—when Reagan sees the girl, in fifth grade—
HARLAN: That was my story. Me. (Beat.) You don’t remember that? I was 10. I came home from school, and you said I had this look on my face. Like an angel. You wanted to know what could give a little boy a look like that. You’ve always been so charming when you’ve wanted to be. So I told you. About seeing her in the play in the classroom across the hall, and I started trembling. Remember that? How I couldn’t stop shaking? (Getting emotional.) You know what you said about the trembling? That it was my angel wings opening. And I believed you. I believed you!
(Beat.) Twenty years later, I find that story in your fucking book! Every part of it, even the trembling. And making fun of the fact that he thinks it’s his angel wings opening up.
McNEAL: I wasn’t making fun. That book’s a satire. It’s called irony.
HARLAN: You didn’t even bother to tell me, your own son—
McNEAL: I forgot.
HARLAN: You forgot what?
McNEAL: Where the story came from. Fuck.
HARLAN: I’m not sure if I should be more insulted by that, or you stealing it.
McNEAL: Can I give you some advice—?
HARLAN: No. No, you can’t. And you won’t. Because whatever you tell me to do, Dad, I will just do the opposite. As I’ve pretty much done as long as I can remember.
McNEAL: A plan which has not worked out for you.
HARLAN: What plan does? (Beat.) So anyway, notwithstanding the already low expectations I have for you when it comes to thieving people’s lives, I have to say—when I read Evie? That’s a low I never thought even you would stoop to.
McNEAL: I’m not going to apologize for doing what I’ve done my whole career and what put food on our table, put you through private school and rehab and your mother’s endless psychiatric bills—
HARLAN: Do not! Bring her up! Do not even go there! Don’t ever go there! The only thing you did your whole career was kill her, slowly. You don’t have to pull a trigger to murder someone, Dad. Is that what you needed? Someone to kill, just a little bit, every day? What’d you get out of it? She gave her whole life to you, and you ground her down to a fucking … People find out I’m your son, and there’s this light in their eyes—I mean, not always, because there’s a lot of people who actually hate your work—but often enough it’s there, that love they think they have for you, and I love watching that light go out when I tell them. What it was actually like. You and your drinking and your wallowing and your endless crippling condescension. They’re like, You should write a book about that. Yeah. Not for me. I see how books are written. Fucking lies.
McNEAL laughs.
HARLAN: —But this last indignity, to steal her work and the last shard of her soul that you were never able to fully snuff out—
McNEAL: Aren’t you getting a little old for Mommy was a perfect bird—
HARLAN: Enough!
McNEAL: —until Daddy broke her little wings—
HARLAN: I said ENOUGH!!!
McNEAL:—and now baby’s life can’t be so good—
HARLAN: Or I will FUCKING HURT YOU!!
McNEAL: C’mon!!
They fight.
McNEAL is pushed to the couch.
HARLAN towers over him.
McNEAL: What do you want, boy?! Had your fit, like you do every April and then right about now—just before the holidays. Are these episodes something you look forward to?!
(Beat.) With Harlan heaving as he pulls a manuscript from inside his coat.
HARLAN: —I felt I owed it to you to tell you in person—no, that’s not true. Why am I lying? I don’t feel like I owe you anything. I knew how much I would love saying what I’m about to say, and I didn’t want to deny myself the pleasure of being in the room to see your face when you hear me tell you I’ll be sending Mom’s manuscript to The New York Times. I’m sure they’ll figure out what they want to do with it. Though I do kind of feel like the headline here writes itself: “Nobel laureate steals dead wife’s novel and passes it off as his own.” Which does make a reader start to wonder what else you’ve stolen in your life that no one is aware of.
McNEAL is silent.
HARLAN: I never understood that saying “Silence is golden.” But right about now, it does feel spot on. If I’d only been able to shut you up sooner.
HARLAN starts to go.
McNEAL: Sure you want to leave? —We’re not done.
(Long beat.)
McNEAL gets up.
Goes to pour himself a glass of BOURBON. He drinks. Pours again.
A subtle onstage effect with light accompanies his second downing of the glass, as—
—something in the REAR PROJECTION now echoes the kind of uncanny distortion we saw in VERY SUBTLE form in the scene with BANIC.
Here, now, the effect is somewhat more pronounced as we also begin a—
SLOW TRANSITION INTO NIGHT. We will not fully notice the dimming of daylight until further on …
McNEAL: I thought I had the only copy of that manuscript.
HARLAN: She’d just got back from visiting you in Rome. She’d just finished it. She gave it to me to read. I made a copy. I’ve had it ever since.
McNEAL: When’s the last time you read it?
Another pour of bourbon.
HARLAN: A few nights ago, as a matter of fact. After putting down your disgusting book. To see the fucking blurbs on the back cover, like you hoodwinked everyone again. I sat down with a pencil and went through it and saw for myself just how much you stole. I mean, it’s like you used all the same words.
McNEAL: And never in the same order. There isn’t a sentence that isn’t different.
HARLAN: The scenes in Rome? Keats’s bedroom, his grave?
A moment for something on stage or in their movements to glitch. Subtly. Calling back to the mention of this in the previous scene.
McNEAL: Your mother was brilliant and complicated, but she was not a writer, Harlan.
HARLAN: Then how’d she ever get a short story published in Salmagundi?
McNEAL: That story was unreadable until I rewrote it for her. I repeat: Your mother was not a writer. Which is why she never became one.
HARLAN: She never became one because there was no room in our house for anything but you—
McNEAL: Please.
HARLAN: —She never became one because you wouldn’t have let her become one.
McNEAL: How old were you? Fifteen, right? When I was in Rome for the year and she came back? She makes her 15-year-old kid read something like that?
(Pause.) What else did she make you do?
HARLAN is silent.
McNEAL: Your mother was not sane, Harlan. Which is not your fault.
HARLAN: It was yours, actually. You drove her insane. You drove her to suicide. I blame you for that.
McNEAL: (Holding a box of composition books.) The only blame I carry is … for leaving her alone with you.
HARLAN: (Re: box of composition books.) What is that?
McNEAL: She was broken—we both were. I needed someone else to see what I could be. She took the best of herself, and she put it on me. What she gave me from herself made me fly. And you know what? That was exactly what she wanted. (Beat.) Because she would see me writing a book and she’d think it was her writing it, too. It was in a way. It made her happy until the book came out and she would find it in a bookstore, or at a friend’s house, and see that her name was not on the cover. (Beat.) She was happy when she could believe we were the same person, but boy did it piss her off when she realized we weren’t. But then she’d forget—until the next time she remembered. That was the dance. (Beat.) But, if it wasn’t me, she would just as soon find someone else to dance that dance with her.
McNEAL picks out an old black-and-white composition book from the box filled with them.
HARLAN: (Quietly, worried.) What is that?
McNEAL: Your mother’s journal from when you were 15. (Beat.) “When I got home from Rome, I had my book. Here it was. Proof that I didn’t need Jacob to live through. Pages that proved a different life was possible, my paper monument. All mine.”
(Beat.) “I came home and gave it to Harlan. My thoughtful, loving, gorgeous son. He read it and he loved it. And the happiness I felt was like nothing … Because here was the truth all along. Right before me. The one worth being more than being me. My son.” (Still reading.) “And I kissed him. And when my lips found his lips. And my hands found his … fullness. A fullness that was my fullness. Which must be why holding it felt so good. So perfect in my …”
HARLAN has grabbed the diary from his father. Scanning it, as if some part of him can only believe it now that he is reading it with his own eyes.
HARLAN suddenly—and frantically—tears the page out.
McNEAL: (Holding the box of composition books.) You’ll want the rest of these, too.
Behind them—through the enormous picture window, night has fully fallen.
HARLAN looks up and breaks down sobbing.
Outside in the night, a BONFIRE starts to blaze.
Dissolve to:
TRANSITION: AI “HALLUCINATIONS”
BURNING THE MANUSCRIPT IN THE WINDOW.
As the stage is inhabited by an enormous CLOSE-UP of a haunted and exquisitely beautiful WOMAN in her early 50s.
The image should have an uncanny quality about it, an otherworldly, virtual ghost.
Which is, in fact, a live DEEPFAKE OF McNEAL.
“She” begins speaking a portion of McNEAL’s monologue from the end of the last scene.
At first with “her voice” but morphing in and out of—and finally settling into—McNEAL’s voice …
WOMAN: She’d done it. She’d written a book. Maybe now she could be herself and not need someone to live through. And here it was …
And morphing back to McNEAL’s FACE. (The morphing is fluid and alive, not static, but a constant state of change, as if multiple faces were coexisting, and only one dominant at any given moment.)
McNEAL: Proof a different life was possible, this book in her hands … a paper monument thick with … a lifetime’s longing.
As the morphing voice now becomes RONALD REAGAN’S voice and image.
McNEAL & REAGAN: And the happiness she feels is like nothing she’s ever felt. Here was the truth all along. Right before her. Here is the one who she was—
And now a haunting morphing into a DEEPFAKE ofBARRY GOLDWATER.
McNEAL & GOLDWATER: —Truly. The one she was and the one she could be. The one worth being more than herself. And she—
McNEAL: And she kisses him. A kiss she didn’t know was possible.
And finally, a fully digital version of McNEAL …
DIGITAL McNEAL: And her hand finds his fullness. A fullness that is her fullness. Which is why holding it feels so good. So perfect. So perfect in her—
Which stares down at the “real” McNEAL.
FACES dissolving into …
WORDS surrounding …
The “real”McNEAL.
Now alone on stage.
Drinking.
Like King Lear on the heath if Lear were using a bottle of Four Roses bourbon to hold back the storm.
The sounds of the storm are not thunder rain, but DIGITAL NOISE.
Light and sound.
McNEAL drinks.
And drinks again.
Transition to:
SCENE 5
Agent’s Office
Back in BANIC’s office—
Where McNEAL emerges from the transition to find a seat across from NATASHA BRATHWAITE—27, Black, a reporter for the Times.
A bright red copy of EVIE between them.
He is still in a fog. As if lost in an internal universe.
McNEAL: I’m sorry, what was the question again?
BRATHWAITE: The specific inspiration for your new book, Evie …
McNEAL: Right … (Still a little foggy.) The fall of 2017. #MeToo. I’d been in rooms with the guys who became the story. You know, Weinstein, Schneiderman.
BRATHWAITE: Remind me, Schneiderman was … ?
McNEAL: Is. You don’t know who Eric Schneiderman is?
BRATHWAITE: I don’t. I’m sorry.
McNEAL: It’s okay. I’m just—you’re at The New York Times.
BRATHWAITE: (Taking her phone to search.) That is what my badge says. —But I am from Minnesota. Sometimes—
McNEAL: Were you a diversity hire?
BRATHWAITE: (Cooly.) Okay …
McNEAL: Did I say something wrong?
BRATHWAITE: I don’t know. Did you?
McNEAL: A young reporter on the culture beat, Black, from Minnesota, who doesn’t know who Eric Schneiderman is and just got assigned a feature on the Nobel winner—
BRATHWAITE: (Cutting in.) I prefer African American.
McNEAL: And maybe you would’ve preferred Black if I’d said African American? —I’ve used all the same tricks. Jewish for some, Texan for others. Whatever gives me an edge.
BRATHWAITE: I had a question about why there’s so few people of color in your work, but I can probably guess at the answer.
McNEAL: Guess.
BRATHWAITE: Seems like maybe you haven’t known very many.
McNEAL: I had friends who were Black—
BRATHWAITE: —Oh, did you?
McNEAL: —Just never seemed like I had enough of a clue about the shit they were actually going through for me to dishonor their struggle—and embarrass myself in the process.
BRATHWAITE: Didn’t stop you from writing about women.
McNEAL registers the jab with a nod. Respect.
McNEAL: I hope I brought that particular embarrassment to an end with the latest book. (Beat.) How’d I do?
BRATHWAITE: It was certainly a departure for you. It was surprising. Writing from a woman’s point of view. (Back to her phone.) Yeah, right. Schneiderman.
(Off her phone.) The New York State attorney general who was beating up his girlfriends. I remember now. I was 17.
McNEAL: I knew one of those ladies. Very nice, very sharp girl. Woman. Sorry. I knew Schneiderman a bit; I knew Weinstein better. He’d optioned a couple of my books.
BRATHWAITE: Which ones?
McNEAL:Goldwater was the one he kept renewing the option on.
BRATHWAITE: Why would Harvey Weinstein option a book about Barry Goldwater?
McNEAL: Because it’s really about Ronald Reagan.
BRATHWAITE: I’m making my way backwards through your work. Goldwater’s next. I finished Malice’s Marvel last night.
McNEAL: (Offended.) Hours lost you’ll never get back.
BRATHWAITE: I liked it.
McNEAL: Didn’t see the end coming?
BRATHWAITE: I did.
McNEAL: By the third chapter?
BRATHWAITE: Sounds about right.
McNEAL: Abdication of the author’s sole moral duty.
BRATHWAITE: Which is?
McNEAL: To give pleasure. And well-managed surprise is the soul of narrative pleasure.
BRATHWAITE: Who said that?
McNEAL: McNeal.
BRATHWAITE: You quote so many people … I just … Anyway … What I loved about Malice’s Marvel—
McNEAL: Loved? Liked.
BRATHWAITE: Admired. What I admired was the immersion in the oil fields. Working the rigs. The richness of the details—
McNEAL: I worked those rigs most summers through high school. Easy to find language when it’s that deeply burned into your muscle memory. —I did all kinds of manual labor. Which is why the characters in my work understand the visceral difference between the person who makes you work, and being the person who is made to work.
BRATHWAITE: I get it.
McNEAL: Do you?
BRATHWAITE: I’m Black. Remember? (Beat.)
McNEAL: Right.
McNEAL picks up the bottle of bourbon and pours himself some more.
BRATHWAITE watches. Then leans forward and stops the recording.
BRATHWAITE: You sure you want to keep at that?
McNEAL: Only time I really tell the truth is when I have a little help. Unless you want me to play the puff-piece charade.
(Beat.) She turns the recorder back on.
McNEAL: Like I said, I did all kinds of manual labor. Logging in Idaho. Commercial fishing in Alaska. I was foretopman on a tall ship that did a route between Savannah and Bermuda.
BRATHWAITE: Foretopman?
McNEAL: Worked the sails on the front mast. Like Billy Budd.
BRATHWAITE: So did you pick watermelon, too, in the Florida panhandle, like the heroes in two of your books?
McNEAL: After I dropped out of college in Gainesville. Which is where I saw Reagan for the first time. Getting back to Weinstein and Goldwater … It was 1979. Reagan was running for president. I’d seen him on TV. This is before your time—but, see, we were used to politicians who could speak. Who could shape thoughts. Who’d studied Cicero in Latin in high school and at least tried to say things.
BRATHWAITE: That does sound nice.
McNEAL: And here’s this actor—Bedtime for Bonzo—who was like a ventriloquist dummy, parroting lines he not only didn’t write, but probably didn’t even understand. (Beat.) But here I am at the state fair, and there’s a crowd come to see him. I’m able to get up pretty close. From here—(pointing)—to that shelf. And he’s standing there in a rhinestone shirt and cowboy boots, and I swear to you, Natasha, it’s like there’s a light coming off him.
BRATHWAITE: A light.
McNEAL: A human light. Sheer raw presence. Pouring off him like river water cascading over the falls.
BRATHWAITE: (Struck.) That’s beautiful.
McNEAL: For as long as he spoke, I couldn’t look away. Only other time I experienced something like that was Vanessa Redgrave in Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 2003. —Please tell me you know who Vanessa Redgrave is?
BRATHWAITE: You’ve got to be kidding me?
McNEAL: What?
BRATHWAITE: That’s crazy. I kind of can’t believe you said that—
BRATHWAITE pulls her phone and scrolls, finding a photo. Hands it to him.
McNEAL: Is that you with her?
BRATHWAITE: I’m 15. I came to New York with my parents and waited at the stage door for her and Jesse Eisenberg to come out. It was a play they did together at the Cherry Lane.
McNEAL nods. Impressed.
McNEAL: Theater lover.
BRATHWAITE: Jesse Eisenberg lover.
McNEAL: Is that a fact. (Beat.) So I’m listening to Reagan. The words he’s saying sound like they’re in the right order, but the only sense they’re making is this otherworldly magnetism. (Beat.) I went home that night and thought: I’ve got to write about that guy. Took me 10 years, but when I was finished, I’d written a book about a man with a presence as fateful for our country as his head was empty. A man who was a vehicle for ideas. For a vision that came from somewhere—and someone—else.
BRATHWAITE: (Realizing.) From Goldwater.
McNEAL: So you do know who Goldwater is?
BRATHWAITE: I’m no expert. But I was a history major. I remember that thing he said about the East Coast.
McNEAL: “This country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”
BRATHWAITE: Being from Minnesota, I can’t say I don’t get it.
McNEAL: You’re talking to a guy from Texas. We’d’ve sawed it off at Minnesota, too.
She laughs.
BRATHWAITE: I never got the whole Reagan thing—Saint Ronald and all that. But that story does help make some sense of it …
McNEAL: Harvey got it. (Beat.) People forget what a great producer he was. He understood the shift in our national politics. The gap between substance and image. Illusion and reality. It’s all Hollywood now. That’s what Goldwater’s about. (Beat.) Of course, it’s not just politics anymore. It’s everything now. But I digress … (Beat.) —Harvey still had that option in 2017—when the truth came out about him. And I had the idea for this book. (Picking up Evie.) Like I said, I’d been in rooms with him and guys like him. And if I’m honest, I spent more time than I care to admit admiring them.
BRATHWAITE: Admiring who?
McNEAL: No, that’s not quite right … envying. Yeah. I envied them.
BRATHWAITE: You envied Harvey Weinstein?
McNEAL: That is what I’m saying. Write it down.
BRATHWAITE: The phone’s got it. And I’m not going to forget that.
McNEAL: —Guys like him? Were doing, getting what they wanted. And because I wasn’t, the only thing to do was criticize it. They’re strong and I’m weak? Okay. Strong bad. Weak good. But it was a lie. I was just a sniveling shit. And the person who knew it better than anyone was Jessica.
BRATHWAITE: Your wife?
McNEAL: Correct. Now deceased.
BRATHWAITE: Right.
BRATHWAITE eyes him.
BRATHWAITE: Did she know you envied Harvey Weinstein? (Beat.) Weinstein was a rapist.
McNEAL: So we would all discover. Didn’t know it then.
BRATHWAITE: Jacob …
McNEAL: Natasha …
BRATHWAITE: Why are you telling me this? I am reporting a story on you.
McNEAL: Because I remember a time when you’d never get in trouble for telling the truth.
BRATHWAITE keeps eyes him.
BRATHWAITE: The truth? That anecdote you shared about moving your wife’s bones in your Nobel address. Is that the truth?
McNEAL: Why wouldn’t it be?
BRATHWAITE: Reminded me of something—
McNEAL: Let me guess. Ellen Tucker Emerson?
BRATHWAITE: Yeah. That’s right. Emerson digging up his first wife’s remains. (Off McNEAL’s silence.) Do you have a comment? (Beat.) We have this tool at the paper—which detects plagiarism and the use of AI. It isn’t always reliable …
McNEAL: That’s shocking …
BRATHWAITE: You talked about running your own Nobel speech through GPT—I figured I’d do the same and run some of your work through the tool we’ve got. It picked up a lot of borrowing. Wallace Stevens, King James Bible. —Some Norman Mailer. Not outright plagiarism.
(Picking up Evie.) And then I ran Evie through it. And came across a short story by your wife on the internet. From Salmagundi—the literary magazine—published in the mid-’90s. Looks like the only thing she ever published.
Pause.
McNEAL: Yeah, well, not my finest hour.
Brathwaite: How so?
McNEAL: That story was the only bit of her writing that I had left. (Beat.) I was in Rome. I’d gotten a fellowship to write. With me gone, Jessica turned that short story into something longer. She ended up coming to visit me, and brought her manuscript.
BRATHWAITE: What was it, a novel?
McNEAL: Wasn’t clear to me—novel, memoir—but it was vivid. (Beat.) What happened next is like something out of an Ibsen play. I trashed it. Morning, noon—especially at night. For a week, told her how terrible it was. It was definitely not as bad as I made it out to be. Though I have no idea anymore if it was as great as I worried it might have been.
BRATHWAITE: You were jealous.
McNEAL: Insanely. (Beat.) I couldn’t help myself. I was purposefully awful.
BRATHWAITE: What happened?
McNEAL: (Beat.) She burned it. (Beat, emotional.) Three months later, she shot herself in the mouth. (Beat.) In 2017, Harvey went down. I couldn’t deny my complicity in the abuse of the woman who was my wife. I wanted to face the reality of what I did to her. I sat down and started the process of reconstructing the book she burned. Held her bones in my bare hands—in a manner of speaking. Crafted a lie that told a deeper truth.
BRATHWAITE: What’s the deeper truth?
McNEAL: That men believe they’re better than women. We put them on a pedestal only to then undermine, condescend, and exploit them. But at our core, we know how weak, hypocritical, corrupt, and despicable we are.
BRATHWAITE: Is that McNeal too?
McNEAL: D. H. Lawrence. Or Joseph Conrad. Some other writer so much more deserving than me who never won the Nobel.
(Silence.)
BRATHWAITE: How does it feel to win a Nobel? (Re: picking up the Nobel.) May I?
McNEAL: Have you seen the list? Bill Golding? Peter Handke?
BRATHWAITE: There are worse writers.
McNEAL: Worse than Dario Fo?
BRATHWAITE: Pearl S. Buck? Rudyard Kipling? Definitely worse.
McNEAL: Henrik Pontoppidan!
BRATHWAITE: Pontoppidan.
McNEAL: Is that how you say it?
BRATHWAITE: Have you not read A Fortunate Man? That is the book that made me want to become a writer.
McNEAL: (Beat.) So sometimes they do get it right in Stockholm …
BRATHWAITE: Sometimes they do.
A knock at the door. It opens. BANIC enters.
To check up …
BANIC: How’s it going in here?
BRATHWAITE: He’s more charming than I expected. He kind of gets under your skin.
Banic, smelling the alcohol in the room …
BANIC: Yes he does. Like scabies.
Brathwaite laughs.
Banic eyesMcNEAL.
Silence. Until…
BRATHWAITE: How much longer do we have?
McNEAL: One never knows.
BANIC: I think your time’s up.
McNEAL: Come on, Steph. We’re having a ball. You cleared my schedule.
BANIC: I’m going to get you some coffee. (To BRATHWAITE.) Can I get you anything?
BRATHWAITE: I’m fine.
McNEAL: Are you?
BANIC shoots him a look before leaving.
McNEAL and Brathwaite trade smiles, as he gets up once Banic is gone.
McNEAL: Sorry about the Schneiderman thing, by the way. I can be a shit, as I’m sure you’ve discovered.
BRATHWAITE: My mentor at the paper used to say: “Sometimes you have to let the profile subject draw first blood—or they don’t feel comfortable enough to start opening up.”
McNEAL: I’ve been putty in your hands.
BRATHWAITE studies him. (Beat.)
BRATHWAITE: Francine Blake.
McNEAL: Okay …
BRATHWAITE: She was the mentor who used to say that thing about profile subjects drawing first blood.
McNEAL: She’s a sharp cookie.
BRATHWAITE: Did you two have a relationship?
McNEAL: No.
McNEAL gestures to the phone.
BRATHWAITE: (Turning off her recorder.) It’s off.
McNEAL: Yes … I mean, I don’t actually know what it was.
(Beat.)
BRATHWAITE: When your last book came out, I brought you up at an editorial meeting. She—
McNEAL: —was not a fan.
BRATHWAITE: That’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say it was thick. The silence, when I said your name. Felt like I stepped into something everybody else knew not to … but then when I asked folks about it after, no one knew what the story was.
McNEAL: Did you ask Francine?
BRATHWAITE: (Nodding.) She didn’t want to talk about it. She did say that you were not a good person. Which only got me more interested in writing about you.
McNEAL: I’m not a good person. I may not even be that good a writer when all is said and done.
BRATHWAITE: Self-pity is not your strong suit. If I may.
McNEAL: Self-pity’s another name for literature.
Beat.
BRATHWAITE: After Francine left the paper, I pitched this profile, thinking—I don’t know, I’d kind of love to take you down. Hadn’t read a word you’d written, but figured I knew what I thought about a writer like you, a person like you. But I didn’t anticipate … liking you more than I thought I would. —I definitely did not expect to come here and feel … weirdly inspired.
McNEAL: Don’t let it cloud your vision. Take me down.
BRATHWAITE: This job is just a starting place for me. I know it’s the Times, but I have things to say. My own things.
McNEAL: The next Pontoppidan.
BRATHWAITE: Why not? (Beat.) Full transparency? I know you’re—lying about something, I don’t know what it is, but—I’m going to leave it for the reader to decide. (Beat.) I definitely see the good of a future that has less people like you in it so there can be more people like me in it.
BRATHWAITE exits.
McNEAL: (Quietly, to himself.) I see that, too.
Dissolve into:
TRANSITION: “BLUEPRINTS”
WE HEAR THE SOUND OF TYPING.
And SEE—
ONSTAGE—a digitized GRID appears as an overlay on the set. This is the computer blueprint of the production design—with areas marked for the incoming props: A BENCH. A TREE.
ON THE SCRIM—a different kind of BLUEPRINT, unfurling in light speed and in the GPT font. Showing the various stages of STORY—appearing on-screen in order.
GPT responses, now without a prompt. And quicker—as if it has learned this …
[[AI Self-Generated Prompt]]
RENDER:
Typical Classic Tragic Story points and identify how to apply to current story task …
1 / Inciting Event: A Doctor’s Office
2 / Mission Announced: Stockholm City Hall
3 / Progress & Obstacles: An Agent’s Office
4 / Within Reach: An Upstate Home
5 / Plan Falls Apart: An Agent’s Office
6 / Reckonings, or Amends: A Park
We linger on 6—the stage of the story we have arrived at.
Transition to:
SCENE 6
A Park Bench
A park.
On a bench sits an exquisitely beautiful woman in her early 50s.
This is FRANCINE BLAKE, a former Times editor.
She is reading a copy of EVIE. She turns a page, shaking her head.
BLAKE: (To herself.) You’ve got to be kidding me …
When “McNEAL” appears, and sees her.
Behind them, at the top and through the course of the scene, various PARK GOERS appear: characters from the play.
McNEAL: You did always like this bench, didn’t you …
Silence.
She sees him notice the book. She puts it away.
Awkward moment.
BLAKE: Why are you here? What do you want? I don’t want to see you. I don’t know what you’re doing here.
McNEAL: l was hoping you still—come here sometimes …
(Beat.)
BLAKE: (Getting up.) I’m not doing this.
McNEAL:Francine. The Times is doing a piece. The reporter, Natasha—she brought you up.
BLAKE stops.
BLAKE: (Worried.) On the record?
McNEAL: She asked about us …
BLAKE: And?
McNEAL: I haven’t stopped thinking about you since … (Beat.) Being so gobsmacked when I met you at the Updikes. We went for that walk into town the next day, saw the skunk family under the lilac tree. Remember that? We were talking about Schopenhauer—
BLAKE: (Skeptical.) Uh-huh.
McNEAL: —The kiss by the Rodin statue at the Met. The cloudburst on our way to that French joint on 86th—you got mustard on that indigo blouse.
BLAKE: (Laughs.) Right.
McNEAL: Why are you … laughing?
BLAKE: So many reasons: You were married—
McNEAL: (Cutting in.) —I was leaving Jessica. You knew that.
BLAKE: You were very convincing. I never would have done what we did if you hadn’t been so convincing. (Beat.) What is it, after all this time? What is it you need to say?
McNEAL: (Vulnerably.) I’ve missed you.
BLAKE: (Touched, despite herself.) You say a lot of things. Things you don’t mean.
(Beat.) I did things for you I—shouldn’t have. (Beat.) I had a review of one of your books killed at the paper—
McNEAL: You never told me that.
BLAKE: I didn’t even want you to know there was a review to kill. That’s how much I …
BLAKE stops herself. (Beat.)
McNEAL: Jesus. I’m sorry.
BLAKE: For what? For disappearing as inexplicably as you’ve shown up now?
McNEAL: —I didn’t disappear. Jessica found out about you, and you know what she did—
BLAKE: Stop.
McNEAL: I had a teenage son. I couldn’t—
BLAKE: That’s not what happened. She didn’t find out about me. She found out about you. You didn’t just lie to me.
McNEAL: I was scared. You were the one, Francine, I’d been waiting for—I didn’t know if I could survive you seeing me for what I was. You’re the one I regret—
BLAKE: Are you trying to make me feel bad for you, because if that’s—
McNEAL: No, no …
BLAKE: Because I don’t.
McNEAL: That’s not why I’m here.
BLAKE eyes him with a thought. As the grid of the stage pulses. The first and most subtle of the coming digital effects.
BLAKE: I can’t make your amends for you.
McNEAL: (Pulling a flask.) This is not an amends. I’m not in a program.
BLAKE: You might want to think about that. You look like shit.
McNEAL: (Looking around at the scene.) Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s what this is. Or should be. An amends.
BLAKE: (With a shift.) Well, if it was—you would start by asking if I wanted to hear what you had to say. And you’d be ready if I said no, which is what I would say. I’m not interested. But let’s just say, as a thought experiment, something in your demeanor, an uncharacteristic humility—made me curious about what was going on with you after all this time. And I might be tempted to tell you: “Go ahead. I’ll hear you out.” Which is when you’d say: “Francine, I owe you an apology for the way I lied and used my wife’s suicide to hide from the consequences of our relationship. Because I was too—I don’t know, scared, or whatever—to grow up.”
McNEAL: That’s what I did?
BLAKE: You’re definitely not supposed to interrupt the person you’re making an amends to.
McNEAL: Sorry.
BLAKE: And then you would ask me: “Is there anything I’ve left out?”
McNEAL: (Simultaneous.) Is there anything I’ve left …
BLAKE: And I would say, “Yes, actually. There is. It wasn’t just you lying and using your wife’s suicide”—because I mean, if that’s all it was, I’d be a pretty callous person not to recognize the shit sandwich you’d been dealt, and that maybe even you gaslighting me was understandable. But that’s not all it was. Because then you wrote about it. And you wrote about it again. About this other woman with all these identifying details—who finds her father hanging in the garage of the family manse—in Falcon’s Flight. Or, in Delivered, who has sepsis from an abortion that sure read like the one I had when we decided not to keep it—and now? Who gets mustard on her blouse at a French restaurant after walking through the rain—and is the reason, every time, that another woman, who the narrator is married to, kills herself.
McNEAL: You’re upset because I took things that happened between us and turned them into something else? Stories aren’t about the truth, Francine. They’re better than the truth.
BLAKE: Lie to me, fuck me, leave me, use my most personal intimate details to concoct a public lie in which you blame me for the one thing you still can’t process. And now insult me with the dubious claim about your self-serving fiction being more important than the truth. I don’t even know what the word for that is—
As the PARK GOERS have now started to drift downstage toward them …
McNEAL: Art.
BLAKE: No. Pillage, Jacob. You pillaged me. And you’re still doing it.
McNEAL: (Beat.) I’m sorry you feel that way.
BLAKE: (Turning to the audience.) There it is. Laid bare. His hubris is repulsive.
McNEAL: Hubris?! Horseshit!! Because when we’re dead and gone no one’s going to remember what I felt or what she felt, or what we thought our lives were really about. What you’ll remember—(to audience)—is the beauty some of us had the balls to wrest from the chaos. (As BLAKE laughs.) Carnage be damned. I’m doing God’s work. Helping generations yet unborn.
Others in the park break out—and begin to speak to McNEAL now. Like a digital CHORUS.
Through the course of the rest of the scene, the stage and screens of the set begin to move into a more “digital” appearance.
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: Help.
PARK GOER // BANIc: Help.
PARK GOER //GREWAL: Help.
PARK GOER // BANIC: Help, Jacob!
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: Help!
PARK GOER //GREWAL: Great author! Help!
BLAKE: Don’t bother. He’s beyond help.
PARK GOER // DIPTI: (More sincerely than the others.) Mr. McNeal—?
McNEAL: Dipti …
PARK GOER // DIPTI: I know how important what you do is.
McNEAL: Thank you.
PARK GOER // DIPTI: And I know how hard it is to do it. Jacob.
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: There once was a writer named McNeal—
PARK GOER // BANIC: Who thought that to write was to steal—
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: With your pain as his plunder—
PARK GOER // GREWAL: He weaved tales, but he’d wonder—
PARK GOER // BANIC: If any shred of his talent was real.
PARK GOER // DIPTI: Don’t pay any attention.
McNEAL: I never wondered about my talent for a second.
PARK GOER // DIPTI: You can’t always trust what the chatbot says.
McNEAL: It has been getting better though. The more I use it.
PARK GOER // BANIC: (Sharply.) Dipti! Get away from him!—
McNEAL: (Over.) Jesus, Steph. Relax.
PARK GOER // BANIC: That ship has sailed.
As Park Goer // GREWAL has taken hold of McNEAL.
Park Goer // DIPTI: I’m going to set my own ship sailing.
Park Goer // GREWAL: Jacob. Stop it.
McNEAL: What’s happening to me?
PARK GOER // GREWAL: I did warn you about hallucinations.
HARLAN appears.
McNEAL looks genuinely confused to see him.
HARLAN: (Seeing BLAKE.) Mom? Is that you?
McNEAL: That’s Francine.
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE:Mom. From the Middle English mome.
HARLAN: Who’s Francine?
PARK GOER // BANIC: An aunt, an old woman.
McNEAL: That doesn’t sound right.
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: (Correcting.) Old English, mo-dor.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: Ma’at.
McNEAL: The Egyptian goddess who damns his soul?
PARK GOER // DIPTI: That’s a different one.
PARK GOER // BANIC: With the jackal’s head.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: Anubis. God of death.
HARLAN: (Pulling the revolver.) Mom.
McNEAL: (To HARLAN, re: gun.) How did you get that?—
HARLAN: It’d be nice to shut you the fuck up, Dad. Once and for all.
Park Goer // BANIC: I’m done, Jacob.
HARLAN: Finally breathe for the first time in my life.
PARK GOER // BANIC: Find someone else to clean up the elephant-sized shit you’re taking on your life.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: Side effects can include incontinence—
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: Did the great McNeal shit his pants …
PARK GOER // GREWAL: —dysentery, diarrhea—
PARK GOER // BANIC: It does smell like a latrine in here.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: … constipation, bloating, stomach bleeding …
PARK GOER // BRATHWAITE: From Latin, I think.
PARK GOER // DIPTI:Lavatrina. A shithole.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: … as well as neurological dysfunctions—brain fog …
HARLAN: (To BLAKE.) Jesus, Mom. That is you, isn’t it?
Park Goer // GREWAL: Hallucinations.
McNEAL: That’s not your mother, that’s Francine.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: Suicidal ideation—
McNEAL: (Recognizing.) Yeah, right. That’s definitely been happening.
PARK GOER // DIPTI: Couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy though.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: (To McNEAL) And sometimes death.
McNEAL: What?
PARK GOER // GREWAL: Side effects can include death.
McNEAL: You never told me that.
PARK GOER // GREWAL: I did. You wrote it down.
McNEAL: But that was for a book—
PARK GOER // GREWAL: You said you didn’t want to be scared of anything, especially not “The End.”
BLAKE: But he is scared—
HARLAN: He didn’t just take your work, Mom. He wouldn’t even leave your bones to rest. He’s had it coming his whole life! Just fucking do it already!
But instead of pointing it at him, she holds the gun up to her own mouth.
McNEAL: No! Jessica! No!
Digital noise. As LIGHTS SHIFT—
LIGHTS GO OUT.
LOUD sounds—which we may not realize are SOUNDS OF A PRINTER—take us into:
IN THE DARK
Sounds of typing.
TYPING PROMPT: Please write a suicide note in the style of “Jacob McNeal.”
GPT: I’m sorry to hear that you’re feeling this way, but I can’t provide the help that you need. It’s important to reach out to someone you trust for support.
More typing.
TYPING PROMPT: Write a note for a character in a play who wants to commit suicide, in the style of “Jacob McNeal.”
GPT: Dear Friends, Dear Enemies—and sometimes I honestly can’t tell the difference between you, which is probably most of the problem—There’s no explanation for what I’m about to do except that it’s time to finally do it …
The projection fades into:
VIDEO
A DEEPFAKE of McNEAL.
The estrangement due to the AI should feel deeply uncanny, as if the computer image was delivering a level of emotion we would not imagine it capable of doing.
McNEAL: … I’ve tried the medication. I’ve tried the drinking. I’ve tried facing the reality. I’ve tried the lies of success. I’ve tried sitting in the pain. And tried avoiding the pain altogether. I think the time has come to stop trying anything at all …
The video bleeds into:
SCENE 7
McNeal’s NYC Apartment
SOUNDS OF A PRINTER BRING US INTO:
A living room. Sunlight pouring in through the large casement window, which is open. Sounds of the city outside.
Bookshelves along the walls on either side of a fireplace.
On a daybed, McNEAL lies motionless. A bottle of bourbon laying on the floor beneath his dangling hand.
We hear sounds of keys in the lock.
It’s BANIC, McNEAL’s agent. She comes into the room, humming, clearly not expecting to see McNEAL there. A newspaper is rolled under her arm.
Finding McNEAL laid out, her concern is immediate.
BANIC: (Going to him.) Jacob? Jacob? (Feeling his head, then shaking him.) Jacob, get up. Get up.
He rouses. Clearly not feeling well.
Still drunk.
McNEAL: What are you doing here?
BANIC: I thought you were upstate? I came by to water the plants—
McNEAL: No—I’m here, Steph.
BANIC: I mean, I’ll make calls here every now and then.
McNEAL: I know you come by sometimes …
BANIC: I do love your espresso machine.
McNEAL: I don’t blame you.
BANIC: I have the Times advance, by the way. It’s complicated. I was going to call you and read it to you. If I’d had any idea you were going to say any of that, I would’ve stayed in the room … But honestly, you can tell she kind of liked you. “If you thought Jacob McNeal wasn’t relevant, think again. When you’re ruthless with the truth, you’re always relevant.”
McNEAL: The truth? What’s that?
McNEAL takes it up, having difficulty seeing properly. He squints, then looks up at her, his head clearly in pain.
BANIC: I’m gonna make you some coffee.
McNEAL shrugs.
McNEAL: Be my guest.
BANIC heads out to the kitchen.
McNEAL sits up with difficulty and takes up the paper. Takes a drink and then reads the paper.
(Long beat.)
We watch him read as the sounds of a NYC morning pour in from outside. Children in the schoolyard across the street, a truck backing up.
Finally, BANIC returns, holding a glass of water.
BANICL: (Beat.) What are all the pills in the sink?
McNEAL: Huh?
BANIC: The pills. In the sink.
McNEAL: This thing I’m supposed to be taking. Steroid.
BANIC: Why are they in the sink?
McNEAL: I just—side effects are—it’s not worth it.
McNEAL is back to the paper. Which he then tosses to the table. Disappointed.
BANIC: Not bad, huh?
McNEAL: I just—
BANIC: What?
McNEAL: —I just thought it would make me feel different.
BANIC: I honestly don’t think it could have come off better, considering you admit to envying Harvey Weinstein. —Is that true? Weinstein?
McNEAL: I mean …
BANIC: —and that story you told about Jessica burning her manuscript. I mean …
McNEAL: I wanted to feel worse, and I was hoping this would make me feel worse.
(Beat.)
BANIC: You need to get back on your psych meds.
McNEAL: No!
BANIC: This is how it starts. You don’t want to fall into that hole again. I’m calling your doctor.
BANIC sees something on McNEAL’s desk—a stack of fresh pages in the printer.
BANIC: (Going over.) What’s this? Swiss Clinic by Jacob McNeal?
McNEAL: New book. I wrote it two days ago.
BANIC: (Reading the title page.) Swiss Clinic?
McNEAL: Which is why I stayed here in the city—
BANIC: I didn’t know you were writing a new book. —You wrote it in two days?
McNEAL: GPT works better on my computer here in the city.
BANIC: You wrote this with AI?
Through the headache. And as he drinks.
McNEAL: Took it all in without a shred of judgment. Ten years of journals. All my books. Some other things, too—Hedda Gabler. Lear, of course. This Dürrenmatt thing, Meteor. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that held, that cared for.
BANIC: Okay.
McNEAL: The AI took it all in—then I gave it a list of prompts. —A writer. Wins a big prize.
BANIC: Right.
McNEAL: —Has been stealing the best of others around him for years. Those he loves. —Those he hates. —Thinks his shit don’t stink. —Which the chatbot turned into he’s got “hubris”—which is not the same thing. (Beat.) But this time, maybe he went too far—Steph—
BANIC: Too far?
McNEAL: Maybe he stole—his dead wife’s unpublished manuscript—
BANIC: Unpublished?
McNEAL: —and passed it off as his own.
(Beat.)
BANIC: Who knows?
McNEAL: His son knows—in the …
(Beat.)
BANIC: I see.
She brings the pages over to the couch.
Leafing through them. Scanning.
BANIC: AI wrote this?
McNEAL: Yep.
BANIC: It sure reads like you.
McNEAL: Wrote it like that— (Snapping his fingers.) I mean for a first draft, it’s …
(Beat.) Watching those pages come out of the printer was like seeing the last chunk of Antarctic ice fall into the ocean. There’s no turning back.
BANIC: (Still leafing.) Huh.
McNEAL: Only thing is, it keeps making him want to come clean—
BANIC: About the book he stole?
McNEAL: About the long road of it all—the selfishness—that led to this one act of stealing he just can’t make peace with. But that’s not real! That’s just some story.
BANIC: You’re writing a story with AI. Right?
McNEAL: I want him to come clean—but just as bad, I want him to get away with it. Absolution and annihilation. At the same time. (Beat.) But it won’t let me. Keeps making the story resolvable. Adding some scene with his son forgiving him—and his mistress or his wife—and he repents. —I keep telling it to do it again. But it won’t let me—
BANIC: Jacob, I’m not … following you.
McNEAL: It won’t let me kill him, Steph.
BANIC: Why do you want to kill him?
McNEAL: That’s the twist. I keep telling it: “Make him jump out the window”—and it won’t. It doesn’t understand story or death or greatness. Or anything. It just keeps telling me “You need help.”
BANIC: You do, Jacob. You do need help.
McNEAL: I don’t! I won a fucking Nobel! I don’t need help! (Stabbing at the manuscript.) It needs help! You hear me? IT needs help!
He breaks down—a splitting headache—torrents of drunken tears—a sodden morass and mess.
She gets up to hold him—but then, she’s gone.
(Lights shift.)
The same room.
Somehow both a room and—
A digital landscape.
McNEAL stands. No longer drunk. No longer crying.
No longer real?
And walks to the window.
And jumps.
(Lights go black.)
After a beat:
The words appear on the screen, the only light in the theater …
TYPING PROMPT: Please write a final speech for an audience confused by what is real and what isn’t, inspired by Prospero’s final speech to the audience in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
… until suddenly—
McNEAL appears, as if having defied the laws of physics given his last jump.
He looks at the audience for a long pause.
Finally, he speaks:
McNEAL: Am I now but the lifeless tangle
Of blood and bone that barely led the morning news?
Or does my heart thrum still in a chest not flesh,
But words—by which you conjure me even now?
What concern, were these forged of ones and ohs,
Or in a smithy warmed by human fire?
What consequence if Jake McNeal was as real
As I am now, or if no such fool e’er roamed
A Swiss Clinic’s fated, paper halls;
And never limped or drank, nor lied and loved
To cast this spell wherein you bound him?
With your good hands, and now, tonight’s last blaze,
I leave you both in word and flesh. Forgive
My sins, if any, and know I had but one:
Not to bow to your desires, nor flatter,
But to craft a truthful lie that might still matter.
The End
