Maybe you’ve had this experience. You follow a reporter’s work in a magazine or newspaper and are impressed by his or her articles. Then this writer covers a subject that you know something about, and he or she gets it completely wrong.
That’s how I felt watching Ayad Akhtar’s new play “McNeal,” which had its world premiere Monday at LCT’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. I much admire the playwright’s previous plays “The Invisible Hand” and “Disgraced,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. The one play is about options and derivatives on Wall Street, the other about two straight couples who get into a fight over Islamophobia (Full disclosure: I know next to nothing about finance and heterosexuality).