Human Design for a Complex Show About A.I.
In Ayad Ahktar’s compelling new play McNeal, Robert Downey Jr. portrays the titular, bestselling author who disdains AI and has Nobel Prize ambitions, but who also harbors dark secrets about his work and broken family. The dramatic and intimate story is being performed at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, a venue with a deep thrust stage and expansive audience layout. Co-sound designers Justin Ellington and Beth Lake balanced the content and reinforcement/amplification aspects as they fleshed out the sound design while making it feel very natural in a large space.
“Most sound designers fall into one or the other camp, but it is my personal belief, and Justin’s as well, that you really have to be able to do both,” says Lake. “Because we are co-designers, we have both of those sides to us, but I’m more heavily involved in the reinforcement side and he’s more involved on the content side. However, as it’s a team effort, we very much complement each other. He created the majority of the content, and I designed the system. Then we came together to implement how that content is played through the system and how it’s brought into the room.”
Ellington and Lake have worked together on other shows, but in a designer/associate relationship. This is their first production as co-designers. The associate sound designer for this show is Megan Culley, and production sound was handled by Charles Shell.
McNeal’s cast of seven are miked with DPA 4061s and Shure ADX1M micro transmitters. The actors are all single-miked except for Downey, who is double-miked as he is on stage for the whole show. McNeal’s A1/FOH mixer, Broadway veteran Bridget O’Connor, deftly handles the line-by-line mixing, and she got up to speed on the cues by working through the entire technical process of the show. Deck audio/A2 Mark Parenti has done a few shows with Lake and understands the visual and aural aesthetics of what she and Ellington were going for. “We don’t want to see the microphones,” Lake said. “We want to make sure that they’re in an appropriate place so we can get the sound that we want, but we really don’t want to see them, which is not always the case.”
Working in the Space
This show marks the fourth time that Lake has worked in the venue (it’s the first for Ellington), and she felt that this time the audio team really nailed the system utilization within the space. “The thing that’s really tricky about that space is trying to get any stereo imaging,” Lake said. “All of our content is very multi-mono. It’s all very much intended to be a mono system that is delivered just as it is. We do have a d&b DS100, in which we’re using Soundscape to do some spatialization, and we’re also using that to do delay matrixing for the reinforcement of the voices.”
She noted that with the layout of the Beaumont, it’s impossible to get full stereo coverage for the audience; perhaps two-thirds at best, no matter what the orientation is. That is why she chose to go with a mono system.
McNeal has sound effects that go along with the large projections that span the stage and walls on either side. These are usually typing sounds to match texting or talk-to-text moments, and there are ChatGPT sessions with AI voice accompaniment. In the scene when McNeal goes to receive his Nobel Prize, a pre-recorded video segment of him making his way to the stage is accompanied by the requisite crowd buzz and applause. At another point, there is a deep fake/face morphing segment that includes an accompanying audio montage.
There’s also a bit of transitional music as well as dramatic underscoring during a key moment during the end of the show. Ellington created and added the ambient tapestries and blended them with some found piano music. “As a composer that was not hired to compose music for the show, I looked for things that I would create in a similar style,” Ellington said. He added that he and director Bartlett Sher share a similar taste in music, so while looking for music, they introduced each other to new composers and sounds.
Such atmospheric music and sounds are placed judiciously at key moments in the play, and they do not overwhelm the audience or clash with the general audio level of the show.
“The trick with that is knowing where the voice sits in the room and playing around that, to not overlap in that frequency range and push it to the max,” Ellington explained. “I think it was super helpful to have a lot of that material in the rehearsal room so the actors also could help out a little bit, but they would get a little energized and a little more heightened knowing that this stuff was coming. We pumped a good amount of sound on stage so that they weren’t just working in a bubble and were really immersed in it. They could play with the sound a little bit, which I think helps them just rise above it.”
The Mix
The McNeal sound team is running a Yamaha DM7 console, using 85 inputs and maxed on outputs. The speaker system for the show is almost entirely d&b audiotechnik except for a few Meyer Sound speakers on stage for effects and for ease of rigging and accessibility. They are using d&b Y10Ps for the mains, d&b Q7s for most of the delays, and E5s and E3s for surrounds.
Given the expanse of the Beaumont and its minimal balcony, there’s a lot of open space in the wide venue. That makes it challenging to get a transparent, natural sounding mix there.
“It’s a multi-mono system all the way around,” Lake elaborated about the theater. “It’s all based on rings, so to speak. So we have a ring of the Y10s, which cover probably from the fourth row to maybe the 10th row. That’s where we have a ring of the Q7 delays come in that pick up where those Y10s fall off, and then another set of Q7s that are just past that to cover the front row of the balcony. Towards the back of the house, we have another set of delays, which I think are (d&b) E0s. As you go further up, they’re all front-facing, so they’re all just delays from the stage. We also have a set of surrounds behind the audience, both downstairs and upstairs.”
Challenges, Challenges
The most challenging aspect of the show for McNeal’s co-sound designers came from the logistics of marrying sound and video — not in terms of content, but intertwining them technically.
“We had never worked together [with the play’s creative team], so the process and how that marriage was going to work was where the biggest challenge was,” Ellington remarked. “We both knew what we wanted to do, but how to make these things work consistently, while changing and editing throughout the process, is where the challenges came up for the most part. There was never really a question in tonality — largely, again, because of just being in the rehearsal room so much and pumping so much information in there. The tone was set by audio, and then video played along, but they had big ideas before they heard anything. [It was more about] how do we match their huge ideas with our ideas that have been already intertwined into this piece before we get to tech.”
Lake said the challenge was more about the number of things that needed to be assembled and synced. When one minor change takes places, it can have a ripple effect down the line and effect the timing of other sounds.
Ellington said that the deep fake video sequence near the end of the show, which dissolves and morphs between different faces, was the trickiest to work on. That is not because of any synching issues, but “it was the act of staying with the change, having not worked with these collaborators before. Just getting our language together.”
“Bart Sher is clear when he needs support of a moment, whether it is sonic or visual,” Lake said. “He’s very astute early in the process of saying, ‘That’s going to be something where I need help to make this moment land.’”
She added that having Ellington in rehearsal with Sher and the cast — as well as the previous experience of her and Ellington working individually with the director on others shows — gave the duo an understanding of how he might want certain moments or the overall to move sonically. In turn, the co-designers collaborated with the video department on how the content could evolve.
“Beth and I have done so much at this point that we don’t need words,” Ellington said. “We just look at each other, maybe with a side eye that says a paragraph worth of things, and then we just dive in and figure out what needs to happen. The same with Bart. We’ve worked with him in separate individual situations, so we get different perspectives and different ways to understand where he’s coming from, which helps so much in the room with a director that is in the moment [and] maybe inspired. That’s really, really important.”
