Review: Angry Alan, John Krasinski Gets Sucked Into the Manosphere

Why is Alan so angry? We never actually meet the title character of Penelope Skinner’s new solo(ish) drama, Angry Alan, so it’s hard to say. But we do meet one of his online disciples, Roger, played with affable dimness by John Krasinski in this New York debut, the first production at the new Studio Seaview. He doesn’t seem angry at all…not at first, anyway, even though he has plenty of legitimate reasons to feel rage.

Roger fits the profile of a lot of men who have fallen under the sway of the manosphere, an online community drawn together by an assortment of grievances that they broadly blame on the excesses of feminism. He’s 45, divorced, practically estranged from his 14-year-old son, and working as the dairy manager of a Kroger supermarket following the loss of his corporate job at AT&T.

The algorithm knows this information and has pointed him in the direction of Alan, an online reactionary who blames everything—from the shrinking share of college degrees held by men to the growing number of male suicides—on the gynocracy. “I find myself shouting YES! YES,” Rogers tells us about the day he discovered Alan’s website, describing it as his “red pill moment.”

Suddenly, Roger has found both a priest and a devil to explain his misfortunes. “Maybe what’s really to blame is the system,” he says, echoing a sentiment about systemic injustice that we in the theater have taken very seriously when it has come from women and racial minorities, though rarely from straight white men.

“Just wait till I share all this with Courtney,” he says of his live-in girlfriend, who has recently fallen in with a crowd of feminist art students. And the audience, snugly seated in a theater in midtown Manhattan, steps from a lobby bar that serves “curated wines, craft beer, and a golden-hued atmosphere” (the renovation looks great, by the way), laughs heartily at much of what he has to say. Poor dumb Midwestern rube, their chortles communicate as they observe this average American man as imagined by a female British playwright and portrayed by a millionaire actor. Is anyone still confused about why Donald Trump won the election?

Of course, one of the reasons we’re laughing has to do with the show’s presentational style. Sam Gold has directed Krasinski to speak his monologue as if he were telling a lengthy anecdote to a crowd of other men clad in button-down shirts and khakis (Kohl’s couture by costume designer Qween Jean). Maybe even a few women are there too. It’s a 90-minute mansplain.

Lucy Mackinnon’s PowerPoint-ready video design and Isabella Byrd’s sharp lighting occasionally push Angry Alan into TED Talk territory, while the small rotating set (by dots) comes complete with a leather armchair, painted backdrops of a down-market suburb, and a conference center populated by literal dummies. It’s essentially a giant diorama of flyover country, perhaps partially inspired by the design collective’s earlier work on Grangeville.

Krasinski’s tone is unrelentingly sunny, even as Roger journeys deeper down the rabbit hole, consuming news exclusively from sources run by Angry Alan™ and even missing a child-support payment so he can purchase a ticket to Alan’s seminar in Detroit. Roger sends Alan money beyond the price of admission so he can reach “Gold Donor” status, which entitles him to a special badge that he wears with the pride a previous generation of American men once reserved for their Purple Hearts. We get the distinct sense that Alan may play angry for the camera, but he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

But Roger’s cheeriness is a performance too, and once the pretense is dropped in a major tonal shift late in the play, we clearly see one of Roger’s fundamental problems—a lack of comfort accessing his full range of emotions that instinctively leads him to reach for either joviality or rage. Roger knows this too. “We need to talk about why we raise our sons not to show their feelings,” he says early in the play, as he is evangelizing the word of Alan. “Why we don’t allow them to be vulnerable. Or to be their true selves.” It’s a sentiment with which most feminists would agree, so why have these two camps remained so stubbornly divided? Can it really all be laid at the feet of internet hucksters like Alan?

While Krasinski’s brave and surprising performance makes for an engaging theatrical experience, Angry Alan feels a bit dated, as far as 90-minute issue plays go. It made its premiere at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Festival (original Roger Don Mackay is given a “co-creator” credit), and we’ve lived through an entire epoch since then. Skinner’s dramatization of the subtle power of the algorithm to turn tribalism into a satisfying consumer experience is still relevant.

But she has little comment on what a non-toxic masculinity might look like, or why calls for men to embrace therapy and softness have mostly failed. And she doesn’t even touch the massive technological disruptions coming our way that will make even the proudest courtiers here at Versailles feel just as powerless and angry as Roger. Will we still be laughing then?