Review: Anon, the One About the MAGA Neighbor and the Ugly Flag

“It’s good to have a plot,” two gay men repeat to each other in a way that makes one worry there won’t be one in Anne Washburn’s latest play, Anon, now making its world premiere at MCC Theater. In fact, there’s plenty of plot to go around (and around and around) in this thoughtful, meandering, and intermittently hair-raising examination of the choose-you-own-adventure paranoia overtaking American minds.

The title contains a clever triple-meaning. It’s shorthand for the QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theorizing that preoccupies Jeanie (Crystal Finn), a mom in suburban San Antonio trying to become a MAGA influencer in the weeks leading up to the 2024 presidential election. It also hints at the anonymous “lurker” account her new across-the-street neighbors, Adam (Jeff Biehl) and Will (Jeremy Shamos), use to watch her unhinged TikTok videos. Meanwhile, Jeanie’s daughter Delia (Izabel Mar) composes a soliloquy for Goneril, daughter of the title character in Shakespeare’s King Lear. ”Anon” means “at once” in antique English. For internet conspiracists, the climax of the movie is always arriving anon.

We only grasp the central conflict on this little street in Texas well into the first act, when Jeanine posts an outraged video about the Progress Pride Flag her new neighbors have raised in their front yard, calling it “indoctrination” dangerous to her two children.

“I hate that flag,” admits Will (me too, gurl), peeved that Adam hoisted it without his consent, and before they have even unpacked and installed proper window treatments. But now that the enemy has taken issue with it, Will vows to protect that ugly flag like a Civil War-era infantryman. “Dumb human psyche,” he laments, wallowing in Washburnian self-awareness. Then he buys a gun.

Washburn is a shrewd observer of the tribal reorganization of American life, how rapidly changing circumstances are scrambling our politics and leading us to conclusions we would have considered unthinkable a decade ago. It’s not a shock that Jeanie followed the RFK Jr. trail, from health-conscious California lefty to MAHA Texas Trumper. So important is her cause that she’s willing to embarrass her daughter by writing online about her late puberty (Mar successfully musters teenage fury tempered by real love) and alienate her quietly suffering husband (an underutilized Andrew Garman).

Finn, one of the best actors working in New York, unsurprisingly crushes it, fully committing to the role of a woman valiantly fighting for her truth. Every snide guffaw from the audience seems to fuel her, reinforcing her self-conception as a lonely prophet standing against the forces of darkness. It’s a remarkable performance.

So it’s disappointing that Washburn squanders it by letting the off-Broadway audience off the hook with easy laughs about the kooky MAGA lady with internet poisoning, as if half of them won’t fire up Instagram within minutes of exiting the theater, happy to indulge their own fantastical delusions. The more difficult (but more rewarding) task would have been to make us understand how we have more in common with Jeanie than we’d like to imagine.

Shamos comes the closest to telling this story in his performance as Will, who initially seems like the more levelheaded of the two (Biehl proves to be an excellent foil, journeying from shit-stirring queen to unflappable crisis negotiator). Shamos treats Will as if he were an addict: His initial hesitancy to delve into this internet drama is only because he knows he won’t be able to stop himself once he does. It’s a compelling approach, but I’m not sure anyone would be able to sell such a sharp dive off the deep end. Most of us wade out gingerly, moving with the current.

An early scene in which Adam (whose last name is “Epstein”) recounts first meeting Jeanie, is telling. She asked him if he is related to the “suicide,” pointedly using air-quotes. “I mean it was fine,” says Adam, adding, “who doesn’t hate Jeffrey Epstein and who thinks that was a suicide?” Not many in the audience, judging from the wave of relieved laughter. Could it be that we’re all paranoid cranks now? Or perhaps we cannot help but notice the truck-sized plot holes in the story peddled by America’s feckless ruling class.

Washburn has reunited with director Anne Kauffman, who helmed Washburn’s The Ladies in 2004, but hasn’t collaborated with her since The Communist Dracula Pageant in 2008. Kauffman’s strengths as a director (her economic use of space, her ability to inject tension into a scene, even when the text doesn’t necessarily support it) are useful for a play that takes too long to get rolling and often moves in circles once it does.

The set (by dots) depicts a spartan dining room with still-packed moving boxes in the periphery, and Cha See’s lighting gives us a sense of the passage of time and creates little flashes of horror as the neighbors peer warily across the street in the mounting darkness. Tei Blow’s cinematic sound design brings us into Jeanie’s headspace, a ’90s Hollywood fantasy of heroic vindication. A second act daydream, in which Jeanie is interviewed by “Vice President General Mike Flynn,” is presented in multiple screens (dramatic projections by Jared Mezzocchi) and earns the only real gasp of the show.

Washburn has an uncanny ability to tiptoe up to rich dramatic situations without ever seeing them through. I enjoy edging as much as anyone, but give me a satisfying climax before curtain call. Unfortunately, Anon is the kind of play that ends in an inconclusive blackout. It’s unsatisfying onstage, but perhaps a truthful depiction of a world that doesn’t follow neat rules of dramaturgy. It’s good to have a plot, but the world keeps spinning without one.