What does a monster look like? In Angry Alan, now playing at Off Broadway’s newly rechristened Studio Seaview (formerly the home of the Second Stage Theater), he bears a striking resemblance to Jim from The Office. Indeed, the unorthodox casting of John Krasinski is the chief draw of this 85-minute drama about one middle-aged white man’s descent into the manosphere. The actor brings his innate likability to a button-pushing role where he repeatedly spouts horrifically misogynistic beliefs that he cloaks in thin fabric of “deep truths.”
Krasinski’s Roger is a master of self-delusion, a 45-year-old divorced man who’s stuck managing the dairy section of his local Kroger after losing his high-flying corporate job at AT&T for reasons that are never fully articulated. He’s divorced, of course, and his ex tellingly won sole custody of their son, now a 14-year-old who hasn’t been in contact with Roger in over a year. And he’s living with a woman, Courtney, whose recent interest in painting and life-drawing classes at the local community college has sparked a deep-seated resentment that he can’t quite articulate. Then Roger discovers an online personality known as Angry Alan, a fictionalized macho man of the manosphere who preaches a reverse-discrimination gospel that seems to owe much to figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
Suddenly, Roger seems to have a new language to articulate his previously inchoate feelings of rejection, isolation, and rage. “Since feminism was so successful things have gone too far the other way,” Roger relates, echoing his online talking points. “This whole ‘weaker sex’ thing is actually functioning in women’s favor.” Leaning into his aw-shucks, everyman persona, Krasinski initially makes Roger’s conversion to red-pill misogyny almost convincing.
But just as he drops telling asides that undermine his credibility (as when he recalls how “extremely challenging” his ex’s postpartum depression was — for him), Roger never emerges as much more than a cartoon figure in the script by Penelope Skinner (Don Mackay is also credited as a co-creator). He’s not your typical incel — he’s outgoing and friendly, and he’s had multiple female romantic partners who lasted for years, including one with whom he’s currently sharing his home. He has all the hallmarks one of those straight white man who seem constitutionally incapable of expressing their feelings; when texting with his son, he states that he is “overcome by emotion so I reply saying: OK.” We get it, what he thinks of as a deeply confessional moment is two tossed-off characters.
While Roger tells us repeatedly about the cushy corporate job he once had, he seems awfully gullible when confronted with glaringly crimson flags about the scamlike elements of Angry Alan’s operation. Moreover, the people around Roger — his ex, his new live-in partner, his son, his best friend from college (sacked from his job on sexual harassment charges), the rare woman he meets at Angry Alan’s in-person conference — remain basically props for Roger’s monologue and the delicate mechanics of the plot. (The ex in particular takes a strikingly dogmatic position late in the show that can really only be explained by the need to set up a narrative twist.)
Most of the other characters in the story pop up in photos projected onto the walls of the dots-designed set — and the Playbill credits five people with “cameos.” One of these makes a memorable surprise appearance near the end of the show, forcing Roger at last to confront his beliefs and betraying the inconsistencies and pretzel-like contradictions of his new philosophy. The scene is a riveting standout, helping us understand Roger and the limits of his thinking while also triggering him to reveal his inner self. But it also suggests the ways in which Skinner might have gone further to challenge Roger’s worldview throughout the show, to shed even more light on a man who chooses to envelop himself in the web’s darkest corners.
Still, there’s a surface slickness to director Sam Gold’s production, from Isabella Byrd’s deliberately harsh lighting to Mikaal Sulaiman’s occasionally jarring sound design to Qween Jean’s Dockers-adjacent costumes. The rotating set, by the collective dots, serves as a kind of visual joke, a series of glorified flats tricked out with elements of deceptive hyper-realisism but also whimsy (like the fully dressed dummies seated in conference room chairs at the Angry Alan live event). ★★★☆☆
ANGRY ALAN
Studio Seaview, Off Broadway
Running time:
Tickets on sale through August 3 for $87 to $249
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