What is the appeal exactly of conspiracy theories, and why are so many drawn to the hidden, unspoken explanations for what ails the world? Anne Washburn’s new drama Anon roots around the psyche of a suburban housewife and would-be influencer named Jeanie Richards (Crystal Finn) who has fallen deep into QAnon rabbit holes and spends most of her days posting her dubiously sourced opinions on platforms that frequently ban her for content violations (or, worse, “shadow ban” her to keep her opinions from going viral).
The action takes place in 2024, “Biden’s America ;)” as projected by Jared Mezzocchi onto the spare beige set designed by the collective dots. And when Jeanie isn’t raging about Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, and the “Jewish media cabal,” she’s posting about the first menstruation of her precocious teenage daughter, Delia (Izabel Mar), in violation of a deal they’d struck about keeping family life out of the public eye. “It’s a reply to a reply,” Jeanie tries to explain before deleting the comment. “I know there aren’t a lot of eyeballs on what I write right now but that actually it makes it all the more crucial that every single thing I write is honed to deliver the best and most powerful message so that if even just one person sees it because this is – quite literally – about saving lives.”
Finn makes Jeanie a relatable suburbanite whose descent into political extremism emerges only gradually. And Washburn, working with director Anne Kauffman, sows the seeds for an epic confrontation that never quite materializes. We meet the new gay neighbors (Jeremy Shamos and Jeff Biehl, acting mostly with furrowed brows) whose pride flag becomes a major source of irritation to Jeanie as well as Jeanie’s clearly frustrated husband, Michael (Andrew Garman, in an underwritten role), who drops hints that his tolerance for Jeanie’s unpaid online shenanigans is wearing thin.
But once Washburn rolls out her characters and sets up a potentially explosive climax — even introducing a Chekhovian Glock purchased by Will and Adam as a self-defense precaution — she doesn’t follow through in any compelling way. Instead, she leans into some of the familiar absurdist and meta-theatrical devices she’s deployed in past plays like Mr. Burns and last year’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire. There’s a long fantasy sequence in which Jeanie imagines herself becoming a hero of the movement and the guest on a talk show by newly elevated QAnon hero Michael Flynn (Joel Van Liew).
There are also riffs in which we see first Delia and later Jeanie working on a school assignment to create a soliloquy for a character in King Lear who doesn’t have one in the original play. Curiously, Delia chooses not the innocent and forthright Cordelia but duplicitous eldest daughter Goneril, and imagines the woman’s concern about a parent roaming a “barren wasteland” in a violent storm. Like Lear, Jeanie has lost her grip on reality and acts out against her own interest and that of her family — but Washburn never follows through on this parallel in any significant way. While Mar brings a fierce intelligence to the role, Delia remains mostly inscrutable, occupying a kind of narrative nether zone. She’s a right-winger who decries the “libtards” at her school but also chastises her mother for posting easily debunked falsehoods denying the Holocaust.
And that’s the problem here. Washburn has crafted a story meant to expose a far-right mindset without digging very deep into its root causes or its effects (if Jeanie’s children are in danger of diving into similar dark waters, there are no clear signs here). We hear Jeanie say that she was once “your garden variety Commiefornia liberal” but never what triggered the radical change in her outlook. Finn seems to pivot between two performative modes, from delusional reasonableness to wide-eyed kookiness, that keeps the character at a safe distance — an object of satirical derision rather than an individual whose fractured worldview seems explicable given her particular circumstances. In the end, Anon lacks the specificity to bring its central character fully to life and out of the shadows of anonymity. ★★☆☆☆
ANON
MCC Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 1 for $49 to $112