NEW YORK — Modern men are in a crisis.
A quick Google search will warn you that guys are feeling more isolated, depressed and suicidal than ever before. One of those gents is Roger (John Krasinski), a perfectly mediocre and seemingly innocuous fortysomething. Roger is now a dairy manager at Kroger after losing his plum desk job at AT&T. He’s divorced but has a steady girlfriend, and a teenage son whom he sees every so often as long as the child support checks clear.
Roger is also deeply insecure and consumed by a grievous pastime: He’s a fanatical, card-carrying men’s rights activist. His chilling descent — from lonely new convert to even lonelier zealot — is the provocative subject of “Angry Alan,” an incisive and pitch-black comedy for our current dread-filled hellscape.
Written by British playwright Penelope Skinner, and grippingly directed by Sam Gold (“An Enemy of the People”), the spiky one-man show opened off-Broadway June 11 at Studio Seaview. It’s a politically incorrect minefield that most Hollywood agents would chuck right in the trash, as Roger rants and pontificates about sexual assault victims, the mainstream media and his own narrow views of gender.
It is to Krasinski’s credit that he’d choose to come back to theater with an original work that is both challenging and potentially rife for misinterpretation. As Roger, the “Jack Ryan” star cleverly inverts his all-American, good-guy persona, creating a character who is eager to be liked yet not above reproach. Imagine “The Office” prankster Jim Halpert, but with an extreme case of Joe Rogan-induced brain rot.
When the play begins, Roger has just tumbled down a digital rabbit hole of the fictional Angry Alan, an Andrew Tate-like messiah who preaches that “most men are intrinsically good,” and it’s the so-called “gynocracy” that is keeping them down. Through his anti-feminist videos and blog posts, Roger feels that finally someone understands the inadequacy and frustration he’s been harboring for years.
And so, he plunges further into the manosphere: donating money he doesn’t have to unspecified “male mental health” causes, and attending a seminar on “Reclaiming Your Masculine Power.” He invites his buddy Dave to an Angry Alan men’s rights conference, but Dave is down-and-out after harassing a woman at an office Christmas party. “All this ‘Me Too’ business is very simple until you actually know the guy who gets accused,” Roger shrugs.
At times, the production feels like the most stomach-churning TED Talk you’ve ever been subjected to. Krasinski spends most of the 85-minute runtime in Roger’s drab, suburban living room (claustrophobically rendered by design collective Dots), clicking through photos and talking points like a rage-baiting snake-oil salesman.
Skinner toes a gossamer line of attempting to understand the root of Roger’s pain, but stops short of rubber-stamping his bigotry and entitlement. For the most part, she succeeds in making Roger’s tangents at once frighteningly familiar and preposterous to the point of parody. (In one moment, he whines about the “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon, questioning why the modern American woman “wants to be president and she wants to be spanked on the bottom.”)
Krasinski returns to the New York stage for the first time since 2016’s “Dry Powder,” after years spent straddling popcorn action movies (“Fountain of Youth”) with directorial passion projects (“A Quiet Place”). Monologuing for an hour and a half is no walk in the park, but the genial A-lister tackles the task at hand with aw-shucks charisma and confidence. It’s an ingenious stroke of casting that instantly endears the audience to Roger, even as his behavior becomes increasingly manic and unhinged. Krasinski will knock you sideways as the play hurtles toward its shocking finish, revealing impressive new shades as an actor that we haven’t seen from him before.
“Angry Alan” is a Molotov cocktail, igniting difficult conversations about how we got to our present-day American nightmare. It’s messy and imperfect and offers no easy answers, forcing theatergoers to confront the fragile-egoed monsters lurking just behind their laptop screens.
“Angry Alan” is now running at Studio Seaview (305 W. 43rd Street) through Aug. 3.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: John Krasinski horrifies as a Trump-era meninist: ‘Angry Alan’ review
