Roger is jazzed. He’s spent money he doesn’t have, including the child-support payment he owes, on a gold ticket to a men’s rights conference. Nor does the gathering disappoint. The Detroit hotel where it takes place is brimming with guys taking back their power. But guess what’s best? Angry Alan, the internet personality who opened Roger’s eyes to the evils of the gynocracy, is scheduled to speak. This is going to be great!
For Roger, anyway. Not so much for us.
It is perhaps a clue to the over-thick ironies of Penelope Skinner’s “Angry Alan,” which opened Tuesday at the new Studio Seaview, that the horde of inspired men at the conference is represented by, count ’em, two dummies and some faceless paintings on a backdrop. Offered in Sam Gold’s staging as a joke, like the rest of their gender, they are mere markers in a loaded argument. Even Roger, though played exceedingly well by John Krasinski, is a place holder: a straw man incarnate.
Krasinski works hard to disguise that. As he proved during nine seasons as the gemütlich Jim Halpert on “The Office,” he performs charm, titrated with a satire of charm, very well. Here, in a role that runs to more than 10,000 words, some of them Roger’s and some of them his unflattering imitations of the women around him, that good-guy appeal has a lot of work to do.
Because Roger is not a good guy. Though he believes himself to be supportive and reliable, the play keeps dropping heavy hints to the contrary. His first wife got uncontested custody of their son. The son doesn’t speak to him. He lost his BMW-level job at AT&T under unexplained circumstances, and is now the dairy manager at Kroger. Perhaps worst, he is paranoid about his girlfriend, Courtney, who has enrolled in a nude life-drawing class at a community college. Her classmates wear T-shirts that say things like Mind Your Own Uterus.
Courtney’s recent behavior and new friends are the immediate cause of Roger’s descent into the manosphere. There, Angry Alan teaches him that women, far from being victims of a male-dominated society, run the world and have done so for decades. Men must fight back to restore the proper balance.
Perhaps these loathsome ideas seemed like news in 2018, when “Angry Alan” premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Don Mackay, credited with creating the play with Skinner, played Roger there and, later, in London.) The title character might have introduced audiences to recently emerged manopshere figures like the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who advocates a return to traditional gender roles, and the British influencer Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist with millions of followers.
But such men are all too familiar now — familiar enough, in some cases, to face retribution. (Tate was recently charged with raping and trafficking women; he has denied the allegations.) A play in New York in 2025 cannot expect to get very far on shocks that are no longer shocks.
So it falls to the traditional elements of drama to create tension, but Skinner, the British author of very smart plays like “The Village Bike,” has mostly forsworn them. Of the five actors besides Krasinski listed in the program, four appear only in photographs projected onto a wall of the set. (The fifth is a surprise I won’t spoil.) And even Roger is not so much a character as the self-canceling negation of one. Everything he says is so clearly delusional and self-unaware that he cannot carry one side of an argument, let alone two.
Fair enough, politically: This isn’t the kind of argument that has sides. There’s no justifying Roger, who does some deplorable things as the force of disappointment begins to crush him. What Skinner offers instead is a hands-off character portrait, a very smart and funny one at that.
Gold’s stylish and well-paced production likewise keeps its distance, with flat, cartoonish sets by the design collective Dots; Banana Republic-style clothing by Qween Jean; cool, almost fluorescent lighting by Isabella Byrd; and sound, by Mikaal Sulaiman, that somehow seems to imply a laugh track. Even the newly refurbished theater, in the dim, amber style of a boutique hotel, has winky quotation marks around it.
But mind the gap. The insight that is meant to grow in the space between what Roger says and how it comes across (he complains that his ex-wife’s postpartum depression was really hard — on him) is soon obliterated by the oncoming train of his rage.
Though Skinner never writes less than compellingly, and Krasinski is willing and able to go where she takes him, I wasn’t. Whether we are being asked to sympathize with Roger as a victim (doubtful) or to consider our own vulnerability to his brand of charming awfulness (no thanks), I could fathom no reason, beyond the intelligence of the performance and production, to spend 85 minutes with him. We already live with him 24/7.
Angry Alan
Through Aug. 3 at Studio Seaview, Manhattan; studioseaview.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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