Roger’s ex-wife had a bad case of postpartum depression. “That was very challenging for me,” he says. And, speaking of his ex, Roger has just had a big realization: “The system is now so rigged in women’s favor.” To him, not only do women have it all these days, they also hypocritically want it all. “She wants to be president,” Roger explains, speaking incredulously of a general she, “but she also wants to be spanked on the bottom.”
In other words, Roger sucks. And as played by John Krasinski, it’s also a perverse pleasure to spend 85 increasingly distressing minutes with him in Penelope Skinner’s tricksy new play Angry Alan. (This is the first commercial production in the newly branded Studio Seaview, formerly the off-Broadway home of the nonprofit Second Stage.)
The title character, never seen or heard on stage, is a leader in the digital manosphere, where disaffected men are fed endless content about how they’re “intrinsically good” despite their victimization in America’s “gynocentric” culture. Roger is going to lay this all out for his girlfriend Courtney one day. If he hasn’t already it’s because she has all these progressive friends and sometimes wears a t-shirt that reads “Carry Yourself with the Confidence of a Mediocre White Man.” The way he sees it, she’ll have to see the light once he breaks it down for her.
We learn all this from Roger in a lightning-speed monologue, staged smoothly and playfully by Sam Gold and delivered by Krasinski with jovial, almost folksy charm. And Skinner breaks down Roger’s increasingly appalling ideas into small enough leaps of logic that we sometimes don’t realize how far from reality he’s traveled until he’s already too far gone.
As he saunters through the design collective dots’ vertiginously tilted set, Roger is aware of the audience, but as long as he’s the one doing the talking, he’s totally at ease. With no one to talk back to him as he digs deeper and deeper into his online community, eventually investing not only time and sanity but also the cash for his next child support payment, Roger speaks with the unchallenged assuredness of someone living in an echo chamber.
But in a wickedly smart structural twist, when Roger is suddenly forced to acknowledge other voices, it’s as if he loses control of the type of story he’s telling, as well as the relationship that he’s been building with the audience. And that’s just it, Angry Alan seems to argue: If we choose to wade into the men’s rights corner of the internet, we meet these YouTube trolls on their own terms, in a vacuum devoid of context or debate. That’s the way they like it, and need it to be, if they’re going to successfully lure in the unsuspecting Rogers of the world.
But as if cracking open a YouTube video from the inside, Skinner interrupts Roger mid-flow, cutting off his access to his viewers and forcing him to, if only momentarily, listen to somebody else. That he’s never learned how to do that tips this taut dark satire toward tragedy.
Angry Alan is now running at Studio Seaview.
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