“Broadway is Back!” echoed through the star-studded theater season that just ended—and the 78th Tony Awards that reflected the excitement, proof that the 40-carat names once filling Hollywood sound stages are now lighting up New York marquees. Denzel Washington, Mia Farrow, Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney and Hugh Jackman are just a few of the in-person box-office lures who sold tickets this year. Now it’s time to add another name to the welcome mat.
I’m talking John Krasinski, the handsome, agreeable writer-director and star of such films as A Quiet Place and It, plus scores of hit series, including Jack Ryan and The Office. He appeared once onstage, years ago, with Claire Danes in a small, short-lived role, but now he’s apparently decided on the need for more prestigious credits in the get-famous business, so he’s back in a long-winded one-man vehicle called Angry Alan, not in a mainstream Broadway theatre, but in a small off-Broadway house called the Studio Seaview. Fans who have never heard of this postage-stamp venue are packing it nightly to see something unusual—not really a play at all, but an 85-minute talkathon without intermission in which the movie actor seizes the rare opportunity to explore a gamut of moods, expressions, feelings, attitudes and opinions about the vulnerabilities, role reversals and gender confusions men face. That’s a lot to chew, and Krasinski does it without ketchup.
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The show, directed by Sam Gold, says a lot of toxic things about women with mixed success, which is pretty amazing since it is written by a woman, Penelope Skinner, whose feminist observations are witty enough to entertain (but not always catalogued well enough to convince). Mr. Krasinski, as the target of enough feminist agendas to require orthopedic surgery, plays a man named Roger—once a skirt chaser but now, approaching middle age, just a frustrated shadow of the man he used to be—depressed, disillusioned, deflated, demoted from an important corporate job that used to define him, divorced from an ex-wife, Suzanne, who understood him and also elevated him to the status of parent to a 14-year-old son so alienated from his father that the two of them haven’t spoken to each other for eight months. Roger also has a new girlfriend-companion, Courtenay, who seemed to be the perfect, understanding and compatible center of his troubled existence, until she fell under the influence of a pack of gal pals and became…(here comes Roger’s most hated word)…liberated. Watching ball games, sharing a beer and enjoying quiet dinners at home turned into self-indulgences like eating kimchi, wasting hours on social media, drinking oat milk and building a career attending art classes to draw naked male models while wearing a T-shirt that reads “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” None of these characters appear anywhere except blow-up images on a wall. For the rest of the show, I twitched nervously while Roger sinks deeper into the growing rage and misery of the confusing hypocrisy of modern women (according to the author, not me). They want equality with an emphasis on dominance, but they also love Fifty Shades of Grey.
Nobody with the titular name ever appears in Angry Alan. He’s a cynical gender defender with a website and YouTube channel, dedicated to dispersing advice, information and negativity about the decline of modern men emasculated by women who have reduced them to paranoid neurotics in a new world order of internet politics. Roger is his obsessed pupil and follower, wolfing down every warning about exaggerated rape statistics, unemployment ratios, the injustice of the family court system and the frustrations men face when they are forced to play the roles of marital scapegoats and financial providers but not allowed to feel or show vulnerability about it. Roger finally makes his peace with the hurt and humiliation of being a man in a society of gender chaos where nobody is sure what a man is supposed to be in the first place, and it looks like he’ll find contentment at last. But then, as the play nears the final curtain, the ultimate shattering of his principles knocks him out of his preppy Florsheim loafers. In an awkward finale, they throw in a scene in which Roger’s monosyllabic son arrives for a surprise visit and confides his secret desire for a sex change. Just when Roger thinks he’s finally figured out how the strategy works in the war between the sexes, his whole world crashes again.
The father struggles to make sense to the son by convincing him a man with a penis does not wear a dress, but the son, whose strange new habits include a reluctance to limit himself by using specific pronouns, thinks Roger is hopelessly antidiluvian. Roger tones down the horror of the realization that he will never have the perfect son, but everyone walks out, and he’s alone again, ready to give in and let Angry Alan be his guide through what’s left of his life. Happy at last. Or is he?
Tragically, his wit is not sharp, sardonic or wry enough to keep up with the times. But neither is the play. Hundreds of awareness-raising issues faced by women are constantly explored on stage and screen, but too few offer insights into the contrasting impact of what men go through in a social environment defined by women. For that reason alone, I join the enthusiastic audience applauding wildly at the end of Angry Alan—not exclusively for the myriad issues left dangling and unresolved in the writing, but especially for the amazing power and nuance in John Krasinski’s colorful, always surprising performance. Movies don’t show how energetic, versatile and introspective he can be. I’m happy to report he’s every bit as forceful and funny—often at the same time—on the stage as he is on the screen. This play is not raw and revealing enough to touch the heart, but it’s fascinating to watch him go through the motions, giving it all he’s got, and time pleasantly well spent.
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