T-shirts for sale in the lobby at Angry Alan, the new play by Penelope Skinner (at the Studio Seaview through August 3) are printed with the legend “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” Experience suggested I turn around and leave immediately, but duty compelled me to stay. The slogan comes up during the play, which is a sort of stage equivalent of a feminist T-shirt.
Running eighty-five minutes and starring John Krasinski as Roger, the work is mostly a monologue (although a second character, his teen son, played by Ryan Colone, appears for about ten minutes) that examines the alleged problem of white-male mediocrity but actually reveals far more about the paltry, reality-oblivious imagination of the left-liberal feminist mindset and the cultural blob that insists that this sort of thinly veiled political screed be accepted as important, meaningful social commentary.
Krasinski has built up considerable goodwill by his stint on The Office and then starring as the CIA analyst Jack Ryan in the Prime Video television series, and he attracts an unusual audience demographic: heterosexual couples under the age of fifty. The theater audience is ordinarily heavily tilted toward women of a certain age from the suburbs dragging along their bored, retired husbands; or women in groups; or women accompanied by theatrically inclined gay men; or groups of gay men. But young and youngish men who look like they’d be comfortable in a sports bar watching the Buffalo Bills are a rare sight. Angry Alan repays their interest with a brisk slap to the jaw.
Given Krasinski’s dopey, wide-eyed expression, and his gee-whiz tone of voice, it becomes apparent in the opening minutes that his character, a Midwestern grocery-store department manager, is an oaf whose insights and beliefs are to be taken ironically (being tall, handsome, and charming, the actor is woefully ill-suited for this part, which was evidently intended for a schlumpy, soft-bellied character actor, not Jack Ryan). Roger, divorced years ago, lives in a blandly furnished Midwestern home; the director Sam Gold and a scenic-design firm called “dots” present an antiseptic, average-looking set so lacking in creative spark or personality it suggests a 1980s family sitcom or possibly just an empty soul. He’s so obtuse that he observes that after his ex-wife gave birth to their son, she suffered from post-partum depression—and it was really hard on him.
Wandering around the internet, he tells us, he happened upon a YouTube personality called Angry Alan who posits in a series of videos that men are intrinsically good but have been downgraded in status by a ruthless “gynocracy.” Roger confesses that he feels like a failure—he used to have a high-flying corporate job at AT&T, but now he is so broke that he can’t afford the price of a ticket to a “men’s rights” conference in Detroit unless he skips a monthly child-support payment. Angry Alan’s diatribes (which we never hear but are meant to consider distilled misogyny) furnish him with a new point of view, one that restores some of his self-worth and which everyone in the audience recognizes as chilling and dangerous. “Maybe it’s not all my fault. Maybe what’s truly to blame is the system,” he says. He is deeply troubled by a society increasingly led by women, which relegates men to second-tier status.
In short, Roger is in the grip of a fanatical obsession; he’s become a creature of “the manosphere.” He notes that he has been “red-pilled,” and the director helpfully illustrates the scariness of this transformation with projections of crimson accompanied by a staticky sound (like old televisions when they were between channels) that indicates poor Roger is losing his grip. By the end of the play, this seemingly nice, ordinary fellow will be utterly isolated, screaming crazily, and it’s all because of those horrible internet videos.
Roger isn’t a character but a caricature, a punching bag, an opportunity for a feminist writer to take a few potshots at men for electing Donald Trump and otherwise interfering with the building of a gynocratic paradise. The British playwright Skinner (together with her husband, Don Mackay, who is credited separately as her “co-creator”) rounds up all of the trite talking points of midwit columnists contemplating masculinity from a terrified and rancorous distance to form a portrait with all of the depth and nuance of the average Washington Post political cartoon. Roger is simply the conduit for a harrumphing lecture about how awful even seemingly affable and ordinary men are, with their sexist jokes, their inability to accept economic change, and their discomfort with teen sons who announce that they might fancy becoming daughters.
Along with a shocking joke he thinks is funny but is meant to make the audience gasp in horror, one of many indicators that Roger simply doesn’t understand how much more difficult it is to be a woman is his disbelief of the statistic that one in six women have been raped. There can’t be that many rapists, can there? he asks, indicating his disconnection from reality. In fact, it’s the play that is oblivious to how things actually are; that rape figure and similar ones about the alleged pervasiveness of rape have been thoroughly debunked. Maybe it’s the “femosphere” that needs to be reacquainted with facts, especially facts about ordinary straight men, from whom liberal women seem increasingly to be estranging themselves.
Amusingly enough, no one connected with Angry Alan seems to understand that it plays like a period piece; the discourse has moved on. The original draft of the play was written in 2017, when “Believe all women,” “toxic masculinity” and “f–k the patriarchy” were rallying cries. Today the cultural Left is engaged in an effortful heterosexual-male outreach program to earn back voters whom Hillary Clinton ignored; it won’t be long before we see Pete Buttigieg, in wraparound sunglasses and cargo shorts, tearing the cap off a bottle of Miller (not Bud Light) at the Daytona 500, or Kamala Harris knocking back shots of Jägermeister at Hooters. Stamping men as insecure, menacing, toxic, rageful beings perpetually on the verge of carrying out rape is no longer being taken quite so seriously as a supposed explanation for our politics these days.
