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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Angry Alan review – John Krasinski gets red-pilled in a tense, timely play
There's something endearing, even a little disarming, about seeing John Krasinski back in some ill-fitting khaki slacks. Though now a bona fide movie star, the 45-year-old actor remains most beloved by wide swaths of middle America for playing Jim Halpert, the perennial guy-next-door with a thankless white-collar job and a deadpan sense of humor on the long-running NBC sitcom The Office. On stage at the relatively intimate Studio Seaview in midtown Manhattan, Krasinski once again inhabits the aw-shucks amiability of your average suburban white guy, the type of guy you'd want to grab a beer with or, just maybe, give a hug. Such affability makes Krasinski a slyly perfect avatar for the concerns of Angry Alan, an Americanization of British writer Penelope Skinner's 2018 play now running off-Broadway, which darkly imagines what would happen if Jim Halpert got laid off, divorced and disillusioned. Or more accurately, what would happen if such a man found himself lonely, depressed, disappointed and on the internet. Such a man is named Roger, an ex-AT&T cog in the midwest who, in the 90-minute play's first scene, stumbles through an internet wormhole onto the videos of a men's rights figure named Angry Alan. Roger, confidently played by Krasinski with an unconfident, frenetic, near desperate energy and beseeching upspeak, is an upbeat guy with seemingly mild political persuasions; he tells us, in one of his cascading direct addresses – Angry Alan is, for the most part, a one-man show that chips at the boundary between performer and audience – that he pays his child support payments to ex-wife Suzanne on time, loves his son Joe and even encouraged new girlfriend Courtney to take art classes with nude models at the local community college. Nevertheless, he gets easily – too easily, I would argue – sucked into Alan's black-and-white worldview of a gynocracy out of control, the feminist movement gone too far, leaving modern men oppressed and 'in crisis'. In a matter of days, Roger becomes a true believer at the expense of his relationships – namely, Courtney and her new pink pussy hat-era liberal friends, as Suzanne already resents him. In a matter of weeks, he's attending an in-person men's rights conference and a 'gold donor' to Alan's cause – the YouTuber, modeled in part on the pseudo-psychology of Jordan Peterson, also bilks his subscribers for money, a characterization that makes the appeal of his ideology feel less insidious than it should; the spectrum of men's rights arguments works not just for financial suckers. The ideological lines in Angry Alan may be a little stark and the targets too easy – the fact that Roger is so credulous, so unwitting and also a night manager at Kroger makes a troubling implication about the class and intelligence of those drawn to the so-called manosphere. But Skinner's updated text, created with Don Mackay and directed here by Sam Gold, goes to great, compelling lengths to shade in the details of a human heart misguided by isolation of modernity, the pressures of masculinity and most prominently, the internet. There's plenty of truth to Roger's observations that men are socialized not to be vulnerable, pressured to make money and see their value in terms of financial contributions; that third-wave feminism can be confusing and at times hypocritical; that the #MeToo movement was not always fair; that people's politics are, by and large, idiosyncratic and imperfect. And there's plenty of pain in his predicament – laid off by a corporation that never cared about him, unable to communicate effectively with his son, feeling left behind. Feeling a lot, and with few tools to handle it. Skinner's great insight, as a writer, is how these elements curdle into hate and resentment. (The stage design by the prolific collective dots, which imagines Roger's living room with skewed eyelines and a sloped floor, evokes the flattening, reality-warping effect of social media.) Roger's stream-of-conscious illustrates the slippery slope from hurt feelings to 'men's mental health', the fine line between embracing vulnerability and weaponizing resentment, why someone would be desperate to hear 'men are intrinsically good' and then take it the wrong way. But the play's main draw in the manosphere-dominant year of 2025 is Krasinski, who ultimately delivers a masterful performance that not only conveys Roger's loneliness and delusion but the confusion, bewilderment and hurt of the women around him. That the rushed ending, with a late-stage twist, is as effective as it is owes to his body near vibrating with currents of shame, confusion, hate and, yes, anger. It's a fascinating use of the everyman quality, turning our sympathy to someone who espouses misogyny, playing into aspects of traditional masculinity while evincing its traps, framing red-pill ideology as poison and straight men's feelings as prey. One could contest the framing, but I can't begrudge empathy, nor the potential that Jim Halpert might give some unsuspecting boyfriends a surprise warning.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Angry Alan' Review: John Krasinski Explores the Manosphere
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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
