**Angry Alan
You may emerge somewhat irked as well
John Krasinski. Photo: Johnny Cournoyer
This almost-solo play starring John Krasinski – America’s officially anointed male sweetheart ever since The Office first aired two decades ago – is a bit of a bait-and-switch proposition.
To dispel a few logical assumptions: “Alan” is not the title character; nor does Krasinski – the main draw for many attending – play him. Also, this is not, strictly speaking, a solo performance – although, given that a coyly semi-credited co-star (Ryan Colone, valiant) is accorded only a few fleeting moments of the 85-minute running time, it might as well be.
Too many spoilers? The only surprise is how tediously Penelope Skinner’s workaday script – co-devised with spouse Donald Sage MacKay, who performed the mostly-monologue at Edinburgh in 2018 – examines the parameters of the anti-“gynocracy” agenda.
Skinner set a high bar with her 2011 play The Village Bike, which Sam Gold directed at the Lortel in 2014 (Greta Gerwig’s portrayal of a young woman in the throes of sexual addiction – see Ben Brantley’s New York Times review – haunts me still). In this venture, also helmed by Gold, Miller takes forever to map how Roger – generic divorced dad, mourning his lost foothold on the corporate ladder – happens to stumble into the pit of resentment that is the male re-empowerment movement. The titular “Alan” is the spokesman/standard-bearer for a vast blogoverse of pissed-off males.
What’s Roger’s major maladjustment? Despite a faux pas that got him fired from an executive post at AT&T (he’s now night manager of the dairy section of a local supermarket), he’s actually enjoying a pretty nice life. He has a decent apartment (the producers skimped on the set: just projections, with a scattering of furniture). He also finds succor in a supportive new girlfriend, Courtney (whose counsel he echoes mockingly). Despite Courtney’s own increasingly woke leanings (she starts hanging with an artsy crowd at the local community college), she sounds commendably patient when it comes to schooling her domestic troglodyte.
Pivot to a Detroit conference hall (also two-dimensional, but plumped up with a couple of dummies in a half-hearted attempt to suggest a crowd): Flinging all financial probity to the winds (he’s on the hook for child support), Roger has opted for a “gold pass” in hopes of bumping elbows and sharing war stories with fellow disgruntled midlife males. He learns the hard way that Alan’s agenda is more ka-ching than Robert Bly-style reclamation. If it’s a letdown for Roger, it’s even more so for the audience, who lack even the element of surprise.
Finally dropping sidelong allusions to the kind of behavior that got him ostracized from polite society in the first place, Roger works his way up to a froth of indignation, and it’s here that Krasinski gets to exercise his actorly chops.
Throughout the play, video designer Lucy Mackinnon frequently zaps the stage streaky-red as Roger’s roid rage starts frothing. When at last it reaches the boiling point, Krasinski’s esophageal varices bulge with pent-up fury.
The final five minutes will come as no surprise. If the denouement reveals Roger to be borderline monstrous, he has been headed there all along. So why protract the process – except to turn a thin concept into a full-length, producible play?
Given the current zeitgeist, the entire venture seems a tone-deaf, superfluous exercise– at best the victim of bad, post-climactic timing. The toxic males are back in power. They won. Now what?
Studio Seaview (former home to Second Stage), to August 3