By Stuart Miller …
Jeanie is sitting at her kitchen table in a San Antonio suburb, working feverishly on her laptop when her teenage daughter, Delia, storms in and through. After a door slams, Jeanie realizes why her daughter is angry and texts a hasty apology for forgetting to pick her up from school. “Work has been crazy today!”
So far, so normal. But in the MCC production of Anne Washburn’s Anon, directed by Anne Kaufman, this is anything but. We’ve already seen a projection telling us this is 2024 and we’re in “Biden’s America.” Jeanie (Crystal Finn) doesn’t actually have a job; her “work” is posting TikTok videos filled with far right and even QAnon talking points to an audience that numbers in the hundreds. So our sympathy for her goes out the window quickly. But surely, her daughter is not cut from the same cloth. Well, at dinner that night, Delia (Izabel Mar) calls out the “libtards” on her high school’s newspaper, to the approval of her mother and her father, Michael (Andrew Garman).
Across the street are new neighbors, Adam (Jeff Biehl) and Will (Jeremy Shamos), who have yet to unpack but who have already put a rainbow pride flag up out front. Unsurprisingly, that sets Jeanie off, creating an all-American conflict between someone who rants about freedom of speech when she is banned from Twitter and who is self-righteously offended when someone has the nerve to offer an opinion or a value that differs from hers.
The play crackles with life in the first act. Jeanie has become unbearably self-absorbed but when prodded by Delia the caring mom in her does re-emerge; they discuss a school assignment about King Lear and soliloquies, which will echo throughout the remainder of the play as Jeanie rages in, and against, the storm.
Still, she only pokes her head out of her rabbit hole so much and Michael is clearly losing patience. When he introduces himself to Adam and Will—he’s genial, implying he doesn’t share his wife’s homophobia—he drops comments that imply he’s halfway out the door.
By the end of Act 1, Jeanie’s behavior has become so unhinged that Will feels the need to embrace the Texas way of life and arm in himself. It was a revelatory moment as his very funny soliloquy reveals.
“I’d gone in thinking I was smarter than this gun store and I was going to win this gun store…Gun ownership is not going to inform my self-identity so I can make a clear and rational decision. As it turns out, I was an idiot . . . I was ruled by shapes and words and also the sheer craftsmanship that goes into gun design is riveting. I got a Glock. Because it’s called: Glock . . . it is a very seductive object of total power and I am helpless before its confidence.”
Washburn builds on the humor as Adam responds with a similar experience, but one that revolves around buying running shoes. Throughout the play Washburn balances that building of tension—will she follow Chekov’s rule and have the gun that is introduced fired—with social commentary and plenty of laughs. She also does an excellent job of blending the texting and posting of modern life into the action of a play without it feeling forced or stilted. She’s aided by an excellent cast. Finn uses her big eyes and expressive face to ooze warmth as Delia’s mama but also to let loose the mania inside of her. The rest of the cast is equally good although they’re more tethered to the real world. Shamos is particularly excellent as he gets more and more wound up by Jeanie’s invasion into their world.
When the second act opens, the set is gone and huge screens project an interview with Jeanie and Michael on TV, where she is portrayed as a truth-telling warrior hero of these tumultuous times—this includes calling out the Jews who had been running the media, revealing an even uglier side to Jeanie than we’d seen previously. But this interview takes place in the near future when we have a new president and vice-president, both of whom are such shocking choices it can mean only one of two things: Washburn is about to twist this play into a stunning new direction or it’s a fantasy sequence.
Sadly, it’s the latter and Jeanie is snapped from her reverie by Delia, who is dismayed by the fact that her mother is now re-posting Holocaust denier material; her endless plunge off the deep end and the inevitable confrontation with her neighbors consumes the rest of the relatively brief second act—the climax is compelling but then the ending feels abrupt and incomplete.
II said “sadly” because the play, while a fun ride, feels a bit too straightforward, although the parallels to the madness and sanity of King Lear are intriguing. We will think of Jeanie when we recognize people like her in the real world—I recently read an article about a mom whose son nearly died for her MAHA beliefs and watched a documentary where anti-LGBTQ+ activists tried taking over a school board. So she’s on to something here. But while “Anon” hits its targets they’re all obvious ones, unlike Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, it doesn’t blur the lines at all and we always know who we’re rooting against.
Washburn’s last play, The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, was equally entertaining in terms of dialogue and characters but it was strange, even enigmatic—you weren’t quite sure what to make of it but you couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. Anon could have used a little more of that.
Anon is at the Robert W. Wilson Space at MCC Theater, 511 W 52nd Street, NYC now through. For further information, please click here.
Photos by Monique Carboni.
Headline photo: Crystal Finn (on screen) and Jeremy Shamos and Jeff Biehl in foreground in Anon.
