John Krasinski Downvotes the Nice Guy in ANGRY ALAN — Review
With his immediately affable, borderline derpy demeanor, John Krasinski is the ideal Roger, the disaffected, suburban nice-guy who finds his own ideal in the play Angry Alan’s eponymous online personality. Though slowly spinning out following the loss of his job, and increasingly emasculated after his ex-wife’s walking out, he registers as harmless, even friendly. Roger’s smiley facade rarely slips, even as playwright Penelope Skinner, with co-creator Don Mackay, reveal the depths of the darkness behind it. Directed by Sam Gold for the one-act’s New York debut, and almost entirely alone onstage, Krasinski expertly exposes the dangerous underbelly of the characters, and persona, on which he’s built his career.
Roger is introduced mid-discovery – or is it after? Before? Skinner’s sense of time is shrewdly askew, representing the displacement of her subject’s mindset as he describes his first encounter with Angry Alan. It began as mindless hyperlink-hopping, clicking from one article to the next until reaching the titular account: one of those vaguely Classicist sites whose articles are just flimsy fronts for rampant misogyny and racism. Quietly seeing himself reflected in (actual) statistics about men’s suicide rates, he finds himself uplifted by Alan’s video on history’s great men (and, later, those “explaining” how women’s liberation has relegated men to society’s bottom rungs) and shares it with his extended circle.
This includes his current girlfriend, whose lefty art class friends he blames for their widening divide, and his one remaining close friend, who moved (ominously) to a shed after a workplace incident upended his life. Everyone else, it can be gleaned from between Roger’s lines, has been pushed away by the curdling of his sad-sack energy into bitterness. So this “red pill moment” (his words) becomes a lifesaver, and he takes to it feverishly, and takes it offline.
Roger’s experience of the failures of strictly enforced gender roles is valid, and Skinner traces the warped path from discontent to interior self-destruction. That journey is cleverly refracted by the introduction of his estranged kid, Joe (Ryan Colone), who offers an alternative Gen Z cope late in the play, long after Roger’s receptivity has been shot.
Having premiered in 2018, the play’s insights feel less incisive than they might have in the wake of Trump’s first election. But with meninism hitting the mainstream head-on in the intervening years, and thanks to the production’s hyperrealistic scenic design (by dots, whose sets chillingly evoke the pseudo-soothing, uncanny valley soullessness of recent AI slop), it catches up to the present day.
Likewise, while the rabbit hole into which Roger falls is a foregone conclusion, Krasinski plays the descent with understated acuity, leveraging his charm to remain mostly intact as the events he narrates begin to sharply counteract it. That placid, everyday Jim Halpert smile takes on the unnameable discomfort many experience when seeing that one photo of the 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation, of the twisted calm achieved through cultism.
A slight crevasse appears, around the two-thirds mark, when Roger stands awkwardly to the side at one of Alan’s IRL conventions he attends, between this supposed ‘beta’ and the six-foot-three, reigning Sexiest Man Alive playing him. But Krasinski deftly fills that gap with a crescendo of aggression that suggests Tom Cruise’s character in the film Magnolia; the perfect storm of sexual charisma and purely toxic ideology. Roger is able to inhabit that same keynote-address charlatanism, manifesting his online world on a number of screens which flank the stage. (Isabella Byrd did lighting; Mikaal Sulaiman, sound; and Lucy Mackinnon, video design.)
Its megastar lead hopefully draws in the exact crowd which might most urgently need to see this, but Angry Alan offers plenty of troubling treasures for those on, or off, any particular pill.
Angry Alan is in performance through August 3, 2025 at Studio Seaview on West 43rd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
