It’s always heartening when a playwright deals with the hot-button social issues of our time. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the new play by Anne Washburn receiving its world premiere at MCC Theater feels so scattershot and unfocused. Depicting the collision, or lack thereof, between a gay couple and a QAnon-addled neighbor across the street in a San Antonio suburb, Anon squanders its potential through the playwright’s penchant for stylization and narrative flourishes that seem mostly designed to show off her freewheeling imagination.
The central character is Jeanie (a terrific Crystal Finn), a housewife and mother of two children (we only see one of them onstage) who has gone down the proverbial rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Spending all of her time on the internet and compulsively posting rant-laden TikTok videos from her car, she’s unhappily living, as an opening projection informs us, in “Biden’s America” circa September, 2024.
Jeanie’s a loving mother to her teenage daughter Delia (Izabel Mar), despite committing such parental offenses as posting about Delia’s menstrual issues online. Her husband Michael (Andrew Garman) indulges her obsessions, although not without pointing out that barely anyone seems to be paying attention to her postings which include Holocaust denial. In a seemingly innocuous discussion with her daughter about the weather, Jeanie comments, “They haven’t gotten any better at predicting the weather, they’ve just gotten a whole lot better at controlling it.”
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The thin plotline is set in motion with the arrival to the neighborhood of Adam (Jeff Biehl) and Will (Jeremy Shamos), who have proudly hoisted a gay flag outside their home. Needless to say, this infuriates Jeanie who posts a TikTok rant affirming her tolerance for gays but saying that the flag display is akin to “indoctrination.” In response, an increasingly rattled Will impulsively buys a gun; a Glock, in fact, which despite his liberal leanings he admits is “a very seductive object of total power and I am helpless before its confidence.”
The stage seems set for a heated confrontation, and a scene in which a friendly Michael knocks on his neighbors’ door and asks if he could have some of their moving boxes, adding that there’s no need to mention the request to his wife, hints at trouble in their marriage. But the play doesn’t lead anywhere particularly interesting, instead providing such digressions as a video fantasy sequence in which a triumphant Jeanie, along with her loyal family, is being interviewed by a “Vice President General Flynn,” and a subplot involving Delia’s school assignment to write a soliloquy for a Shakespeare character that leads to a lengthy riff on King Lear and its heavily symbolic storm.
The play features incisive characterizations and dialogue, with the conspiracy-obsessed Jeanie, who rants about her many social media bannings at the hands of the “Jewish media cabal,” coming across as all too believable. And the performances by the top-flight cast are not to be faulted. It’s a shame, then, that Anon seems content to coast on the surface of its provocative situations.
The staging by Anne Kauffman, who also directed the playwright’s post-apocalyptic black comedy Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play, leans heavily on the current penchant for excessive video projections, giving the evening an unnecessary multi-media feel (we get it, we’re all glued to our screens). Although it partially makes up for the blandness of the set design by the ubiquitous collective “dots” which consists of little more than a large kitchen table for what the playwright describes in her script as “a kitchen table play.”
Anon opened October 14, 2026, at the MCC Theater Space and runs through November 1. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
