On the QT
Setting a play entirely around a kitchen table is not in itself remarkable. When the author is Anne Washburn, however, it is. In fact, the decision is juicily provocative because no one would ever expect that of her.
Far from being spartan, domestic, or kitchen-sink realistic (theater’s usual contexts for kitchen tables), Washburn’s plays tend to be unabashedly wacky, droll, and supercharged with surprising and pointedly theatrical convergences that skew political. A party for Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu morphs into Vlad-the-Impaler cosplay (The Communist Dracula Pageant); a postapocalyptic America mythologizes The Simpsons and uses remembered lines from it as currency (Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play); an off-grid leftie commune in California uses giant-puppet shows to indoctrinate its kids with a creepy fantasy backstory (The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire).
And now, with her new play Anon, there’s a kitchen table.
In the set designed by the collective dots for Anne Kauffman’s production at MCC Theater, this table is the only individual style choice in the environment: a plain, strait-laced wooden rectangle with lathed legs and matching chairs. The rest of the room is a cookie-cutter suburban interior, starkly empty except for a few boxes off to the sides and, on one of the gray walls, a fixture resembling a big doorbell. This arid, depersonalized place is the fulcrum of two households in San Antonio, Texas—one a gay couple just moved in, the other a family whose stay-at-home mom, Jeanie (Crystal Finn), is an obsessive MAGA TikToker.
All the main players in this drama are consumed with their screens—a point emphasized by the anonymous yet putatively homey space because its bare walls serve much of the time as surfaces for projections (of texts, dates, times, photos, videos). Anon does traffic in Washburn’s characteristic paranoias and eccentric theatrical excesses, but they play out largely online here in (ominous sound effect) “BIDEN’S AMERICA,” just before the 2024 election.
Procrastinating in his online job one day, Adam (Jeff Biehl)—whose partner is Will (Jeremy Shamos)—discovers Jeanie’s increasingly unhinged, conspiracy-laden, QAnon-adjacent “coming storm” videos. One of these shows the gay pride flag they’ve displayed in their yard in order to gin up right-wing outrage. Panicked about this exposure, Will, the more normie of the couple, runs out and buys a gun he has no idea how to use.
As the 125-minute action progresses, both households, especially Will and Adam’s, come to feel more and more vulnerable (oddly, neither has blinds, even though Jeanie’s family moved in a year ago). The threat that the virtual provocation will blossom into real physical danger, bursting the confines of the pseudo-secure suburban fortresses, is the core of the conflict.
That threat is thrillerish and a lot of fun. But the main treat in the production for me is Crystal Finn’s phenomenal performance as Jeanie. Finn has grasped the insufferable core of such a person: a perfectly ordinary soul whose very lack of professional skills or expertise becomes the basis of a virulent persecution complex. That the world ignores her (she was banned from Twitter and has only a few hundred followers on three different TikTok accounts) is to her evidence that she’s dangerous and special. Of course, she’s been “shadowbanned” by insidious algorithms! Her ability to locate and appreciate so many outlandish QAnonish conspiracies proves her superior imagination and intelligence.
The play’s funniest and most acute scene is a redemptive daydream, shown on multi-screen video at the top of Act 2, where Jeanie imagines herself a national hero. In a TV interview, she’s an “Information Warrior and Patriot” in conversation with “Vice President General Flynn” (presumably Michael Flynn, the disgraced Trump flunky), at the request of newly elected President John Kennedy, Jr. (who returned as savior after faking his own death in 1999). We watch Finn in this scene drink in the adulation, bug-eyed with sanctimonious triumph, teary with false humility as her penitent, previously benighted husband and kids berate themselves for ever doubting her. This is a delectable political satire.
All the show’s other actors are excellent too: Biehl, Shamos, Andrew Garman as Jeanie’s husband Michael, and Izabel Mar as her 15-year-old daughter Delia. Delia is a particularly important presence because she’s smarter than her mom yet also, it seems, eager to stay connected. Her skepticism makes us believe for a while that she might help yank Jeanie out of her rabbit hole. But then we witness her school project on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Asked to write a soliloquy for a character Shakespeare didn’t write one for, Delia chooses parent-killing Goneril, and Mar’s performance of this caustic soliloquy during a real rainstorm—her own redemptive daydream, you could say—is downright electrifying.
My Royal parent roams the wastelands, mind
in rags, soul sorely torn, and as the first
drops fall, I am new born, liberated
for if a child is by a parent made,
The parent being unmade the child is fresh-
-formed and rebirthed, spewed forth raw, the tempest
which spins and twists your body and brain is
my glorious baptism, a soft and
cooling rain which sluices you away from
me; I will make my own history
Delia isn’t the only character who channels the Bard, interestingly enough. Adam too quotes Lear amusingly as he and Will anticipate confronting mad Jeanie on their front lawn-heath.
My one reservation about Anon has to do with husband Michael, the only character in a position to offer adult pushback against Jeanie’s increasingly disturbing posts (and they get really disturbing, sinking to Holocaust denial and pro-Hitler links). We know he’s intelligent, and in the scene when he challenges her he seems about to be blunt (we’ve seen him contemplate moving out). Then he inexplicably wimps out, limiting his pushback to milquetoast doubts about her videos’ audience size and earnings, saying nothing about her values.
With so much at stake, I’m afraid I didn’t buy that. The play—as well as that family, their reluctantly armed neighbors, and the country—deserve a harder-hitting showdown.
Anon By Anne Washburn
Directed by Anne Kauffman
MCC Theater
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