San Antonio, Texas. Jeanie (Crystal Finn) is a mother of two, fifteen-year-old Delia (Izabel Mar) and eight-year-old Leo. Her husband, Michael (Andrew Garman), is a loving father who insists on the importance of family dinner. Delia is an active participant in the conversations at these dinners, and it is clear she respects her parents more than the average teenager and that they respect her more than the average parents. But Leo is never home, and when Delia is alone with Jeanie, they are always fighting. This is because Jeanie is an “information warrior,” an obsessive online conspiracy theorist who spends most of her time reading and posting misinformation. Jeanie has promised to keep Delia out of her “work,” and she crosses the line when she posts about her daughter’s period.
Adam (Jeff Biehl) and Will (Jeremy Shamos) move in across the street. Adam notices Jeanie is in her car all the time, recording videos on her phone, and he finds her account on TikTok. Convinced she has been “shadow banned,” Jeanie escalates her rhetoric and directs her anger against Adam and Will’s gay pride flag. The couple have mixed feelings about the flag itself—it was a gift—and they panic about their safety. Michael, meanwhile, comes over to ask if they can put aside about twenty boxes from their move. He’ll pick them up in a week or two.
Anne Washburn’s Anon, currently running at the Newman Mills Theater, is framed around a Shakespearean conceit. Delia has to write both a paper on the soliloquy form and a soliloquy for a character in either King Lear or Richard III who does not have one. When she asks Jeanie for help, Jeanie, only half-listening, itching to return to her podcast, remarks that it’s too bad she’s not reading Romeo and Juliet, as Mercutio would make for a good soliloquy (apparently she has forgotten “O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you”). Delia concludes that “a soliloquy is a place for … conflicts too private to speak out loud but which we can’t understand or resolve if we don’t give voice to them and, in the arena of the audience’s attention, the warring factions which make up any body, be it a civic one or our own, contend.” She ends up selecting Goneril, oldest daughter of the mad King Lear. Her mother, of course, gets one, too.
Anon is a fairly conventional play about a problem that is affecting large numbers of American families. But the play feels more like a dramatization of a problem than a drama with insights into one, the soliloquy conceit a little ham-handed and a little underdeveloped. In the lobby of the theater, there are poster boards that answer questions like, What is QAnon? I suppose if the material is new to you, the story might be a little more engaging. For me, it was not bad but nothing special.
Anon runs through August 23rd at the Newman Mills Theater. 511 W. 52nd Street. New York, NY. 2 hours 5 minutes. One intermission. Photograph by Monique Carboni.
