Kitchen Table, Anne Washburn's Anon Divides the Critics at MCC

A pride flag goes up across the street, and a whole cul-de-sac starts to come apart.

That is the engine of Anon: a tempest at our kitchen table, Anne Washburn's new play at MCC Theater. It opened Wednesday, October 14, in the Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, 511 West 52nd Street, and it runs through Sunday, November 1. It is the first production of the company's 40th anniversary season.

The reviews are in. They are mixed, and they agree on more than the star ratings suggest.

The Neighbors

The setup is a suburb in Texas. Jeanie is a TikToker who spends more and more of her life online. When a gay pride flag is unfurled across the street, two households that seem very different start reacting to each other, and the play asks how well anyone really knows the people next door once fantasy and reality blur.

New York Stage Review fills in the rest. Jeanie lives outside San Antonio and posts conspiracy content. The new neighbors are a gay couple, Adam and Will. Her 15-year-old daughter, Delia, has a school assignment to write a soliloquy, and she picks Goneril from King Lear, a choice that shadows her mother's slide.

Anne Kauffman directs. Crystal Finn plays Jeanie, Jeff Biehl and Jeremy Shamos play Adam and Will, and Izabel Mar plays Delia, with Andrew Garman completing the cast. The running time is two hours and ten minutes with one intermission, and TDF lists full-price tickets from $40 to $112.

The Split Verdict

The actors get the warmest words. Roma Torre of New York Stage Review calls Finn "perfectly wacky" as the "kook next door" who turns out to be a real threat. Her colleague Frank Scheck, writing a separate review for the same outlet, calls Finn terrific and says the performances by the top-flight cast "are not to be faulted."

The play gets the harder ones. Scheck gives it three stars out of five. He finds it scattershot and unfocused, and says it squanders its potential through the playwright's taste for stylization.

"It's a shame, then, that Anon seems content to coast on the surface of its provocative situations." Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review

Torre also gives three stars. She writes that the play links the madness of Lear to the lunacy of QAnon, and calls it all very clever, perhaps too clever for its own good. In the end, she says, nothing is resolved, and the production leaves its characters and its audience strangely unmoved. Her sharpest note is about Delia. If only Washburn had allowed her to take the leap, Torre writes.

Other critics landed in the same zone, according to BroadwayWorld's review roundup. Thom Geier of Culture Sauce says the play "lacks the specificity to bring its central character fully to life." Kimberly Ramirez of Talkin' Broadway notes how it shows users trying to manipulate algorithms to win viewers. Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania calls it "the kind of play that ends in an inconclusive blackout."

The Screens

Kauffman's staging leans on video projections, and the two Stage Review critics read them differently. Scheck says they give the evening "an unnecessary multi-media feel," though he grants that they partly make up for the blandness of a set built around a large kitchen table. Torre credits the projections with keeping a two-hour-plus production moving.

One outlet did not get to a verdict at all. Front Mezz Junkies' critic saw only the first few minutes before a technical problem that could not be fixed in time canceled the performance. He calls the result "a tantalizing glimpse, a head full of questions."

What to Know Before You Go

Anon plays at 511 West 52nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, through November 1. Previews began September 25, and tickets are sold through MCC Theater at mcctheater.org.

For another new American play heading into a Manhattan house this fall, see our story on Bruce Norris's Downstate at the Booth.

The flag is still up. The neighbors are still watching.