There’s something endearing, even a little disarming, about seeing John Krasinski back in some ill-fitting khaki slacks. Though now a bona fide movie star, the 45-year-old actor remains most beloved by wide swaths of middle America for playing Jim Halpert, the perennial guy-next-door with a thankless white-collar job and a deadpan sense of humor on the long-running NBC sitcom The Office. On stage at the relatively intimate Studio Seaview in midtown Manhattan, Krasinski once again inhabits the aw-shucks amiability of your average suburban white guy, the type of guy you’d want to grab a beer with or, just maybe, give a hug.
Such affability makes Krasinski a slyly perfect avatar for the concerns of Angry Alan, an Americanization of British writer Penelope Skinner’s 2018 play now running off-Broadway, which darkly imagines what would happen if Jim Halpert got laid off, divorced and disillusioned. Or more accurately, what would happen if such a man found himself lonely, depressed, disappointed and on the internet. Such a man is named Roger, an ex-AT&T cog in the midwest who, in the 90-minute play’s first scene, stumbles through an internet wormhole onto the videos of a men’s rights figure named Angry Alan.
