By the early 2020s, fifteen percent of Americans held Q-adjacent beliefs; it wasn’t that unlikely the wine mom across the street was fomenting the Storm online. In Anon at MCC, an October 2026 world premiere that feels like 2021’s most topical show, Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play) and director Anne Kauffman offer audiences a Nextdoor post drenched in Lear. As a pride flag becomes the lightning rod leading two San Antonio households toward parallel psychoses, TikToxicated red-pill-popping housewife Jeanie’s gay neighbors get swept up, as Lear himself would describe, in the “tempest in [her] mind.”

Applying Shakespearean gravitas to neighborly pettiness on one level suits a play powered by a character convinced she’s an arbiter and warrior of Truth, and Washburn makes an intriguing but self-consciously rendered analogy between online silo and soliloquy. But Anon is mostly undercut by broad satire—a genre, in our era’s built-in exaggeration, so often frozen by its own redundancy into a period piece of just-yesterday. Crystal Finn, as Jeanie, compellingly contorts the exhibitionistic cadences of the Internet into something feral, but the character is written as little more than a connect-the-dots of QAnon buzzwords. She may plunge into a conspiracist fugue, but she herself feels like a fever dream of the collective liberal unconscious. The folie à deux of polarization may be the (self-evident) point, but until distance offers more interesting satire on the subject—to quote an Anon character quoting Trump—we may have to “stand back and stand by.” —Moze Halperin