ANON

ANON is a new play by Anne Washburn, presented by MCC Theater as a world premiere in a limited run. It is a drama about two households on one suburban street in Texas, set in 2024, in the weeks before the presidential election. Most of the fighting between them happens through screens.

The play is original and not adapted from another work. The idea came while she followed a handful of health and nutrition bloggers on the political left who moved toward the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She had felt she knew those online personalities. As their public selves changed, she started asking what they were leaving out of what they posted.

The title works in two directions. It points to QAnon, the conspiracy movement that takes hold of a mother named Jeanie, and it also names the anonymous account her new neighbors use to keep tabs on her. The play is the first production of MCC's 2026–27 season, the company's 40th-anniversary season.

The play starts in a suburb just outside San Antonio, Texas. Jeanie is a stay-at-home mother who cooks, runs the house and gives her teenage daughter, Delia, warm advice. Her husband, Michael, lives there too. On her phone she has a second life: she posts TikTok videos and, more and more, repeats QAnon talking points.

Across the street, a gay couple, Will and Adam, have just moved in. When they fly a Pride flag, both households react with alarm. Adam hung it without getting Will's agreement, but once Jeanie objects, Will digs in to defend it. Jeanie answers with a video arguing that the flag puts her children in danger. The dispute comes fully into focus well into the first act.

From there the feud is carried on social media. Will and Adam watch Jeanie's videos from an anonymous lurker account, and they learn that she has been aiming vaguely threatening posts at them. Delia, meanwhile, is writing a soliloquy for Goneril, one of the daughters in King Lear.

The question underneath it all is how much anyone really knows about the people next door, or under the same roof, once fantasy and fact are hard to tell apart.

Washburn is a New York-based American playwright, a graduate of Reed College with an MFA from New York University. She works with The Civilians and New Georges as an associated artist and belongs to 13P. Among her earlier works, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012) was a Drama League nominee for Outstanding Production, and 10 out of 12 played Soho Rep in 2015.

Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a Whiting Award (2015), the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for an American playwright in mid-career (2015) and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2016).

ANON takes on contemporary politics, performing for an online audience and the arrival of a Pride flag in Texas. It is written in two acts with one intermission, and its subject is close to home: conspiracy thinking, social media and suspicion between neighbors.

The set is a spare dining room, with unpacked moving boxes around its edges. Kauffman's staging recreates what a viewer sees on a TikTok screen. In an Act Two fantasy sequence in which Jeanie is interviewed, projections spread the scene across multiple screens. The Newman Mills Theater seats 245.

As of October 2026, Crystal Finn plays Jeanie, Jeremy Shamos plays Will, Jeff Biehl plays Adam, Andrew Garman plays Michael, Izabel Mar plays Delia and Joel Van Liew plays the Host.

As of October 2026, several of those performers bring long New York résumés. Finn returns to MCC after Cold War Choir Practice, which earned her a Lucille Lortel nomination; she holds a Theatre World Award and has a Broadway credit in Birthday Candles. Shamos makes his MCC debut, with Broadway credits that include Clybourne Park (a Tony nomination), Glengarry Glen Ross and Noises Off. Garman has created parts in many new plays, including The Christians at Playwrights Horizons, and Biehl, also new to MCC, has Broadway credits in Patriots and Machinal. Mar's screen credits include Babygirl, Showing Up and A House of Dynamite.

ANON is billed as a world premiere. MCC announced it on June 18, 2026 as part of its 40th-anniversary season, and the complete company and design team followed on August 19, 2026. The first preview was September 25, 2026, and opening night was October 14, 2026, in the Newman Mills Theater. As of October 2026, public sources show no earlier productions, readings or workshops.

MCC, founded in 1986 as Manhattan Class Company by Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey and William Cantler, moved into The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in 2019. The building is the company's first permanent home. The rest of the 2026–27 season is set to bring the New York premiere of The Heart Sellers in January 2027 and a world-premiere musical of What's Eating Gilbert Grape in June 2027, which Kauffman also directs.