TheatreReviewSignature Theatre, New York
The latest offering from Annie Baker focuses on things both seen and unseen, and benefits hugely from the playwright’s feel for character and dialogue
Maybe the playwright Annie Baker wears glasses when no one is looking. Maybe she has special contact lenses to correct astigmatism. When it comes to playwriting, she is astonishingly clear-eyed. In John, her new play at the Signature Theatre, one character is blind and another wears glasses with a very strong prescription, but they both benefit from Baker’s excellent vision.
Elias (Christopher Abbott of Girls) and Jenny (Hong Chau), a Brooklyn couple on the outs, arrive late at night to a Gettysburg B&B, an inn so filled with knickknacks, ornaments and bric-a-brac that it’s a wonder there’s any room for paying guests. (Mimi Lien designed the vaguely menacing set, a layering of object and pattern like a kitschy, worrying Bonnard painting.)
They are shown to their room by Mertis (the indelible Georgia Engel of the Mary Tyler Moore Show), a kindly if slightly dotty host with a grandmotherly mien and a little girl’s voice. In the second act, they are joined by Genevieve (Lois Smith), Mertis’s blind and occasionally insane friend.
There’s much discussion of sight and vision throughout the script. Mertis asks her guests if they’ve ever felt “a larger presence watching you from somewhere”. Jenny says that she felt a favorite doll always observing her in childhood, urging us to notice the dozens of stuffed animals and figurines eyeing the characters. And of course there are nearly 100 of us seated in the theater – a larger presence watching. Even so, several scenes occur offstage, accompanied by muffled dialogue. This is a play about what we know and what we think we know, what we can see and what we can’t.
In John, Baker has veered away from the seeming ultrarealism of her earlier plays and toward something a little spookier. There are magical realist gestures toward ghosts and animated dolls and rooms that occasionally thwart their occupants. Mertis reads aloud from what sounds like HP Lovecraft. With a few exceptions, these touches feel effortful, as though pasted in from another draft. They sit astride the action and dialogue too cumbersomely, though Baker and the director Sam Gold, her longtime collaborator, work to integrate them into the script, with gentle, theatrical touches like Mertis’s winding of the grandfather clock to indicate the passage of time and her closing and opening the stage curtains in the breaks between each act. (For those who either celebrate or bemoan Baker and Gold’s pauses, note that the caesuras are here in all their glory.)
But if the emphasis on the uncanny doesn’t succeed, Baker’s almost superhuman flair for character and dialogue is in rare form. Watching John, I realized as never before how unlikable most of her characters are (even the sweetheart Mertis can seem a pest and a pill if you are feeling grouchy) and how little it matters. Baker approaches them all with a kind of radical empathy, without ever softening or excusing their faults. She sees them so clearly that though the play runs more than three hours, you can’t take your eyes off it.
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