Review Roundup: Annie Baker's JOHN Opens Off-Broadway

JOHN, written by Pulitzer Prize winner-Annie Baker (The Flick) and directed by Tony Award-winner Sam Gold (Fun Home), kicks off Signature Theatre's 25th Anniversary Season, opening tonight, August 11, and running through September 6 in The Irene Diamond Stage at The Pershing Square Signature Center.

The cast includes Christopher Abbott (HBO's "Girls") as Elias, Hong Chau ("A to Z," "Treme") as Jenny, five-time Emmy Award-nominee Georgia Engel ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show") as Mertis, and Tony Award-nominee Lois Smith (Signature's The Trip to Bountiful, The Illusion, Heartless and The Old Friends) as Genevieve.

The week after Thanksgiving. A Bed & Breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A cheerful innkeeper. A young couple struggling to stay together. Thousands of inanimate objects, watching.

Charles Isherwood, The New York Times: But in "John," Ms. Baker...stretches her talents in intriguing if sometimes baffling new directions...The membrane between life and death, the world of things and the realm of spirits, seems strangely permeable in Ms. Baker's appealingly odd...drama, which is laced with shivery suggestions of a ghost story...As with Ms. Baker's other work, the dialogue in "John," orchestrated with intuitive delicacy by Sam Gold...proceeds in the natural fits and starts of lifelike conversation, often eddying around trivialities and digressions...Many will be perplexed by the play's obscurities; others bewitched by a writer who dares to raise large philosophical questions...while at the same time drawing characters in such piercingly specific emotional detail. As has been the case in all of the Baker-Gold collaborations, the acting is exquisitely honed and artifice-free. Perhaps because that gentle voice has something almost angelic about it, Ms. Engel makes Mertis's distinctive spirituality feel organic to her character...And as the young couple tortured by indecision about whether they have a future together, the gifted Ms. Chau...and Mr. Abbott delineate the murky complexities of their characters' anxious souls with admirable transparency.

Jesse Oxfeld, The Hollywood Reporter: This is a big show - three hours and change, on a broad, tchotchke-carpeted set, dealing with love and relationships and sadness - but also a humble, cerebral one, without bells and whistles...The play is also about the difference between our public selves and our private ones...Engel is a delight to watch, long a master of the subtle, underplayed batty aunt...John is recognizably a Baker play, her characters trying to figure out how to exist with each other, with wise insights inside mundane observations, comfortable with long pauses and a slow pace (and a sizable running time). But it's also unlike much of her previous work...its characters are not outcasts. They are, more or less and in their own ways, successful. Also, John is sometimes wry, but unlike Baker's other plays, it's not especially funny. It is thoughtful, however, and softly mesmerizing as these characters slowly reveal themselves.

David Cote, Time Out NY: John runs three hours and 15 minutes over three acts and two intermissions. I note the length not to warn you about potential boredom (in the ordinary sense), but because duration is key component of the experience, which lodges in your memory, emitting time-delayed puffs of meaning...John is basically a fish-out-of-water comedy with haunted-house undertones. Baker and Gold use ordinary settings and bottled-up characters to explore, in painstaking detail, the coded behavior of isolated people in highly charged spaces. That means a lot of superficially banal business unfolding slowly, full of cold, awkward silences...Baker has written a deeply mysterious drama, with a thematic patterning that seems to warp and dissolve as each act progresses. At times John seems to be a study of the inner lives of objects...Suggestions of ghosts, possession and witchcraft are brought up, then dropped...At the same time, this is a perfectly ordinary study of trust issues between a young man and woman.

Linda Winer, Newsday: This one is weirder, nuttier, scarier than any Baker play I've seen. It is positively gothic -- mysteries within mysteries, ghost stories on top of ghost stories -- without losing Baker's power to zoom in on the peculiarities in the oblique and blunt ways of real people...there is the owner of the place, Mertis, gorgeously portrayed by Georgia Engel with a guileless smile, a chirpy sweetness and, perhaps, an unseen husband dying behind the double doors of the meticulously overdecorated, cozy inn...She controls the time by turning the hands on the grandfather clock...Also, Mertis is in control of drawing the drapes, which means she decides when we'll be allowed to watch. The hypnotic, if never actually conclusive experience, is directed by Sam Gold...This is Gold's sixth Baker play, and the two obviously understand the importance of atmosphere in the terrors and passions of these oddly recognizable people...Baker does not merely tell a scary story. She shows them, piling up like ghosts of amputated limbs from the war wounded, and makes them riveting, unpredictable, altogether human theater.

Robert Kahn, NBC New York: "John" is notable as well for its marvelously quirky performance by Georgia Engel...The passage of time is a recurring theme in "John," and Baker and Gold leave Engel to do the heavy lifting. She manually closes the theater's heavy curtain at the end of each act. During each scene change, she advances the hours on the grandfather clock in the center of the living room, a process that sometimes feels long and drawn out...While Baker and Gold are surely capitalizing on our affection for the perpetually smiling Engel, there's something mysterious brimming just beneath Kitty's surface...Abbott and Chau, both excellent, make for familiar urban types...Their push-and-pull throughout "John" is real, and often painful to experience..."John" is full of attempts by lonely characters to relate to one another, just like "The Flick." Ultimately, "John" is a darker story, one that leaves audiences grappling with questions about how much they trust the people with whom they're most intimate.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: If you're looking for easy answers, "John" will keep you busy...Every time you wonder where this is going, Baker drops a tantalizing tidbit. Could Genevieve be some kind of seer? Did something bad happen to Jenny and Elias when they were kids? Does Kitty's husband, George, even exist? What about John himself, whom we never see? There's a vaguely supernatural vibe, but Baker and Gold don't push it. "John" is what you make of it. It could be a Freudian fairy tale in which youngsters find a strange house with its own rules, except it belongs to a nice lady instead a witch. Or it could be about women dealing with repressed traumas. The beauty of the show is that my guesses are as good as yours. Baker knows exactly what she's doing -- she gives us just enough to open up possibilities. What a thrill!

Jesse Green, Vulture: I'm not sure I've ever seen a couple's blowout arguments rendered as accurately as Baker renders them here: unfair, nonsequential, compulsive, zingerless...Though Baker gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast between their misery and Kitty's bonhomie, she is not making fun of either...Baker is trying to extend to characters in extremis the intense realism...usually denied them in plays. She and Gold have always asked their audiences to share their patient fascination with humans doing the work of living...Here they are focused more particularly on people in their most liminal states: the elderly, the blind, the crazy, and (not so different, really) lovers at the end of the road. How does Baker make such people dramatic without making them melodramatic? Pretty much as she has always done, through carefully observed action...As the young couple, Christopher Abbott and Hong Chau are a bit tentative; they have mastered the necessary narrow focus but are still working to project it outward. Engel, though, is a revelation. That rare adult whose face naturally defaults to a smile, she knows from pleasing; but her attention to everything around her, animate or not, is never less than a wonder. Her scenes with the cantankerous Smith are so loving, funny, and real they seem almost sacred.

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Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy