Review - John

Of course I've been aware of Annie Baker and her plays for a long time - I read one of her early works and I've chatted with her at work events for a few years - but I've never seen one of her plays staged before.  I still kick myself over missing Circle Mirror Transformation; finally seeing The Flick is definitely on my list.  So when my favorite spot in town, Signature Theatre, chose Annie for one of their residencies, I was excited to know I would see one of her plays.  Last night was the night and I saw her new play, John.

After reading a lot about Annie and her work, I knew about her extremely naturalistic style, that utilizes conversation and frequent pauses/silences.  When I saw that John would be a three+ hour experience with two intermissions, I was briefly worried, but I shouldn't have been.  As far as I'm concerned, John could've been twice as long and I would've been just as engrossed.  I was completely swept away by the world that was created and the characters who inhabited it.  I loved the language, the mood, the pacing...everything.  I give John a huge ginormous thumbs up and want to go back right away.  I want to go back and experience it again, obviously because I liked it, but there is another reason, too, which I'll share later...

photo credit: Matthew Murphy

John takes place at a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, PA.  The set is amazing, so detailed and specific.  And so recognizable as a certain type of Midwest B&B.  The detail is incredible.  The space is decorated for Christmas, so everywhere you look, there's another figurine or holiday decoration to see.  The set is so great, it's almost another character.  As the play goes on, that becomes more and more true, as each decoration takes on a life/story of its own.

A young couple has come from New York to stay at the B&B for a weekend getaway.  You immediately notice that this couple is extremely uncomfortable around each other, so you wonder what's going on with that.  The owner of the B&B seems sweet and genuine, but you also see something that's maybe underneath.  Actually, there's a lot of 'underneath' going on, which is one part of what made the play so intriguing to me.  From here on out, spoilers may abound.  I didn't read any reviews before I saw John and I'm glad I didn't.  I just throw that out there (though there is one detail I wish I'd maybe known about beforehand)...

Georgia Engel of The Mary Tyler Moore Show fame plays Mertis, the owner of the B&B (she asks several time for people to call her Kitty, but no one does; just another cool mystery in this play).  She is really off-the-charts incredible, creating a character that is so unique and utterly intriguing.  I found Mertis to be heartbreaking in her gentleness and simplicity that is actually terrifically complex.  But there's also so much joy in her performance.  She has monologues throughout the play that are amazing, but one speech just made me stop and hold my breath, hoping that the moment could last forever.  The way it was delivered and the way it was written was just so...indelible.  I can't really describe it.  It was just stunning in its theatricality and transportiveness.  Which isn't a word, but it works for me here.

The young couple, played by Christopher Abbott and Hong Chau, seem at first to be complete stereotypes of young millenials, and yet they're wonderfully authentic and original.  I kept going back and forth about their motives and connection, but as their layers are peeled back more and more, I was just so engaged and committed to what would happen to them.  There were moments that shocked me into tears and surprise, and there were moments that lulled me into a false sense of secure reality, and I don't think secure reality is what anyone had in mind for John.



photo credit: Matthew Murphy

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fourth character in the play - Genevieve, a blind woman and Mertis' best friend, played by the stage treasure Lois Smith.  In my opinion, Lois Smith can do no wrong.  She is just theatrical genius every time she steps on a stage.  And her performance in John is no different.  She comes onstage and completely upends the atmosphere on stage; after she arrives, nothing is the same.  She also has a speech that is so baldly glorious, I couldn't stop thinking about it as the play continued (but the other characters couldn't either, so it's not like I was distracted or stopped from experiencing the rest of the play).

I could really go on and on about how much I loved this play - every minute, I felt something different and learned something new.  I felt like I really 'lived' the piece, moment to moment.  I was enveloped, welcomed and pushed away; it was a fantastic experience.  There was a hyper-realistic quality, and yet a vaguely supernatural quality, that I thought blended together so well.  I should also mention that the play was expertly directed by recent Tony winner, Sam Gold, and his collaboration with Baker was a huge part of why everything worked together so beautifully.

Now, there was one wrinkle in my experience:  my seat neighbors were annoying as all get out and I have discovered after reading reviews of the play that they caused me to MISS A LOIS SMITH MONOLOGUE.  I will never forgive them.  They kept wandering in and out of the row, taking their time to sit down and shut up.  They didn't turn their phones off and they kept getting calls.  But the most egregious thing was at the end of the second act - there is a stage convention used to signal the end of the act.  Before this stage convention could even finish before the second intermission, my stupid seat neighbors were standing up and crowding into the aisle.  To avoid their squashing my feet, I just got up and skedaddled out to the ladies room.  I wondered why the ladies room seemed so empty.  Then, when I walked back into the lobby, I wondered why there was no one else IN the lobby.  Where was the rest of the audience?!  Suddenly, they came out en masse and I thought, wait, why are they all coming out NOW, five minutes after I did?!  Well, in reading the reviews, I found out it was because Lois Smith came out in a fourth-wall -breaking speech that I am SO MAD THAT I MISSED!  So, not only do I want to go back to relive my experience, but I also want to hear what I missed!!!

Clearly, I recommend you go out to see John.  It has recently had its run extended, so you should take advantage of that.  I've never seen anything like it.  Now seeing The Flick has moved even higher on my list of 'things to do'. 

To close, I want to mention that I've been trying to be mindful of gender parity when I see theater.  My company has taken on a project of documenting facts and figures of percentages of women produced across the country.  I've taken it up myself to pay more attention, too.  I've counted up the shows I've seen so far this year and I'm nearly at 50% of shows written by men and shows written by women.  I think it's important to prove to producers that plays written by women can sell just as well as plays written by men.  Anyway, recently, I've seen two plays, both written by women, that I found disappointing.  And I'm trying to figure out why.  The plays themselves were quite good (I'm talking about the script), but the productions were not good.  One play was done by one of those young companies that is really more interested in showing themselves off than doing the play any service, so that was not good (not to mention that the theater didn't have air conditioning, which is just.not.right).  The other was done by a company of repute, but didn't seem to be cast or directed with the same care as I've seen exhibited by that company in the past.  I wanted so desperately to love and support these two plays, but I just couldn't bring myself to blog bad reviews of them because I honestly feel that the problems weren't with the writing, but with the execution of the productions as a whole.  And I'd hate to think that gender had anything to do with that...