Hong Chau and Christopher Abbott in John. The twenty-nine-year-old Elias Schreiber-Hoffman (rendered, with just the right amount of sourpuss passive-aggressiveness, by Christopher Abbott) enters, followed by his Asian girlfriend, the thirty-one-year-old Jenny Chung (Hong Chau). It is in part a mystery, and in part a haunting, melancholy fable about what takes hold … In fact, Mertis has secrets and depths and a history that Elias and Jenny can’t begin to plumb.I think they missed something wonderful. During her tenth year, Annie becomes obsessed with the idea of death after spending the summer outside the city near a cemetery and learning that children die. Annie Baker John review – check into Annie Baker's gothic Gettysburg B&B 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars. A Menopausal Gentleman. You can cancel anytime.
. Mertis, on the other hand, pushes past her own concerns, including a sick husband, to look forward. Despite the sometimes sinister undertones that all this watching and overhearing implies, Baker balances the balefulness with care-taking and affection. About.
Next to her, Jenny, who earns a living writing questions for a game show, seems jangly, synthetic, “modern,” a texting creature who can’t attend to much beyond her needs and secrets. At the end of one of Genevieve’s visits, Mertis offers to walk her friend out—and she does. James Macdonald’s meticulous production, like Baker’s play, is fascinated by minutiae and focuses on the immediate moment rather than what happens next. It’s a handsome object, “old” in structure.
When, toward the end of the evening, Jenny and Elias’s relationship reaches a breaking point, you know that Mertis will silently fold that sadness into her, as she has so many others.
Directed by Jonathan Goad. It’s less a play of ideas than of atmosphere and one that works through a masterly accumulation of detail. And Baker writes magically for her. It’s rare to find an actress of Chau’s beauty and youth who’s willing to go the distance and play a conniving cipher so unashamedly. Seemingly nothing happens. Annie Baker is truly an amazing playwright.
She, in turn, writes questions for a TV game show and suffers Elias’s moods while being haunted by an old affair that may, for all we know, be ongoing. They’re gentle with one another in the casual way of old friends, which is only remarkable for how infrequently we see older women with long-standing relationships explored on stage. The three watch the angels flutter. Until Feb. 19 at the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, 26 Berkeley St. companytheatre.ca or 416-368-3110 People have time for Annie Baker. Books. Theatre and Sexuality. Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. In John … That is, after all, the purpose for which they were written. Mertis lights her “angel chimes,” a set of candles whose flames prompt little angel-shaped figures to fly around a stem. But I still think that they have the right to their opinions, which involved much more than just complaining that the show was long.Love your work, Feminist Spectator. Sometimes, it has been difficult to distinguish between Baker’s world of guys and her own ethos.
Utopia in Performance. Mertis fusses over them in the always intrusive way of B&B proprietors whose lives are empty without boarders to exhort and entertain—or so we think.
The Feminist Spectator in Action. Of course, it’s foolish to walk into a play hoping that it will represent one’s race or sex; the playwright’s job is not to represent or stand up for anyone but to say something fascinating about humanity. So this little side trip is an indulgence—a visit to an enthusiasm of the past.Annie Baker’s “John” (a Signature Theatre Company production, at the Pershing Square) is so good on so many levels that it casts a unique and brilliant light. The actors cross the stage arm in arm as Genevieve snaps her cane into place and shrugs on her coat. And we watch them, noting their intimacy, affection, and age as they cross the wide proscenium toward the door (which takes a while). Who is the John of the title of Annie Baker’s latest play at the off-Broadway Signature Theatre?. So do Jenny, Genevieve, and Mertis—they’re women, after all. “John” is a gradual and expert evocation of intimacy, mystery, solitude, togetherness. Jenny’s concern for entrapped dolls finds a strange echo in her memory of a mystical moment in New Mexico when she felt “less alone in my alone-ness”. ), it was clearly not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s hard to sit still as Mertis talks about birds, for instance; you feel airborne with the sheer effervescence of the sound she makes, building a world out of words and love. On their first morning at the B. and B., we see Elias eating cereal as Jenny tries to hide the fact that his slurping is irritating her. Still, Mertis’s sympathy extends through questions that might seem invasive and probing, but that sound kind and wise in Engel’s precise, empathetic delivery.True to form, too, Baker doesn’t waste time on exposition. But for Mertis—and for us, too, thanks to Baker’s outstanding writing and empathy—that sadness does not defeat; it simply burnishes her belief. 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 I have just one quibble, however.