John
Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre
Writer: Annie Baker
Director: Craig Baldwin
September 19 – October 12, 2019
The New Yorker declares that John (2015), written by the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker casts “a unique and brilliant light”, but upon what it does not really say. In general, reviews of Baker’s three-and-a-quarter-hour play, while acclamatory, skittishly evade defining statements, resorting to “mysterious” and even “unclassifiable”. But despite the mystification, the play is totally and weirdly engrossing.
Entering the theatre we are warned to be “mindful of the curtains”, and wondering what it is that the curtains might do, we proceed. The swathes of scarlet velvet that intrude into the auditorium and dominate the small space are soon to be pulled aside by a diminutive figure in pink slippers and senior pastel colours. While her prosaic appearance contrasts oddly with the opulence of the curtains, she seems confident of her place in the universalising world of the theatre.
In these times of minimalist stage sets, we gaze – slightly horrified but deeply fascinated – at the intensively furnished living room of a typical Gettysburg Bed and Breakfast. A collection of ill-assorted dust-gathering furniture, an array of ornaments, pictures, toys, a plethora of lamps, overbearing wallpaper, a highly polished pianola, a glowing rainbow jukebox and a cluttered dining nook referred to as Paris, takes some looking at while we repress the desire to leap onto the stage and de-clutter.
The pink-slippered Mertis Katherine Graven (Rebecca Giblin), chatelaine of this ordinary but eerie domain, appears from a door to her unseen living quarters at the rear of the dining nook to greet the arrival of her newest and only guests, Elias (James Bell) and Jenny ((Shuang Hu). Visiting what is reputed to be the most haunted Civil War battle site owing to the massive number of casualties has spawned many B&Bs, all decorated to meet the assumed “homey” expectations of tourists. Is the orchestrated “cosiness” a compensation for, and a denial of, the brutality of the past?
Mertis’s house, we learn from her long-time friend, the blind but truth-telling Genevieve (Maggie Blinco), is steeped in the blood of the Civil War, and reluctantly Mertis reveals gruesome facts about it past use. She confesses to reservations about one of the upstairs bedrooms, the Jackson Room, which she describes in mysterious terms as “unreliable”, possibly because Jackson was a wealthy slave-owning planter and, when president signed the Act that forcibly relocated the Indigenous Americans of the South to the infamous Indian Territory. She is keen for the couple to visit Dobbin House, vaunted, although unsubstantiated, as the first stop on the Underground Railway that helped slaves escape to the North.
Guilt is a recurring pattern in the play although woven into a larger fabric. Elias we learn feels guilt over an unfortunate childhood incident which he was powerless to prevent, and is angry with Jenny – whom he seeks to control – when he learns she has revealed his secret to Genevieve and Mertis. Jenny, in turn, feels guilt about the way she has treated her playthings, in particular, her American Girl, a brand of doll, named Samantha. Doll-like, she passively resists Elias’s attempts at control, and hides behind a conventional girl-image to frustrate him.
Eventually, the accumulating tension between them results in a battle over Jenny’s phone.
Coincidentally, Mertis has a Samantha positioned in a commanding position on a high shelf, as well as many other dolls situated on each stair leading up to the bedrooms. They stare straight at the audience, who, from their perspective, may well seem to be arranged in the same fixed way. Mertis whose disappearance into and appearance from an unseen realm enhances her mystery as a character, confronts each of her guests separately with the same question, “Do you ever feel that you are being watched?” While an irony, as they are actors in a play, the question prompts Jenny to recall a moment in Mexico in which she experienced a sense of something much larger outside of herself. Is this a reality or merely the human propensity to find a watcher because it is more comforting?
Mertis reads to Genevieve from Lovecraft, a writer for whom horror is science’s discovery of an indifferent universe, however, one of the most moving scenes in the play may be when the blind, clinically mad Genevieve clutches Mertis, who is guiding her to the door and says, “I really love you, Mertis”. Jenny can sit with the two older women on the sofa as can Elias, if not in communion, in a kind of human confederacy.
Baker’s John eschews the conventional use of dialogue or compressed time, choosing to overtly show the passage of time through Mertis’s manipulation of a grandfather clock, opting for real-time passage across the room or up the staircase and having the characters reveal themselves slowly, grudgingly, so that we see more of them than we hear. But seeing is believing, so it is said, and the four recognisable, memorable and weirdly endearing.
John makes immense demands on the actors, and the wonderful, truly amazing Rebecca Giblin is well supported by an unforgettably mad sage in Maggie Blinco, and the convincingly angst ridden Millennials, James Bell and Shuang Hu. Do not worry too much about the John of the title or you may become anxious yourself.
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