Georgia Engel, Christopher Abbott, and Lois Smith/ Photo: Matthew Murphy via
In the 1970s, the actress Georgia Engel played the sweetly aloof girlfriend and bride of anchorman Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Now 67, she has changed little—she has the same eager, daft smile and the same singsong, nursery-school-teacher voice. It hardly need be said that she would make an ideal choice to play a serial killer, a psychotic or even a vaguely sinister bed & breakfast owner who seems reluctant to explain what happened to either of her two husbands.
It is the latter role that Engel plays, marvelously, in Annie Baker’s circuitous, funny and unnerving new play, John, at the Pershing Square Signature Center on West 42nd Street through September 6. Baker, whose last play The Flick won her the Pulitzer Prize last year at age 33, writes three-hour plays that tend to take place in a single setting with a small cast. Characters test the audience’s patience by speaking in banalities interrupted with frequent long pauses, and the reading-room quiet of the (in)action on stage often induces naps in audience members, whose snoring in turn makes it even more difficult to hear. Tickets for John are only $25, though, so consider it implied that you should use the savings to invest in an espresso, maybe a double.
Even so, John may not hold you in its thrall: it’s a 195-minute, two-intermission piece that guards its secrets, releases them only at lengthy intervals, and can be read any of several ways. Nevertheless, for playgoers who enjoy theater with aspects of a puzzle, it is a stimulating evening. It might be premature to call Baker a “genius” (The Daily Beast), but she is not to be dismissed either. Baker’s voice is developing impressively, and if her trademark in previous plays has been the inarticulacy of her slacker characters (The Flick was labeled “mumblecore” by Natasha Simons), the cupboard of Baker’s thoughts is ample, especially in John.
The play is a sort of implied ghost story that takes place entirely on the ground floor of a chintz-infested bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania at the end of November. The doddering owner-manager Mertis (Engel) is a shuffling, harmless old thing who exists almost silently in the shadows among the doilies and the flowered upholstery and the knickknacks. At right is a bookcase holding a collection of ceramic winter cottages. Next to it is a fully decorated Christmas tree. A young Brooklyn couple, Elias (Christopher Abbott, a Seth Rogen type) and his girlfriend Jenny (Hong Chau, ditzy and passive-aggressive) arrive late in the evening. They are on their way back to New York from her family’s home in Ohio and intend to spend a day or two exploring the nearby battlefields, Elias being a Civil War buff. Between the two of them exists an unspoken tension, and Jenny is obsessed with an American Girl doll that is part of the decor. It’s an exact copy of a doll she possessed as a girl, and lately on a visit to her childhood home she grew obsessed with the idea that the doll hated her for being boxed up and placed in the basement. Jenny, trying to be humane, cut some windows in the cardboard box to make things more bearable for the object.
Baker creates the sense that violence could erupt, but instead such shocks as arrive are largely the ones we learn about when characters talk about their back stories—about history. Segue to the War Between the States: the B & B itself once served as a hospital, and so many limbs needed to be hacked off in July of 1863 that the discarded arms and legs formed a ten-foot pile outside the windows. Mertis delivers this piece of information, like all the others she dispenses, as dispassionately and fondly as she offers plates of Vienna fingers or cups of chocolate tea. About subjects closer to her own history she is less forthcoming: it isn’t till about halfway through the play that we learn she has a husband, who apparently is in the house somewhere, though no details are offered about why no one else has seen him. Moreover, she once had another husband, someone who died in an unfortunate accident that is, again, not described in a satisfactory way, though Mertis, Georgette-like, is so feather-brained that it’s difficult to tell whether she is intentionally withholding information or simply is unaware how strangely incomplete her personal reminiscences sound to others.
A fourth character (impeccably played by veteran actress Lois Smith, whose career spans from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden to HBO’s True Blood) adds a bizarre twist to the proceedings, but to say more would perhaps be to say too much. Her name is Genevieve—a near-match for Jenny. Via Genevieve we begin to learn that the past is, as in Faulkner, not dead, and not even past. There are discussions of whether the house is haunted: certain rooms, Mertis says in her sweetly oblique way, are simply “unreliable on certain nights.” Christmas tree lights blink on and off. The piano to the left begins to play itself. Oddness fills the air.
There are no men named John in the play, and yet there are two men named John in the play, one in the present and one long ago, each looming strangely over the relationships of the characters onstage like a harvest moon. In the final minutes, Baker skillfully coaxes the two together, ending the proceedings with a devastating one-liner that settles a point of suspense even as it clarifies John’s larger theme. This may not be an especially wicked or devastating black comedy, but it’s a droll and deftly designed one. Baker is a playwright on the march.