What do you think?
Rate this book
John
The week after Thanksgiving.
A bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A cheerful innkeeper. A young couple struggling to stay together. Thousands of inanimate objects, watching.
John, an uncanny play by Annie Baker, was first seen Off-Broadway in 2015. The play had its UK premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2018, in a production directed by James Macdonald.
A bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A cheerful innkeeper. A young couple struggling to stay together. Thousands of inanimate objects, watching.
John, an uncanny play by Annie Baker, was first seen Off-Broadway in 2015. The play had its UK premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2018, in a production directed by James Macdonald.
112 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2016
11 people are currently reading
1315 people want to read
About the author
Annie Baker
24 books262 followersBaker grew up in Amherst, Mass., and graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College.
Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with Circle Mirror Transformation.
Baker's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya premiered at the Soho Repertory Theatre in June 2012 and was called a "funky, fresh new production" by a New York Times reviewer. Her play The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013. A New York Times reviewer wrote, "Ms. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight." The play received the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013.
Baker teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was one of seven playwrights selected to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. In 2011 she was named a Fellow of United States Artists.
Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with Circle Mirror Transformation.
Baker's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya premiered at the Soho Repertory Theatre in June 2012 and was called a "funky, fresh new production" by a New York Times reviewer. Her play The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013. A New York Times reviewer wrote, "Ms. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight." The play received the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013.
Baker teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was one of seven playwrights selected to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. In 2011 she was named a Fellow of United States Artists.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 188 reviews
February 13, 2017
I’m not sure if what I’m going to write could be considered spoilers or not, although I suspect you might not make sense of this review if you haven't seen the play – so, perhaps it is best not to read this if you are planning to see the play, or perhaps it is best to read this after you've seen the play when it will make more sense – hard to say.
The first thing to say about this play is that it is long and it is slow. Normally, those two things would be enough to put me off the play. It is in three acts and I saw the MTC production on the weekend. The set was amazing and it was beautifully acted – even the put-on American accents didn’t annoy me as much as they mostly do.
Because I saw this and didn’t read it, I can’t refer back to the text – and there are parts of this play I would like to re-read so as to see if I missed something. Still, plays are meant to be watched rather than read and having been watched that ought to be enough for the viewer (aka, the poor bastard that handed over real money to see the play) to have some notion of what happened – and while I have some notion, there is lots about this play that I didn’t understand or could not make fit into the narrative I’ve constructed around the rest of the play.
The main thing about this play that you might want to know is that it is a meditation around the story of Pygmalion (the Ovid, rather than the George B Shaw – although, if I was to see it again I would be looking for GBS references more closely). It took me, I guess, up to the last act to realise that was what this play was, and so I needed to then flick back over the play to see how that worked – and that then made me think that if you are going to make the play so clearly about that, perhaps an earlier reference (rather than just at the ‘tell me a story’ bit near the end where it became completely obvious) that might have helped ground the whole thing. People will, and with good reason, say that the author probably didn’t want the story ‘grounded’ – and fair enough – except, the story that is told by one of the characters is so clearly a telling of Pygmalion and so clearly makes sense of so much else in the play (from the female characters cold hands – her being a metaphorical statue right through to the major conflict theme in the play and also, I think, her PMT) that it really was a kind of organising motif linking the whole play together and I think as such it might have helped to make it clear that is what it was being used for earlier in the play.
This could be described as a ‘new materialism’ play. New Materialism is a post-structuralist set of ideas (is theory too strong?) that has grown out of some of the new feminisms. The idea being that all objects have a kind of life-force (not really that, that is perhaps too strong, but metaphorically, I guess) and that this means that the presence of something in a room impacts on what happens in that room. Now, in some ways this is almost completely obvious. If you are in a room and you are sitting around a folding card table, that is going to be a different kind of experience to sitting around a mahogany dining table. But this isn’t just about the ‘affordances’ (as Gibson would call them) of objects – new materialism is based on the idea that the materiality of existence impacts us in ways we simply do not understand and certainly in ways we cannot control even if we did understand them.
Here virtually every object on the stage has a kind of life of its own – and this is particularly true of the rooms which virtually all have names and personalities, some of which are clearly not all that friendly. There are discussions of ghosts, but I think ghosts is actually a poor metaphor for what is really being discussed here – ghosts are dead and a presence from the past, these aren't ghosts as such, but rather are the ongoing natures of these rooms, not so much an echo from the room’s past, but rather something about its own fundamental character and nature.
This is the story of two people trying to make their relationship work by going away together to a place of ghosts – Gettysburg, no less – and this isn’t the only reference to ghosts of the past. Here the characters are constantly haunted by presences – one of the characters is haunted by an ex-husband who morphs into just about everyone else she ever meets, another (clearly linked to this blind woman by name and by other kinds of echoes) also has a past ghost who torments her throughout the play.
I want to focus on the idea of desire. I use the Pygmalion myth in my teaching – the idea of a statue coming to life through desire is one of the ways I try to explain Bourdieu’s idea of habitus – of being able to recognise in others what is ‘the best’ in them, that sets them aside from and above all others – that shows that they are ‘one of us’. But the key here is desire - the idea of desire as the catalyst for the change. It is the desire that causes the stature to be converted into a real woman – and perhaps this is something that helps make sense of so much of this play. As much as you may want to resist desire, being desired is a potent force in the universe – an incredibly attractive force, one that is hard to resist - that changes you. It is interesting to consider how many relationships end because of the longing to be desired, rather than 'just comfortable'.
At one point in this play a character is told that the only time he cries is over ‘that Bob Dylan song’ – the song is ‘I Want You’ – the ultimate three-word expression of desire (note that there is a Beatles and an Elvis Costello song with the same name – the Costello one might have fit too well here and so the Dylan version that is more obscure is used, and I think this is a good choice, by the way). Anyway, it is the fact that he cries at the song, not at her – that he cannot express his desire in a way other than in one that ultimately means he is reduced to tears that is terribly interesting in all this. For, if you are to convert a statue into a woman then you must make your own desire known.
I’m not sure about a lot of things in this play – the birds, for example. I know birds are often symbols of messages from the gods, but I can’t quite get that to work for me here. And the insects sort of fit with the ‘metamorphosis’ idea – they change from flesh and blood into things with exoskeletons – all the same, that seems a little forced for me. I didn’t know if the two old women were lovers, I couldn’t tell if one of the women’s husbands had been made up, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to see the blind woman as Tiresias - I suspect so, but I might be reading too much into this here.
There is a really interesting part of the play where the woman that runs the guest house is talking to the young woman and she reads her the description of the sunset she has just written. It is truly awful writing – adjective piled upon adjective, all the mistakes that writers make when they are starting out. But here it was interesting because here she is trying to preserve what is impossible to preserve and the bad writing makes that point perhaps better than could otherwise be made - that somethings need to be just experienced and allowed to pass. That we are particularly hopeless at doing just that is perhaps one of the major themes of this play.
I still felt this was too long and even longer by also being too slow – but this wasn’t at all an awful play. I think I would be prepared to even sit through it again. I came away thinking I’d possibly missed an awful lot.
The first thing to say about this play is that it is long and it is slow. Normally, those two things would be enough to put me off the play. It is in three acts and I saw the MTC production on the weekend. The set was amazing and it was beautifully acted – even the put-on American accents didn’t annoy me as much as they mostly do.
Because I saw this and didn’t read it, I can’t refer back to the text – and there are parts of this play I would like to re-read so as to see if I missed something. Still, plays are meant to be watched rather than read and having been watched that ought to be enough for the viewer (aka, the poor bastard that handed over real money to see the play) to have some notion of what happened – and while I have some notion, there is lots about this play that I didn’t understand or could not make fit into the narrative I’ve constructed around the rest of the play.
The main thing about this play that you might want to know is that it is a meditation around the story of Pygmalion (the Ovid, rather than the George B Shaw – although, if I was to see it again I would be looking for GBS references more closely). It took me, I guess, up to the last act to realise that was what this play was, and so I needed to then flick back over the play to see how that worked – and that then made me think that if you are going to make the play so clearly about that, perhaps an earlier reference (rather than just at the ‘tell me a story’ bit near the end where it became completely obvious) that might have helped ground the whole thing. People will, and with good reason, say that the author probably didn’t want the story ‘grounded’ – and fair enough – except, the story that is told by one of the characters is so clearly a telling of Pygmalion and so clearly makes sense of so much else in the play (from the female characters cold hands – her being a metaphorical statue right through to the major conflict theme in the play and also, I think, her PMT) that it really was a kind of organising motif linking the whole play together and I think as such it might have helped to make it clear that is what it was being used for earlier in the play.
This could be described as a ‘new materialism’ play. New Materialism is a post-structuralist set of ideas (is theory too strong?) that has grown out of some of the new feminisms. The idea being that all objects have a kind of life-force (not really that, that is perhaps too strong, but metaphorically, I guess) and that this means that the presence of something in a room impacts on what happens in that room. Now, in some ways this is almost completely obvious. If you are in a room and you are sitting around a folding card table, that is going to be a different kind of experience to sitting around a mahogany dining table. But this isn’t just about the ‘affordances’ (as Gibson would call them) of objects – new materialism is based on the idea that the materiality of existence impacts us in ways we simply do not understand and certainly in ways we cannot control even if we did understand them.
Here virtually every object on the stage has a kind of life of its own – and this is particularly true of the rooms which virtually all have names and personalities, some of which are clearly not all that friendly. There are discussions of ghosts, but I think ghosts is actually a poor metaphor for what is really being discussed here – ghosts are dead and a presence from the past, these aren't ghosts as such, but rather are the ongoing natures of these rooms, not so much an echo from the room’s past, but rather something about its own fundamental character and nature.
This is the story of two people trying to make their relationship work by going away together to a place of ghosts – Gettysburg, no less – and this isn’t the only reference to ghosts of the past. Here the characters are constantly haunted by presences – one of the characters is haunted by an ex-husband who morphs into just about everyone else she ever meets, another (clearly linked to this blind woman by name and by other kinds of echoes) also has a past ghost who torments her throughout the play.
I want to focus on the idea of desire. I use the Pygmalion myth in my teaching – the idea of a statue coming to life through desire is one of the ways I try to explain Bourdieu’s idea of habitus – of being able to recognise in others what is ‘the best’ in them, that sets them aside from and above all others – that shows that they are ‘one of us’. But the key here is desire - the idea of desire as the catalyst for the change. It is the desire that causes the stature to be converted into a real woman – and perhaps this is something that helps make sense of so much of this play. As much as you may want to resist desire, being desired is a potent force in the universe – an incredibly attractive force, one that is hard to resist - that changes you. It is interesting to consider how many relationships end because of the longing to be desired, rather than 'just comfortable'.
At one point in this play a character is told that the only time he cries is over ‘that Bob Dylan song’ – the song is ‘I Want You’ – the ultimate three-word expression of desire (note that there is a Beatles and an Elvis Costello song with the same name – the Costello one might have fit too well here and so the Dylan version that is more obscure is used, and I think this is a good choice, by the way). Anyway, it is the fact that he cries at the song, not at her – that he cannot express his desire in a way other than in one that ultimately means he is reduced to tears that is terribly interesting in all this. For, if you are to convert a statue into a woman then you must make your own desire known.
I’m not sure about a lot of things in this play – the birds, for example. I know birds are often symbols of messages from the gods, but I can’t quite get that to work for me here. And the insects sort of fit with the ‘metamorphosis’ idea – they change from flesh and blood into things with exoskeletons – all the same, that seems a little forced for me. I didn’t know if the two old women were lovers, I couldn’t tell if one of the women’s husbands had been made up, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to see the blind woman as Tiresias - I suspect so, but I might be reading too much into this here.
There is a really interesting part of the play where the woman that runs the guest house is talking to the young woman and she reads her the description of the sunset she has just written. It is truly awful writing – adjective piled upon adjective, all the mistakes that writers make when they are starting out. But here it was interesting because here she is trying to preserve what is impossible to preserve and the bad writing makes that point perhaps better than could otherwise be made - that somethings need to be just experienced and allowed to pass. That we are particularly hopeless at doing just that is perhaps one of the major themes of this play.
I still felt this was too long and even longer by also being too slow – but this wasn’t at all an awful play. I think I would be prepared to even sit through it again. I came away thinking I’d possibly missed an awful lot.
Read
August 16, 2025and I can’t stress this enough: ?????????????????????????????????
May 14, 2017
Just. Great. Right up there with Baker's "Circle Mirror Transformation", "The Flick" and her "Uncle Vanya" translation for me. A great study of what haunts us in our lives- everything from scary stuff in our childhoods to jealousy and regret. And one of the best last lines in a play I've ever read. Beautiful.
April 28, 2025
قشنگ.
February 16, 2018
Further thoughts: https://harryrmcdonald.wordpress.com/...
This woman's talent makes me sick.
Every time I finish one of her plays I just wonder "How did we get here?" and "How did she create drama out of almost nothing?" John feels in many ways her most ambitious work, and slightly imperfect in comparison to her earlier works, but imperfect Annie Baker is still vastly superior to the majority of modern drama.
This woman's talent makes me sick.
Every time I finish one of her plays I just wonder "How did we get here?" and "How did she create drama out of almost nothing?" John feels in many ways her most ambitious work, and slightly imperfect in comparison to her earlier works, but imperfect Annie Baker is still vastly superior to the majority of modern drama.
June 1, 2020
تو تنهایی م کمتر احساس تنهایی می کردم
June 6, 2024
Astonishing, very creepy and then all of the sudden not at all creepy and just devastating and quiet and resigned. A little sort-of-kind-of haunted house story about a relationship failing and not knowing for sure what meaningful connection feels like and God watching over us in the form of all the weird trinkets and inanimate objects that surround us. Are we just being watched by a higher power or does he intervene? Are you in love with a person or with a personality/desires you assigned onto someone like a doll? Annie Baker there is nobody in the world writing stories like you!!! Onto the next four plays. 🤭
July 4, 2022
I've never seen her plays live, but I'm convinced she's our greatest contemporary playwright. Maybe she just reads spectacularly. Next chance I get, I'm going.
Blown away by this one.
Blown away by this one.
June 17, 2018
"I had this dream last night that I was standing outside in the snow. Outside of this house looking in. And it was cold and all the lights were on and no one would answer the door. (pause) I guess you could call that dream a nightmare."
i've had too much free time on my hands being home alone this week so i read this twice in 24 hours, which has never happened. the first time around i thought it was almost too subtle for its own good but knew that it was something great. the second time i realized just how lonely and heartbreaking it is. it's so rare that i find someone's writing or a written work so transcendently good that i don't know what to do with it or myself. it happens all the time for me with movies or music, i'll obsess over one album or film for a week or so and be unable to move from it for a while. i read annie baker's play "the flick" a few weeks ago and thought i had found a new favorite writer; reading this confirmed it by outdoing that play several times over.
there are so many things i find special about the way annie baker writers her plays but i think the one that most people familiar with her work would agree with is that she's incredible at creating characters and situations who wouldn't otherwise find themselves in a play (movie theater ushers! an acting class in small town vermont!) without ever feeling exploitative or meanspirited. her plays are honest. what makes "john" so impressive to me is how it subverts so much of her previous work while also maintaining her trademarks. the awkward pauses, un-theatrical dialogue, and vulnerable characters are all here, but the context for them is different. where those previous plays can feel like looking at something you're not supposed to see, this one is all about watching others and being watched.
it's also just stylistically different enough to stand out, nearly verging on the horror genre at points and with some playful meta elements - little touches like genevieve interrupting the second intermission for her monologue, or mertis closing the curtains at the end of each act stand out in particularr. the overall effect of her recurring traits in her plays is different too - "the flick" uses its tension and awkward moments to create a melancholy but sweet feeling at the end. here the pain and awkwardness only leads to more pain and awkwardness. on my quest to read as many plays as possible this summer this is easily the best one i've come across yet, and i don't see anything taking that title from it.
i've had too much free time on my hands being home alone this week so i read this twice in 24 hours, which has never happened. the first time around i thought it was almost too subtle for its own good but knew that it was something great. the second time i realized just how lonely and heartbreaking it is. it's so rare that i find someone's writing or a written work so transcendently good that i don't know what to do with it or myself. it happens all the time for me with movies or music, i'll obsess over one album or film for a week or so and be unable to move from it for a while. i read annie baker's play "the flick" a few weeks ago and thought i had found a new favorite writer; reading this confirmed it by outdoing that play several times over.
there are so many things i find special about the way annie baker writers her plays but i think the one that most people familiar with her work would agree with is that she's incredible at creating characters and situations who wouldn't otherwise find themselves in a play (movie theater ushers! an acting class in small town vermont!) without ever feeling exploitative or meanspirited. her plays are honest. what makes "john" so impressive to me is how it subverts so much of her previous work while also maintaining her trademarks. the awkward pauses, un-theatrical dialogue, and vulnerable characters are all here, but the context for them is different. where those previous plays can feel like looking at something you're not supposed to see, this one is all about watching others and being watched.
it's also just stylistically different enough to stand out, nearly verging on the horror genre at points and with some playful meta elements - little touches like genevieve interrupting the second intermission for her monologue, or mertis closing the curtains at the end of each act stand out in particularr. the overall effect of her recurring traits in her plays is different too - "the flick" uses its tension and awkward moments to create a melancholy but sweet feeling at the end. here the pain and awkwardness only leads to more pain and awkwardness. on my quest to read as many plays as possible this summer this is easily the best one i've come across yet, and i don't see anything taking that title from it.
May 2, 2025
I don't know what is going on but I'm a fan of it
June 21, 2021
I really want to say something pithy about this play being deep and calling unto deep or everyone knowing someone named John and they all love this play, or whatever, but it's late, and I'm too tired to think of anything clever, so I'll just say that I've read all of Annie Baker's plays recently, and I think this one is my favorite. It's so good.
February 6, 2018
first read: three stars – what a weird, unpredictable, magical play. I don't know what kind of journey I was taken on and what I'm supposed to have gotten out of it, but it was beautiful anyway.
second read: five stars – I loveeeee you Annie Baker I want to dissect this play like a frog
second read: five stars – I loveeeee you Annie Baker I want to dissect this play like a frog
December 7, 2024
simmering, transcendent, haunted. every inch of this play shimmers with the past. i don’t know how it’s even possible a human being has written something so good.
///
i finished this one hour ago and find myself only able to cry about it now, sat at my desk, a quiet moment away from the forest where i finished this. annie baker's ability to create not characters but fully fledged humans, even ones who clearly exist for dubiously "for the plot" purposes, just astounds me. this play's relationship to its own haunted elements is so magical to me because i think the questions of real haunting, haunting which exists wholly inside one's own mind, haunting that exists in other people - none of it goes answered. we are left with these pieces of lives that have so many gaps and yet the story feels so completely full. parts of this just felt absurdly personal and i love stories of complicated people where there are no heroes and there are no villains, and this was just otherworldly.
///
i finished this one hour ago and find myself only able to cry about it now, sat at my desk, a quiet moment away from the forest where i finished this. annie baker's ability to create not characters but fully fledged humans, even ones who clearly exist for dubiously "for the plot" purposes, just astounds me. this play's relationship to its own haunted elements is so magical to me because i think the questions of real haunting, haunting which exists wholly inside one's own mind, haunting that exists in other people - none of it goes answered. we are left with these pieces of lives that have so many gaps and yet the story feels so completely full. parts of this just felt absurdly personal and i love stories of complicated people where there are no heroes and there are no villains, and this was just otherworldly.
October 6, 2021
" ...یادم میآد وقتی به همسر سابقم از زاویهی خاصی نگاه میکردم به طرز وحشتناکی شبیه ماهی ماقبلِ تاریخ بود... و گاهی جورج مثل حیوانات جنگلیه... مثل موش خرما یا موش خرمای کوهی... شاید خود این که هرروز به یه نفر نگاه کنی باعث میشه یکم شبیه جونور به نظر بیاد... وقتی به یه کلمه زیاد نگاه کنی به نظر میرسه اون دیگه یه کلمه نیست."
March 6, 2024
I have no idea what I just read… it was funny, though :)
October 4, 2017
With one closing line to seal the deal, I am now hooked on Annie Baker and her plays. “John” is a pseudo-ghost story, exploring the darkness of human relationships, insecurities, and peculiar fears all incased within a Bed & Breakfast teeming with inanimate objects and a quirky innkeeper in Gettysburg, PA. As an amateur writer, I struggle the most with composing dialogue, so I am completely fascinated by authors who can successfully structure believable and meaningful conversations between two intimate characters. Baker explores the insecurities of two people (Jenny & Elias) failing to piece together their relationship so seamlessly, I almost had the notion that I once had conversations entirely similar. Throw Mertis into the mix, the eccentric owner of the Bed & Breakfast, and we’ve got a truly unique play. Just to give you a look into the play, I’ll leave you with my favorite line spoken by Mertis, “Maybe looking at someone everyday makes them seem a bit creature-like. The way when you look at a word for too long it doesn’t seem like a word anymore.”
March 15, 2022
I am left with so many questions after finishing this play. I never would have voluntarily read it, it was required reading for my AP Literature Class. The book would be a psychological thriller movie and it is a play that I now want to see because it was just so so weird. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to have any of my questions because everything is left up to the reader's analysis to try and think of what these things are. This review makes no sense because my mind makes no sense now after finishing this. I do recommend though!
Read
November 26, 2024To all my Goodreads friends, few though you may be, I just want to officially tell all of you that Annie Baker is my favorite writer. This play has solidified this. I own all of her plays and if you ever want to borrow one I’d be more than happy to lend it to you. She’s my favorite writer because not only does she get me excited about being a writer, but also being a human being.
September 6, 2016
Pulitzer Prize winner Baker never repeats herself, which is admirable, but I am not always sure where her plays are intending to take one. I think they are the type of play that really need to be seen staged to appreciate, and so it is with this rather bizarre example.
July 14, 2018
If you’re not into horror you might not be too keen to the first act but regardless she gets you in there in a really great way. Her characters are so disturbing.
December 8, 2018
My hope was strong that this would be a better play - because it is so close to being remarkable. It certainly has a wonderfully theatrical premise / theme: the realities of hauntings in our lives. There's a bit of Shirley Jackson here; something of the influence of Martin McDonagh's 'The Pillowman' (a much better play); the wistfulness of some of the gentler 'Twilight Zone' episodes. We're shown some of the various ways that things can haunt (for good or otherwise): rooms, God, objects, people (whether they are close or living or not).
Its setting of a bed and breakfast - at first - made me recall when I saw David Mamet's 'American Buffalo' on Broadway. That 3-character play is set in a junk shop and the dense set for that production went on forever with junk. I found myself so uninterested in the inert nature of the play that I ended up observing the details of the set almost the entire time. It was impressive but it didn't make up for the lack of a play.
Playwright Annie Baker goes into some specifics about how over-stuffed (with tchotchkes and little sets-within-the-set) her B&B is. I've seen photos of the original NYC production - and, yes, the play can be a set designer's dream. But, though 'John' has a lot more going on in it than 'American Buffalo' (almost any play could do *that*), the text is not quite up to its potential (and, again, that's a real shame).
There's no real plot. We spend time with the whimsical 72-year-old owner of the B&B, her 85-year-old friend (who went blind in her late 50s - and now occasionally visits)... and a young couple (each around 30) at a genuine impasse in their relationship: the B&B serves as a way station for the fate of their bond. There is a marked richness to these characters - and good actors could, no doubt, bring the necessary subtext to add more color to what they're asked to play.
But, although 'less' is sometimes more - sometimes less is just less. Baker (esp. in the fine first act - and, luckily, a little in the third) serves up some effective scenes for her characters but, as the play progresses, the urgency of the conversations begins to falter; some of them are needlessly thin and seemingly pointless.
I don't often read new plays these days (or get to see them done live, for that matter). The bulk of them don't seem to have all-that-unique an angle. Baker has been getting a lot of attention as 'the playwright to watch' (her earlier play, 'The Flick', won a Pulitzer Prize). I've read about her other plays - but 'John' stood out as special. ~and, in many ways, it is. I just wish - considering it was so on-track - that it didn't run out of steam. I'm sure that - for some - what's there will suffice. It can be said that a play often does just so much - and the rest should be left to subsequent personal conversation - and a case can be made for that. Personally, though, I wanted Baker to take her own 'argument' further along.
Sidebar: I've heard that, in performance, this play can run almost 3 1/2 hours (with two breaks and lots of 'silences'). That's a bit much - for the story, as is, that it's telling.
Its setting of a bed and breakfast - at first - made me recall when I saw David Mamet's 'American Buffalo' on Broadway. That 3-character play is set in a junk shop and the dense set for that production went on forever with junk. I found myself so uninterested in the inert nature of the play that I ended up observing the details of the set almost the entire time. It was impressive but it didn't make up for the lack of a play.
Playwright Annie Baker goes into some specifics about how over-stuffed (with tchotchkes and little sets-within-the-set) her B&B is. I've seen photos of the original NYC production - and, yes, the play can be a set designer's dream. But, though 'John' has a lot more going on in it than 'American Buffalo' (almost any play could do *that*), the text is not quite up to its potential (and, again, that's a real shame).
There's no real plot. We spend time with the whimsical 72-year-old owner of the B&B, her 85-year-old friend (who went blind in her late 50s - and now occasionally visits)... and a young couple (each around 30) at a genuine impasse in their relationship: the B&B serves as a way station for the fate of their bond. There is a marked richness to these characters - and good actors could, no doubt, bring the necessary subtext to add more color to what they're asked to play.
But, although 'less' is sometimes more - sometimes less is just less. Baker (esp. in the fine first act - and, luckily, a little in the third) serves up some effective scenes for her characters but, as the play progresses, the urgency of the conversations begins to falter; some of them are needlessly thin and seemingly pointless.
I don't often read new plays these days (or get to see them done live, for that matter). The bulk of them don't seem to have all-that-unique an angle. Baker has been getting a lot of attention as 'the playwright to watch' (her earlier play, 'The Flick', won a Pulitzer Prize). I've read about her other plays - but 'John' stood out as special. ~and, in many ways, it is. I just wish - considering it was so on-track - that it didn't run out of steam. I'm sure that - for some - what's there will suffice. It can be said that a play often does just so much - and the rest should be left to subsequent personal conversation - and a case can be made for that. Personally, though, I wanted Baker to take her own 'argument' further along.
Sidebar: I've heard that, in performance, this play can run almost 3 1/2 hours (with two breaks and lots of 'silences'). That's a bit much - for the story, as is, that it's telling.
March 3, 2025
I'm so impressed. The American Gothic, the awkwardness, and the tension are just delicious coupled with how much there is to dig into in terms of mythology and literary references—such a great intro to her work.
June 3, 2023
I don’t read a lot of plays, but when I do I’m grateful they are Annie Baker plays. Nobody conveys more reality, more emotion, more intrigue with so few words. Pure magic.
March 22, 2024
Such good writing!! The characters were all amazing and so much depth to each one! I was expecting a little more from the ending, it seemed a little unfinished - I would’ve liked a bigger twist or something as it seemed the whole play was building to the end moment. But overall really liked it!
October 13, 2021
John is a simple play and simultaneously a complicated one. Annie Baker presents her audience with a story of young love but then she adds so much supernatural static that the play crackles at certain points. This makes for an enjoyable read because the many unusual occurrences never obscure the main story, and the dialogue is consistently ultra-smooth. The relationship between Elias and Jenny, the core story, is well outlined and we gain a vital piece of information in the last moments of the play. However, in this tale of a young couple staying at a B&B in Pennsylvania, the playwright also leads her readers down many rabbit holes. One senses that many of the mysterious events like flapping wings in haunted rooms and photos of ghosts are just for entertainment. Yet, some events are grounded in philosophy and psychology too. The eclectic mix of strange occurrences backlight a squabbling young couple and make their story far more engaging.
Baker’s play does not answer all the questions it poses and therefore it provides food for thought for days after reading it. It is an enjoyable and reader-friendly play. If you’d like to read further into this work then please see my blog post - my link text
Baker’s play does not answer all the questions it poses and therefore it provides food for thought for days after reading it. It is an enjoyable and reader-friendly play. If you’d like to read further into this work then please see my blog post - my link text
April 24, 2020
I really liked this play. The world of this story was creepy, haunting, and the setting created a tension that paralleled beautifully with the story. Annie Baker did a wonderful job with creating empathy in both the hero and the villain that sometimes you’re not sure which is which.
If you’re looking for a horror and a romance wrapped into one, look no further.
If you’re looking for a horror and a romance wrapped into one, look no further.
March 22, 2021
This made me realize how much I miss reading plays :')
December 19, 2021
wow. yup.
reading baker doesn’t feel like reading a play. it’s like. wow.
probably not the best thing to read while going through a breakup but oh well.
thank you to priya for lending it to me!
reading baker doesn’t feel like reading a play. it’s like. wow.
probably not the best thing to read while going through a breakup but oh well.
thank you to priya for lending it to me!
February 19, 2020
This play was so intriguing and weird and fun! Very glad I read it.
And of course Samantha would be the American Girl to be pissed off; what does she really have to be pissed off about though? She had like the easiest life out of all of those girls. (Yes I know I'm missing the point. But it has to be said.) Anyway.
And of course Samantha would be the American Girl to be pissed off; what does she really have to be pissed off about though? She had like the easiest life out of all of those girls. (Yes I know I'm missing the point. But it has to be said.) Anyway.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 188 reviews