A quietude of kindness
In these days of energetic acting, high-speed dialog, and dazzlingly complicated plots, playwright Annie Baker’s John is a marvel of tender realism. The three-hour play at A.C.T.’s The Strand is paced like a snail on Quaaludes. But as they say, there’s never a dull moment in this detailed and insightful study into human loneliness and love.
The play opens with the character who is its guiding spirit opening the theater’s curtains to reveal her home, a several storied B’n’B in Gettysburg. The home is one of those in which the objects, or “matter”, of a lifetime have accumulated. There are portraits and landscapes on the wall, stuffed toys on every step leading to the rooms upstairs, an aging couch, plants, a plastic duck under one of the plants, more dolls, two light-up plastic replicas of the Eiffel Tower, a huge Christmas tree with temperamental strings of lights that go on and off in the middle of the night, a toy train set with miniature tracks and town, a player piano that bursts spontaneously into raucous song. Etc. Etc. All brilliantly assembled by Scenic Designer Marsha Ginsberg.
You’ve been in this house before. Perhaps it was your grandmother’s, or a place where you rented a room in some godforsaken place just outside Iowa City, when your car’s radiator overheated and aborted your cross-country race to the other coast for a few days.
Mertis, known as Kitty and played brilliantly by Georgia Engel, is a woman of more than very uncertain years, who rents out rooms in her memory-packed domicile. She’s sweet, she’s patient, her gears move very slowly, and somewhere off-stage she has an ill husband.
At least she says she has an ill husband. But who knows? It is entirely possible that hubby is imagined. Or a ghost. Or the cat in a different guise.
Mertis opens the door to a young couple that have rented her Jackson Room online. They are traveling back home and Elias (Joe Paulik) has been an enthusiast of the Civil War and Gettysburg ever since he was a kid. His partner Jenny (Stacey Yen) obliges his interest because, as becomes very clear very quickly, their relationship is in crisis. Rather like the Jackson Room, it’s sprung a leak.
Mertis moves them to the Chamberlain Room, ever so much nicer, and for the same price. But in the middle of the night, Jenny patters downstairs. She’s cold, the room’s cold, she has cramps. Elias follows soon after. Defensive and angry, he’s looking for a fight, and they argue over an affair Jenny has had with a man named John.
The following day another character joins the mix. Mertis’ ancient and blind friend Genevieve (Ann McDonough). She’s a scrappy non-believer who was inhabited by the ill-will of her husband John, even after his death, which drove her mad but led her to a personal truce with her aloneness.
Over the course of the play’s two or three days, these four characters meet in different configurations, and in each meeting there is the promise of a mystery answered, that something will be revealed and something will be learned. The silences in the conversations, the repetitions, the hmms and ahhs, hesitations and lapses are many, but they fascinate because they so perfectly resemble real-life exchanges.
The directing by Ken Rus Schmoll never fails to enhance the writing. We never begrudge Mertis her slow navigations of the room, from chair to front door and back, from one side of the dining table to the other. We follow her movements, as we do that of anyone we find enchanting or mysterious, expecting that at some point a deep truth will appear.
That’s the point, though, that deep truth is simply in the passage of time and in our presence within the world as human beings feeling, suffering, or quietly celebrating our small existences within an unimaginably vast universe.
This is a wonderful theatrical experience, poignantly written and beautifully enacted.
– Jaime Robles
A.C.T.’s production of Annie Baker’s John continues through April 23 at The Strand Theater in San Francisco. For information and tickets, visit act-sf.org.
Photo: Genevieve (Ann McDonough) and Elias (Joe Paulik) listen to Mertis (Georgia Engel) tell how she met her husband. Photo by Kevin Berne.