Lois Smith

[On Rick On Theater, I’ve said of actress Lois Smith (b. 1930), whom I’ve seen on stage a number of times in different kinds of roles (not to mention several TV and film performances), that she’s “truly one of this country’s top performers” and that her “prominence . . . comes from her absolute command of any role she plays, irrespective of the quality of the rest of the production.”  In a 2011 report on this blog, I made the definitive statement, “I don’t think Smith can deliver anything less than a credible and warm performance.”  I’m doubling down on that assessment. 

[I met Smith briefly after a performance—playing opposite her was David Margulies, a former teacher of mine, so I waited by the stage door to say hello to him—and I got to tell Smith how much I liked her work.  Something else I wrote in a ROT report: “I think Lois Smith is an honest-to-God living national treasure.”

[Posts on ROT that feature commentary on Lois Smith are: “The Illusion” (1 July 2011), “Heartless” (10 September 2012), “The Trip to Bountiful (2005)” (25 May 2013), and “John” (1 September 2015).]

“LOIS SMITH AND THE WORK THAT ENDURES”
by Lyndsey Bourne

[The following transcript was slugged “Interview” and was posted on the American Theatre website on 23 December 2025; it didn’t appear in the magazine’s print edition.]

The 95-year-old actor reflects on her rich and rewarding stage career, and the life it drew from and made for her.

For more than 70 years, Lois Smith has been delivering performances that have the power to remind an audience what a night at the theatre is for, and what a play can do. Across stage and screen, Smith has built a body of work remarkable not just for its longevity but for its consistency of purpose. She gravitates toward writing that unsettles and deepens, that asks something of her, and of her audiences. She has consistently met that demand with a blend of rigor and curiosity that has made her a touchstone for several generations of artists.

In September, I was invited to an early screening of the upcoming film The Steel Harp [independent comedy directed by Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan and written by O’Sullivan; Ley Line Entertainment, Fusion Entertainment, release date to be announced], in which Smith stars. She anchors the film with steadiness and grace, with the same searching, steely gaze and emotional precision that has defined her stage work for more than seven decades.

When we spoke a few weeks after her 95th birthday [3 November 2025], our conversation moved from her earliest days on Broadway [Time Out for Ginger (1952) by Ronald Alexander, The Wisteria Trees (1955) by Joshua Logan, The Young and Beautiful (1955) by Sally Benson] through the landmark productions that shaped her career, to the rhythms of her life now. In person she is warm and generous—as well as very tough, practical, and discerning. She brings to every exchange a level of care, thought, and attention that feels increasingly rare for a person of any age. At 95, she’s reflective without nostalgia, clear-eyed about the industry’s changes, and devoted to the communal spark that makes theatre worth returning to.

In the time since we spoke, it is the reverence for her craft, the integrity she exudes, that has stayed with me most. That and the indelible sound of her deep, endearing laugh.

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

LYNDSEY BOURNE: I’ve been having so much fun revisiting some of your work. I watched an archival recording of Buried Child [Broadway, 1996; by Sam Shepard; Nominee for 1996 Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play] earlier this week, and The Trip to Bountiful [Off-Broadway, 2005; by Horton Foote; 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, 2006 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play, 2006 Obie Award for Best Performance, 2006 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play, and Nominee for 2006 Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance]. 

LOIS SMITH: I think those are two of my best works.

In Buried Child, especially, the final reveal in the third act—when we learn about the baby as you’re going up the stairs, gripping the side of the banister with both hands and your back to the audience—it’s devastating. It’s rare to be so moved by back acting.

Discovering that was very specific and very real. Gary Sinise [b. 1955], who directed it, was so fierce, holding everybody so tight, we’d go crazy. [The production transferred from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.] Afterwards, I felt if he hadn’t done that, we never would have gotten to where we got. I felt free because we were so grounded. And he was delighted at the things that came forth.

The Trip to Bountiful too. Carrie Watts is such a physically and emotionally demanding role. I kept thinking, for an old play, it feels very contemporary. 

Oh gosh, yes. What a beautiful play. Horton [Foote (1916-2009)] was with us all the time, and he loves actors—he was a delight. He’d been working on that play for 50 years. In ’53 it was on television and Broadway the same year. Then, of course, he adapted it for the film [1986]. The original had something like five huge sets and three acts. In 2005, when we did it at the Signature [Theatre Company; Off Broadway company in New York City], Harris Yulin [1937-2025], the director, proposed we cut it down. We did it in 90 minutes without stopping. Horton was all for it—he made it happen. It was so exciting. 

I’d love to go back to the very beginning of your career. You moved to New York in 1952, is that right? Were you scared, coming here on your own, all the way across the country for those first few months? [Smith was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family had moved to Seattle, Washington, around 1941.]

No, I wasn’t scared. I was excited.

You were ready to start your life.

New York seemed like the place for me. I was at the University of Washington in the Drama Department. There were two theatres on campus performing plays year-round with student casts. Every play ran for six-week runs, six nights a week, to a paid audience. It was like being in a stock company or something—a kind of theatre training that was beyond classwork.

We drove from Seattle to New York in a little old Ford that boiled over during the day, so we drove at night. It was really crazy.

What were you hoping for when you moved here? Were you thinking long-term about your career, about the kind of life you wanted to build?

I don’t think I had that kind of thought. I wanted to work—and I was lucky. When my husband [Wesley D. Smith (1930-2018); m. 1948, div. 1970] and I first came, he was going to Harvard. We stayed a month in a little rented room. I worked all night sorting checks in a bank on Wall Street; he had a filing job. I looked for acting work during the day.

That summer, I got my first job, a play on Broadway called Time Out for Ginger; Melvyn Douglas [1901-81] played my father. Suddenly I had a Broadway salary. In those days it was nothing like what it is now, of course, but it was more money than I’d ever made in one day. I came here hoping to work and I lucked out. There was a lot of theatre going on then. Off-Broadway didn’t yet exist, but there were a lot of plays on Broadway, there were showcases, television dramas—I don’t mean series but plays filmed live for television. That’s how I got started in television.

[For some comments on theater on television, see my post “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” (25 April 2013).

[Off-Broadway was just getting started at the beginning of the 1950s. It’s first real success was the 1952 revival of Tennessee Williams’s (1911-83) Summer and Smoke directed by José Quintero (1924-99) at the Circle in the Square Theater in Greenwich Village.  The play had failed on Broadway in 1948, but ran in the Village for over 100 performances—and audiences and the press took notice, helping establish Off-Broadway as a legitimate New York theater venue.

[Summer and Smoke’s success was followed by the first musical success of Off-Broadway, the 95-performance run of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Kurt Weill’s (1900-50) Threepenny Opera (which had also flopped on Broadway) in 1954, the same year that the Village Voice inaugurated the Obie Awards to recognize excellence in the new theatrical venue.]

I don’t want to presume, but it must have been difficult in the 1950s to be a woman and an actor, and then also a mother. [Lois and Wesley had a daughter in 1958.] What was it like for you?

Well, you know, it’s me, all those years, all those 70 years. So it’s hard to say. I was lucky in that there was a lot of work. And sometimes, like right now, there isn’t. By the time I’d been here, I think, two years, I had done some television work and a film, which meant I could make a living—which you can’t do in the theatre, or almost can’t.

Was it steady work?

Oh, never. It’s not steady.

Are there roles you feel most connected to? Which plays still stick with you the most?

It’s interesting, you immediately picked two of them: The Trip to Bountiful, Buried Child. Also The Grapes of Wrath [Broadway, 1990; Book adapted by Frank Galati from the novel by John Steinbeck; from Steppenwolf; 1990 Tony Nominee for Best Featured Actress in a Play]. I think they were my best work. They were examples of what it is when it’s good—when it’s the real thing. When people are working together with skill and trust and love. So many things have to come together. And in those cases, they did. You can’t do it alone. Though as a playwright, you probably feel more than others that you are alone, at least for a good part of the process.

Just the first half, really. I love being in rehearsal. I’m just a playwright so I can get to the rehearsal room, you know?

It’s the best place.

Do you feel your approach to a rehearsal process changes with each role, with every play, whether it’s a new play or a classic?

It’s always different. I mean, I’m speaking now ideally and about my best experiences. Of course, it’s not always wonderful. It’s very hard. And it hasn’t always worked beautifully, which has to do with everything: the play, the actors, the director. This is a slightly different subject, but when Glynis Johns [1923-2024; British actress and singer] died this year, I read an obituary where she said, “I think my best thinking is in the theatre.” That’s exactly how I feel.

[Smith was probably referring to Johns’s remark quoted in her New York Times obituary of 6 January 2024 (Johns died the year before Smith’s interview for AT): “Acting is my highest form of intelligence, the time when I use the best part of my brain” (Anita Gates, “Glynis Johns, 100, Dies; ‘Mary Poppins’ Actress And Tony Award Winner”; online, the notice was entitled “Glynis Johns, Tony Winner for ‘A Little Night Music,’ Dies at 100,” posted on 4 January, the day of the actress’s death.)

Looking back, was there a decade in theatre that feels most meaningful to you?

My first decade. That excitement—everything was new. The fact that I got work quickly and in all three mediums meant that I could keep working. In ’55 I did a Broadway play, The Young and Beautiful; Sally Benson [1897-1972] wrote it based on F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940] stories. That was very early in my career—fun. By then we were living in Princeton [New Jersey]; my husband was a classicist and taught at Princeton. My daughter was born there in ’58. I had various jobs during that time, Broadway plays. Sometimes they would close quickly.

[In addition to the stage work Smith did in the ’50s, she did many TV shows, a number of them episodes of anthology series, a popular format of the era in which each episode presents a different story and a different set of characters (Kraft Television Theatre [1953], Studio One [1954], Modern Romances [1955]).  She also made her film début in East of Eden in 1955 (see a brief anecdote about Smith and this film in my report on Heartless (referenced in the introduction above).]

Did your daughter come with you when you worked, when you traveled for jobs?

When she was a little baby, I remember a job when I was carrying her in a handbag practically, and my mother from Seattle came down to L.A. and babysat while I was doing a television show there. That happened more than once. Then in the ’60s, we lived in Philadelphia; my husband’s next job was at Penn [University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia]. I worked for Theatre of the Living Arts. André Gregory [b. 1934] was artistic director.

You’ve mentioned a few directors already—Gary Sinise, Harris Yulin—and how much their approaches shaped those productions. Are there other directors or collaborators you’ve especially loved working with—people who really understood you or lifted you up in the work?

Frank Galati [1943-2023], certainly. I first worked with him in The Grapes of Wrath at Steppenwolf. I think we did three more things together.

[Smith was also directed by Galati in The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber (1990) and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (2001); in 2009, Smith performed in William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) The Tempest in a cast that also included Galati, under the direction of Tina Landau (b. 1962). All three of these productions were performed at Steppenwolf in Chicago; none traveled to New York City as The Grapes of Wrath and Buried Child did.]

What was it about him?

His presence. His manner of working. Who he was. I remember when we did The Grapes of Wrath in ’88, he hadn’t been a member of the company very long. He was a phenomenon in Chicago, and they were very pleased that they lured him to come and be a member at Steppenwolf. This was a great big cast; everyone was working at the top of their game. They had gotten my name from asking around because they didn’t have a Ma Joad in the company. Anyway, it was a huge production. Everybody felt a lot of agency; nobody was shy. It was my first experience with him and with the company. It was really falling in love.

I’m also thinking about how important and meaningful working with Irene Lewis [b. 1945] has been to me.

Tell me about her.

She was artistic director at Baltimore Center Stage [1991-2011]. I first met her when she cast me in Escape From Happiness by George Walker [1993]. Then she asked what I’d like to do. I mentioned [George Bernard] Shaw [1856-1950] and The Cherry Orchard [Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)]. She directed me in Mrs. Warren’s Profession [1999] and then as Ranevskaya [1994].

She used all of the allotted rehearsal time—and used it well. I find this less and less the norm. There is no substitute for what happens during rehearsal. There is no substitute for the experience and growth of the production of a play during the rehearsal hours together. She exemplified an understanding and practice of the art of rehearsal. My times of working with her were probably in the 1990s.

[I wholeheartedly share Smith's feelings about rehearsals, and I suspect most stage actors would also. I loved rehearsing. Performances are the reward for the work; they’re the endorphin shot at the end of weeks of effort. But the rehearsals are where the actor's creativity happens, it’s where the adrenaline is generated. Rehearsing is how the actor contributes the art of theater; it’s how we discover what the playwright wrought and what the director conceives. Rehearsals are where the collaboration of the “collaborative art” takes place; they’re where the juices flow. Smith is spot on; ask any actor!]

At what point did you move back to New York?

It was the beginning of the ’70s, when we were living in Philadelphia, and my daughter and I moved back to New York. That was really kind of scary.

You were a single mom, is that right? How did you manage that?

One of the first things I did coming back to New York was a Joyce Carol Oates [b. 1938] play, Sunday Dinner [1970]. Curt Dempster [1935-2007] directed it; this was right around the time he started EST [Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dempster’s repertory and developmental company]. Then, fairly early on, I got a job in a soap opera. And then another. [Among others, Smith appeared in 708 episodes of Somerset in 1972-74 and 247 episodes of The Doctors in 1977-79.] For a long time, I had several running jobs in soap operas—hardly what I would most love to do—but my goodness, Monday to Friday, daytime hours! Amazing. That was a real break, you know? Not in my sense of myself as an actor, but as an actor who was working, which was very important. I was making enough money to comfortably live on. That was how I managed as a single mom in those early years, in her school years.

[This was a common wish among New York-based actors just starting their careers.  Getting a soap opera role (or a commercial gig), could subsidize one's stage work for a few months.  Snagging a recurring character rather than a member of the regular cast, because that meant regular work a few days or weeks at time, then being laid off for some time before the character returns to the plot, gave the actor time to audition or perform in a stage show with money in the bank. Booking a commercial, especially getting cast as a character appearing in a series of ads, worked the same way.  Soaps and commercials paid well, and it was daytime work, as Smith points out.  Some soap opera and commercial actors were known to do their TV work during the day, and tread the boards at night. Needless to say, I suppose, it takes luck and persistence to get that kind of set-up--but it was an almost ubiquitous ambition.]

How important have your friendships in the theatre been—to sustaining your career, your resilience, to moving through all these decades?

Amazingly important. Harold Clurman [1901-80] was another director I loved and a very good friend. I first worked with him in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending [Broadway, 1957], probably. Harold introduced me to Stella Adler [1901-92; actress and acting teacher] and her daughter, Ellen, who he had really raised with Stella from the time she was with the Group Theatre through all its years. Ellen and I both had daughters, born, I think, a day apart.

[Stella Adler, aside from being a renowned actor in her own right—she was a founding member of the famous Group Theatre (1931-41) with Clurman, Lee Strasburg (1901-82), and Cheryl Crawford (1902-86)---was one of the United States’ most esteemed acting teachers and interpreters of Method acting and the system of actor training conceived by Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), on whose theories the Method was based (see “The Method – a Review” [12 March 2022] and “Bombast to Beckett” [13 January 2025], both by Kirk Woodward).

[Adler was born into an acting family, founded by her father, Jacob Adler (1855-1926), a star of the Yiddish theater (see my post “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene” (23 and 26 August 2012). Her mother, Sara (1858-1953), was also a Yiddish theater actor, and so was her brother, Luther (1903-84), who became a prominent figure in films and the English-speaking stage.

[Stella Adler was married to Clurman, author of one of the most influential books about directing, On Directing (1974), from 1942-59, which includes the period when Smith was starting her career in New York.  Adler’s daughter, known as Ellen Adler (1927-2019), though her father was Stella’s first husband, Horace Eliascheff (1896-1944) and Ellen was married to clarinetist David Oppenheim (1922-2007). Ellen Adler was a painter, musical artist, and guardian of the Adler family name and legacy.]

What was your daughter’s relationship to you being a working actor? Did she ever talk about it with you? Was she thrilled by your job or was it just what Mom did?

I think she was interested. I remember when I was in the Theater of the Living Arts, she was in grade school, and it was the first time that my husband had brought her to see a play all the way through—a modern-day version of The Misanthrope [Molière (French; 1622-73)]. I must have been about 35, I’m guessing, something like that. [The production was staged in mid-1965, so Smith would have been just under 35 and her daughter would have been just over 7.] Afterwards she said, “Here you are, getting your gray hair, and you were so bouncy.” So that was my first review from my daughter. 

That’s so good—that’s my favorite review I’ve ever heard.

Isn’t that wonderful?

When you’re on a stage, what’s your favorite sound to hear from an audience?

Oh, gosh. You know, it could be silence. It could be laughter. As long as they’re listening.

I can think of a time an audience just went crazy for you: In Annie Baker’s [b. 1981] John [2015; see my report, referenced above in the introduction], when you came out to do that speech at the start of the second intermission.

Wasn’t that fun?

Amazing. Everyone’s just leaving and then you come out from behind that big red curtain and you start talking.

There were people afterwards, who were so mad they missed it. They didn’t know it was going to happen; they were already gone. 

I almost missed it. And then I heard your voice and ran back inside. That year, 2015, you also had Marjorie Prime [Jordan Harrison (b. 1977)]. 

It was a crazy year. We did Marjorie Prime at the Taper [Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 2014; Playwrights Horizons, 2015] and then, not long after that, I did a play at Steppenwolf, which Frank Galati directed, called The Herd [by Rory Kinnear (b. 1978), 2015]. Then I came back to New York. I think that’s when I first read Lily Thorn[e]’s play, Peace for Mary Frances [2018], and then I went straight into John and then straight into the movie of Marjorie Prime [BB Film Productions, 2017], and then straight—truly, the next day after we finished shooting—right into the Playwrights Horizons production of Marjorie Prime. I don’t think I’d ever had so much good, interesting, exciting work pile up on top of each other. But it was horrible because my beloved, David Margulies [1937-2016], was sick and getting sicker and sicker. He died during all of that; it was awful. I didn’t even understand for a while afterwards how much in shock I was through parts of that year. It was . . . It was really awful. It was wonderful, but it was awful. It was just one of those . . . one of those things.

[David Margulies, whom I identified above as a teacher of mine (in the then-brand-new Master of Fine Arts program in theater at Rutgers in the mid-1970s), was Lois Smith’s romantic partner—something I didn’t know. Their relationship began around 1973, after each of their marriages had dissolved, and though it was often on and off, Smith said that they were “very strongly together” during the final years of Margulies’s life (Michael Schulman, “Lois Smith Refreshes Her Memory,” New Yorker 20 November 2017). Both actors had been active with the Ensemble Studio Theatre from its formative years—Curt Dempster founded the company in 1968—and performed there frequently. Margulies, who joined the executive board on 1973, also directed EST productions. Margulies died of cancer on 11 January 2016 at 78.]

It must have been overwhelming. And to have so much attention on you at that time, in your career . . . It really was a huge year for you.

Yeah, it was a huge year.

I think Marjorie Prime and John are two of the most important plays of the last 25 years. Certainly, two of the most memorable nights I’ve spent in the theatre. Do you still see a lot of theatre? I know I’ve spotted you in quite a few audiences.

After the pandemic, I sort of made a point of it. It’s one of the most important things I do. 

What do you look for in a play when you’re a member of the audience? What do you hope for when you go to the theatre?

I don’t know if I go with a hope; I think I go with a habit. Still, there’s that little happy feeling, a hopeful feeling, at the beginning, right before a play starts, being there together. What do you hope for?

I think I hope I’ll be surprised.

Yes, surprise is one of the best things, isn’t it? I agree. We need it.

What are you thinking about these days? How do you like to spend your time?

I love to read novels. That hasn’t been as true lately. When The Steel Harp became a reality, I kind of stopped reading. I just spent all my time on that script. I don’t think I’ve ever been a hasty person, but I’ve become much more of a slow mover than I used to be. Everything is slower, I think. I take too long to read the Times in the morning.

But what’s too long?

No, you’re right. It’s a morning ritual. David and I always used to read the Times together in the morning; I think that’s part of why I continue doing it. That’s how my day begins.

Now I’m organized around social dates, theatregoing dates: dinner with friends, theatre with friends. I’m 95. Many things are different. I’m not as strong. But I can still work, and with pleasure, thank God. I just had a television job that dropped in for a couple of days. There were things I couldn’t do physically, but it turned out to be okay. I love working. I really do.

What do you hope for the future of the theatre?

I haven’t thought a lot about that. It’s hard to think about the future of theatre without thinking about what kind of world it will exist in. I guess I would say that the things most precious to me—the interconnectedness of people and experience, thought and concern—that they be present in the work. I don’t think I have a clear vision or hope for the future, except that it be . . . rooted.

[Lyndsey Bourne (b. ca. 1992) is a Canadian writer, teacher, and doula (a woman who assists mothers during labor and after childbirth) working with The Doula Project.  She’s currently based in Brooklyn, New York.  Her plays include The Second Body (workshopped at La MaMa E.T.C., New York City, in 2020), Mabel’s Mine (still in workshop; reading in July 2025), and I Was Unbecoming Then (Canadian première: 2024).  She teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (New York University Tisch School of the Arts).]

'John'

I seem to be having a mini-run of overlong plays that require me to sit for three-plus hours after which I still don’t know what I saw.  In July, it was Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore at three hours with an intermission (see my coming ROT report on 11 September) and now comes Annie Baker’s John, the opener of the Signature Theatre Company’s 2015-16 season, which runs a whopping three-and-a-quarter hours with two intermissions.  (When was the last time you saw that?)  In both experiences, I never figured out what the playwrights or directors wanted to say to me: Kafka is adapted from a highly metaphysical novel of the same title by Haruki Murakami, which surely accounts for its obtuseness, but Baker’s latest work is shot through with intentional mysticism (contrived to my ear) and an apparent willfulness to reveal as little as possible before, during, and after the performance.  (Looking for a brief description of the plot, all I could find outside of the reviews, which had only just come out, was the theater’s cryptic promo: “The week after Thanksgiving.  A Bed & Breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  A cheerful innkeeper.  A young couple struggling to stay together.  Thousands of inanimate objects, watching.”)   The New York Times’ Alexis Soloski reports that when asked about John even when it was completing rehearsals, Baker “wouldn’t share many particulars”; Jesse Green wrote in New York that she wouldn’t even describe it for him back in May.  Even Baker’s professional and personal background is only available in sketchy outlines and Soloski observes that the playwright waves off personal questions with a “No, no, no!”

My subscription partner, Diana, and I went to the Pershing Square Signature Center for the 7:30 performance of John on Friday evening, 14 August, on the Irene Diamond Stage, STC’s large, 294-seat, proscenium house.   Spectators enter through the rear doors of the theater rather than the usual side entrance down front.  (The only other time I’ve done that was for Charles L. Mee’s Big Love, when the rear entrance was dressed to look like an Italian sukkah under which the audience passed; see my ROT report on 18 March.)  The Signature production of John, a world première, started previews on 22 July and opened on 11 August; it’s currently scheduled to close on 6 September (extended from 30 August).  Baker’s fifth produced play (she’s a 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winner for The Flick, currently running in a commercial revival at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village) is her first production as a member of STC’s Residency Five program.  (One of three residencies at STC, now celebrating its 25th season, this residency program offers emerging playwrights three full productions of new works over a five-year period.  The other two programs are Residency One, for established writers, and the Legacy Program, for former playwrights-in-residence who are invited to return with a new or reimagined script.)

I could find little about Baker’s biography; Alexis Soloski reports that neither the writer nor her director, Sam Gold, like to reveal details of their private lives or their work together.  The bare bones are that she was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1981, which makes her 34.  Her family—New York Jewish mother, Irish Catholic father, and older brother (also a writer—a novelist)—moved to Amherst where she and her brother were raised “by hippies in an incredibly politically correct, we-all-love-each-other, world-peace household.”  She went on to get a bachelor’s degree from the Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University and then a Master of Fine Art from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where she went to work with playwright Mac Wellman.  What drew her to writing, Baker isn’t sure—neither parent was a writer—just that it was something she always wanted to do.  Playwriting is even more of a mystery, she says, though as a schoolgirl she enjoyed participating in school productions.  It wasn’t the acting that drew her, she says, “It was dealing with the theatre text that gave me pleasure, and the staging of the live event.” 

In fact, that’s what she says The Flick is partly about.  Jesse Green reports in Elle magazine that Baker feels that “the theater, in its liveness, has a crucial, distinct function.”  The dramatist explains: “So many plays are trying to be like film, like the needy kid who keeps saying ‘Like me, like me!’ and falling flat on his face.”  What she wants, Green reports in another profile of the playwright, is for plays “to marshal the ancient resources of the stage toward experiences only it can provide.”  ROTters may recognize this as my second criterion for good theater—I call it “theatricality.”  (The first criterion is that a good play must do more than just tell a story.  See my play reports “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children's Theater in America,” 25 November 2009; “A Disappearing Number (Lincoln Center Festival 2010),” 8 August 2010; “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” 27 May 2011; “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide,” 6 June 2011; “Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar,” 30 August 2011; “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” 4 April 2012; “Red,” 4 March 2012; “Painting Churches,” 14 April 2012; “Lying Lesson,” 6 April 2013; or “New Jerusalem,” 20 April 2014.) 

Her first professional play, Body Awareness, premièred at the Atlantic Theater Company in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2008. Directed by Karen Kohlhaas, the play received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations and brought the dramatist to national attention.  In 2009, Baker followed this production with Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons, her first collaboration with director Sam Gold who has since directed Baker’s next four premières: The Aliens (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 2010; 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize finalist and winner, with Circle Mirror Transformation, of the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play), her adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (Soho Repertory Theatre, 2012), The Flick (Playwrights Horizons, 2013; the 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting and 2014 Pulitzer Prize), and now John.  Gold also directed a 2010 staged reading of Nocturama, so far unmounted in a full production, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and the current Off-Broadway revival of The Flick.  (Since they began working together, Baker has had no other director—she directed the workshop of her own new play, The Last of the Little Hours, at the Sundance Institute’s 2014 Theatre Lab in Utah—but Gold has had successful productions of plays such as Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Fun Home—Off-Broadway, 2013; Broadway, 2015; Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical—and numerous other Off-Broadway and Broadway plays.)  Baker has won a number of honors, fellowships, and prizes for her writing.  She currently also teaches playwriting at NYU, at Barnard College, and in the MFA program at the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York.  Her plays have been produced all around the U.S. and in many countries abroad and four of her plays that are set in Vermont (The Aliens, Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness) have been anthologized as The Vermont Plays (Theatre Communications Group, 2012). 

“I’m someone who spots extremely theatrical moments in everyday life that usually go unnoticed,” the playwright avers.  According to Nathan Heller of the New Yorker, Baker “wants life onstage to be so vivid, natural, and emotionally precise that it bleeds into the audience’s visceral experience of time and space.”  As Sam Gold characterizes her playwriting, “It feels easy, casual, and unconsidered.  But the truth is that every breath, every hiccup in a thought, every tense inarticulate silence is orchestrated like a carefully composed piece of music.”  Heller, a staff writer for the New Yorker who writes on various topics, continues: “Drawing on the immediacy of overheard conversation, she has pioneered a style of theatre made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention.”  Those tools include not just the dialogue (including silences), but also the actors’ movements and gestures, the costumes, set décor, music, sound, lights, and “the whole immersive apparatus of the modern stage.”  When she writes, she now consciously attempts to rid her work of “conventional dramatic style”; the first things she thinks about, she says, are “all of the things that I think are integral to writing for the theatre”: “physical space and time and duration and design.”  (This is very reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’s “plastic theater,” about which I wrote on ROT in “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012.)

Though critics have labeled her both a “Realist” and a “Naturalist,” the playwright rejects those terms.  (Charles Isherwood called her work “micro-naturalism,” and the meticulous and detailed sets for her plays have even been described as “hyperreal.”)  She doesn’t feel there is a name that describes what she does.  “We need different terms,” Baker insists. “The old ones are outmoded.  They were outmoded when Chekhov wrote The Seagull.”  Her writing, asserts Heller, seems “as unplotted as real life” and then “breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence.”  “Nothing huge or overtly dramatic happens,” avers Jesse Green in Elle magazine; nevertheless, “. . . a real world, full of improbable feeling, arises from minimal information.”  In the earlier Green profile, the journalist asks: “Where is the argument?  Where is the exposition?”  He explains, “Such ‘resistant’ materials force the audience to open itself in a new way to what it experiences.  Some people do; some walk out.”  Baker’s plays comprise what Heller calls “intensely realistic elements—the studiously plausible scenery, the lack of obviously purposive action—but they don’t always add up to a realistic effect.”  The playwright “zooms in” on the tiny, revealing details of ordinary life, says Adam Greenfield, the director of new-play development at Playwrights Horizons.  Further, Baker’s plays don’t come to usual kinds of conclusions where things are wrapped up in a neat package.  “I get frustrated when theatre tries to make it make sense,” the writer argues.  “Sometimes people go to the theatre expecting articulated ideas, a lesson and dots for them to connect. The play is telling you what to think and I’m just not interested in that.”

Like many avant-gardists and postmodernists of the late 20th century, Baker has come, since her collaboration with director Sam Gold, to conceive of her plays as what she calls “blueprints” which are only finished during the rehearsal process.  The playwright acknowledges that work on a new play always starts with “the image of a place”—for John, for example, it was the bed-and-breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—then she thinks “about an actor I want to write for”—“the great” Georgia Engel for John.  (The process often begins with a road trip with Gold and the scenic designer; before writing John, Baker, Gold, and Mimi Lien went to Gettysburg and photographed several B&B’s in meticulous detail.)  The characters of her scripts, Baker senses, are “already there and I have to get their voices right.”  That often comes from the actors for whom she’s writing, whose “cadences and personality lead me to the character.”  The work she and Gold create with the designers and actors, says Alexis Soloski in the Times, is “a kind of theatrical pointillism: Observed up close, it isn’t anything like real life, but onstage it looks and feels and sounds that way.”  (In contrast, New York Theater’s Jonathan Mandell asserted, John “comes off instead like an exercise in theatrical pointillism . . . without as much concern that the dots add up to a clear and satisfying overall picture.”)  Gold admires the “microscopic lens on the world” Baker’s plays wield and observes, “Everything has to be right.  Everything has to be honest.  Everything has to be full.” 

Playwright and director “dive into the mundane and ordinary and reveal the extraordinary in it,” said Signature’s artistic director, James Houghton.  Baker’s literary aim is to look at what Heller called “what’s left unsaid along the edges of conversation.”  Green notes that her plays “feature as much silence as speech.”  This is a hallmark of Baker’s dramaturgy, the long, often awkward silences: the trailing line that’s left unfinished, the unspoken response to a question or observation—usually accompanied by blank stares as if one character didn’t understand what the other said or the language she’s speaking.  It’s evident in John, as are wordless scenes.  In a rehearsal of John, Soloski observes, Gold admonished actress Hong Chau to “recommit to a pause, making it longer and more awkward.”  He told her, “I know it must feel really unnatural.”  Green characterizes these silences as “cryptic,” but I often saw them as just empty.  Matthew Maher, an actor in both the Playwrights Horizons début of The Flick and the Barrow Street revival, remarked that they are “sometimes a gray area between an awkward moment between actors and an awkward moment between characters,” and Gold, telling the actors that they were supposed to feel that way, cautioned Maher, “You have to learn to embrace that bad feeling.” 

John takes place entirely in a Victorian house in Gettysburg that’s been converted into a bed-and-breakfast.  The innkeeper is Mertis Katherine Graven (Engel, beloved by many from her days as Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show of the 1970s), who insists that people call her Kitty—though almost no one ever does.  The house is filled with scores of ceramic miniatures, dolls (which line the central staircase and landing), stuffed animals, figurines, a grandfather clock, and a lighted Christmas tree.  The story’s set between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  A CD player (disguised as a tiny 1950s-era jukebox) constantly provides a background of classical music, and occasionally, a player piano under the stairs starts up all on its own.  Is the place haunted?  Mertis doesn’t think so but her friend Genevieve Marduk (Lois Smith), blind, spooky, and unpredictable, is sure it is.  Jenny Chung (Hong Chau) and her boyfriend of three years, Elias Schreiber-Hoffman (Christopher Abbott) arrive at the B&B on their way home to Brooklyn from Thanksgiving with Jenny’s family in Ohio.  As soon as Jenny and Elias are shown to their room upstairs, it’s clear from a muffled tiff leaking through the floorboards that they’re an unhappy couple with serious problems—or problems they’ve made serious—to work out.  (One reviewer said of this couple, “Baker feeds us the dissolution of this relationship with the precision of a sadist pulling the wings off of a fly.”)  During the night, Jenny comes downstairs (as she will again the next night) to sleep on the couch; she complains of being cold, but we don’t really know why. 

Mertis tells the couple that she’s caring for her ailing husband, but we never see him.  Mertis serves as the Stage Manager, in the sense of Our Town rather than the real-life show-runner: she rotates the hands on the grandfather clock to move us forward in time, as the living room lights and the sunlight through the windows dim or brighten, and she opens and closes the curtain (by hand) for each act.  She controls time and seals or opens her world to us.  We have to wait for the second act to meet Genevieve, who sits motionless at a café table in the breakfast nook (called Paris just to add to the forced coziness and Gemütlichkeit of the place) expounding on life and “the time I went crazy.”  Genevieve tells about John, her former husband (whom we never meet), a bully whom she believes invaded her mind and soul even after she left him.  Jenny reveals that she once knew a man named John, whom we later learn was an abusive and possessive older lover, to which Genevieve snaps, “Everyone knows someone named John.”  All this is where Baker took her title for the play. 

Of course, the play’s story, which is teased out in tiny bits in haphazard order (and which actually contains many more incidents and details I haven’t recounted), isn’t the same as its theme or point.  This is where I failed.  Three-and-a-quarter hours is a long time to sit in confusion.   Diana began complaining as soon as the first act-break came along and I was sure she was going to suggest leaving—which I wouldn’t have done—but she didn’t.  Plays can go downhill as they go along, but they almost never improve in the second act (or, in this case, the second or third), and by the middle of act two, I’d given up any hope that Baker would let us in on the point of John.  She never did, and Diana insisted that the dramatist didn’t have one.  I suspect she at least thought she did but either didn’t know how to reveal it or had deliberately buried it beneath so many layers of misdirection and mystery, including hints of the supernatural—Elias goes on a nighttime cemetery ghost tour and captures a ghostly blur in the photo he took in a child’s bedroom of a restored Civil War-era house, and Mertis relates that her inn had been a hospital for Union soldiers and rumors had it that mountains of amputated arms and legs were piled so high outside the windows that they blocked the light—that you’d need a crib sheet to suss it out.  When asked about her themes, Jesse Green reports, she replies: “Of course you want your plays to say something.  But you want them to say something that could never be said in a sentence, because then you’d write a sentence and not a play.”  The play let out a little before eleven and, after Diana and I went for a snack afterwards, I didn’t get home until around 1 a.m. and still didn’t know what John is about.  (I doubt I ever will, either.  I think I’m not going to be a fan of Baker’s.)

A tactic Baker seems to like is raising issues that aren’t explained or questions that aren’t answered.  (I wonder if this technique is related to the playwright’s tendency not to talk about her life or her work.)  For instance, do you know what a Neo-Platonist is?  I didn’t and I still don’t after trying to look it up.  (I thought it might be revealing, but I’ll never know now.  It’s apparently a mixture of Platonic concepts and Eastern mysticism.  Go know, right?)  Mertis identifies herself as one, but just as Elias is about to ask what that is, they’re interrupted and it’s never explained.  So here we have an unanswered (and actually unasked) question inside an impenetrable play.  John’s a little like a set of Russian nesting dolls in that respect—one unanswered/unanswerable question inside another.  Now, do you know what a wahwah bird is?  It’s a mythical bird that lives at the North Pole and flies in ever-decreasing concentric circles crying wah-wah until it flies up its own ass.  That’s how I found John.  

Let’s talk about the production; at least I don’t have to interpret that.  Mimi Lien, after traveling with Baker and Gold to Gettysburg and taking “exhaustive photos of several bed-and-breakfasts—the wallpaper, the hand-embroidered samplers, the spooky stuffed animals,” designed a prop-crazy set of a fussy living room for Mertis’s guesthouse.  (The room is an old-fashioned box set, with three walls and a ceiling, which encourages the impression that the B&B is a closed world.)  The sofa and overstuffed chairs are all covered in floral-print fabric and Paris, the breakfast nook at stage right, has three or four little white metal café tables with matching chairs.  The chair cushions and table coverings are also flowery and lace squares are laid over the tablecloths and there’s a cozy little fireplace in the upstage Paris wall.  All around the room are the tchotchkes, making the place look like a demented toy-and-knickknack shop—or a hoarder’s paradise.  Up stage, slightly left of the center, is a lighted and decorated Christmas tree (whose little white bulbs occasionally go on or off at will) and the grandfather clock that Mertis looks after is directly up center, next to the door that leads to the kitchen and Mertis’s (and, I suppose, George’s) room.  The staircase to the second floor, which leads up to a landing before disappearing into the flies, is straight up stage just to the right of the center—leaving an alcove in which resides the player piano.  The bannister is wrapped in greenery and more Christmas lights and each step is home to a doll or stuffed animal.  All around are several wall sconces and faux-Tiffany lamps, the ones that dim or brighten when Mertis moves the clock hands.  The decor is precisely arranged and I got the feeling Mertis knows where each object is and where it came from. 

Special recognition goes to Props Master Noah Mease and his assistant Becky Parker Geist for their work finding all these items—there must be hundreds—and setting them so precisely.  “Design,” Baker insists, “is 70 percent of the theatergoing experience.”  The lighting design of Mark Barton and Bray Poor’s soundscape are also integral to the artificial friendliness of the inn, as well as its undercurrent of spookiness; the magical dimming and brightening of the lights when Mertis uses the clock to reset the time, even though I know it’s a deliberate stage effect, is nonetheless eerie, along with the willful holiday lights and player piano.  Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes could not be more apt—Mertis’s flowered dresses, neat, prim, and old-fashioned just like her; Genevieve’s proto-hippie shifts; Jenny’s and Elias’s Brooklyn yuppie casual—helping to establish each character’s personality visually as the actors do through behavior.  Like Lien’s set, Hostetter’s clothing is precise and detailed and meticulously conceived.  In line with Williams’s plastic-theater concept, the visual and aural life of Baker’s plays is as important to a production as the text, the acting, and the directing.

The performances, clearly under the careful tutelage of director Gold, were all technically excellent.  John (and, I presume, all of Baker’s writing) is the kind of play that demands an actor buy into the style as well as the verbal and emotional content.  Everyone has to be guided by the same playbook, like Brecht-manqué (and Brecht actually did have a playbook—his Modelbücher).  Some actors chafe, not being allowed to follow all their own instincts but toeing someone else’s line—more like classic dance on a simplistic level than modern acting.  (Of course, there are many theater forms in which codified acting is an integral element of the art—Kabuki, Noh, Kathakali, Beijing Opera, Wayang Orang—but it isn’t a prominent technique in Western theater.  Brecht, of course, was a stand-alone artist and had been greatly influenced by Asian performance.)  As in these forms, there’s little room in John for approximation or winging it.  Like the settings and the tech, the acting has to be precise.  (“I have a really fanatical side,” Baker confesses.)  The New Yorker’s Heller observes, “Onstage, Baker exercises meticulous control” and characterizes the performance style of her plays as “the invisible precision that’s become a hallmark of Baker and Gold’s style.”

The acting in Baker’s play doesn’t look codified or choreographed, but the contribution of the director is strongly felt here.  (The work of Baker and Gold is closer than the customary writer-director relationship, even the legendary pairing of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan in its heyday.  It’s almost a creative partnership like that of a lyricist and a composer or a team of writers like Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, or Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse; reviewer Jesse Green called Gold Baker’s “joined-at-the-hip director.”)  But while I recognize the technical achievement of Baker, Gold, and their cast and crew, I can’t help finding that the style produced, no matter how well executed, reads artificial, contrived, and empty.  The portentous silences, the secrets and mysteries, the eccentric behavior all adds up for me to affectation and gimmickry, the equivalent of what one of my theater profs used to call “Hamlet on roller skates.”

Individual performances are still important, of course, but it’s also fascinating to watch accomplished veterans like Engel and Smith adjust their talents to realize Baker’s and Gold’s requirements.  As director, Gold sees his job as “translating her cryptic silences and fussy requests into terms the actors can work with,” but that’s a simplistic view for public consumption; he really is, as Vsevolod Meyerhold held, the “author” of the production as he “calibrates the declarations and pauses and elisions with knife-edge precision.”  Some actors shine despite the restraints, flourishing within the challenge.  I’ve always likened it to writing a sonnet: the form is precise and confining, but some poets embrace the strictures and create unique artistic expressions nonetheless.  The four cast members of STC’s John are of this caliber.

The standouts in the cast of four are Georgia Engel as Mertis and Lois Smith, truly one of this country’s top performers, as Genevieve.  Smith’s prominence here comes from her absolute command of any role she plays, irrespective of the quality of the rest of the production.  (I’ve seen Smith a number of times now, and reported on her work in Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, posted on ROT on 1 July 2011; Sam Shephard’s Heartless, 10 September 2012; a 2005 production of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, 25 May 2013; and Foote’s The Old Friends, 10 October 2013.)  Even though her part in John seems almost superfluous—Genevieve stirs the pot a bit, but isn’t a strong presence except for Smith’s performance—her characterization, the idiosyncrasy of the persona she creates, is stunning.  Smith’s Genevieve is the polar opposite of Engel’s Mertis, a timid and soft-spoken woman, and Smith’s intestinal strength, sureness, and authority on stage provides a backbone to the play that it would otherwise lack.  (Don’t confuse this backbone with the “spine” Harold Clurman describes in On Directing.  Baker doesn’t seem to write plays with that kind of supportive throughline.)  Smith takes hold of Genevieve and projects her out into the house, even the little surprise curtain speech she delivers at the end of act two, as if she were playing Queen Margaret in Richard III—no equivocating, no if’s, and’s or but’s.  (That fourth wall-breaking interlude is the most overtly non-realistic element in John—evidently the only one Baker’s ever used up till now—outside Mertis’s clock-keeping and curtain-pulling duties.)  Even Smith, though, can’t disguise the sense that Genevieve is a contrivance, a sort of latter-day Tiresias inserted to jolt the proceedings, but the actress commits to the role and make it thrum.

As Mertis, Engel, who doesn’t have Smith’s range, is an overgrown baby doll.  Of course, this impression is advanced inevitably by her little-girl voice, well know from Engel’s past work, including (perhaps especially) MTM’s Georgette Franklin.  Eternally up-beat and content, Engel’s Mertis has a permanent smile—not dissimilar to a doll’s, by the way—and can’t seem to raise her voice above a semi-whisper.  When Mertis goes into one of Baker’s signature silences, Engel retains a blank look on her face as if someone had paused the tape.  All these attributes combine to make Mertis seem not only ditzy, but not too bright as well—but the character cracks that image now and then by saying something a little brainy, and Engel, with an absolute commitment to the role, maintains her otherworldly demeanor even then, as if the words that came out of her mouth surprise her as well.  Even with the hint—well, sometimes more than a hint—of sinisterness Baker wrote into the character (she reads H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” to Genevieve), Engel still comes off as a sweet little biddy.  Just don’t let her come up behind you in the dark with a kitchen knife or maybe spout some incomprehensible words (like the ones in her journal) to one of her dolls.

Christopher Abbott and Hong Chau, who play the young couple Elias Schreiber-Hoffman (an homage, do you suppose, to Liev Schreiber and Philip Seymour Hoffman?) and Jenny Chung, can’t raise their characters above the level of neurotic and whiny 30-somethings; they’re closest to bad Woody Allen characters who never grow out of their annoying foibles.  Baker is reputed to write characters who are just everyday people, like her audience; she doesn’t like the adjective ‘ordinary,’ however: “The distinction between ordinary and extraordinary is bogus.  I want to erase the line between the two.”  One potential problem with subjects like that, though, is that their problems, which seem monumental to them, just aren’t especially interesting.  Elias and Jenny wallow in their inability to communicate and be honest with one another, finding slights and wounds where healthier folks would just move on.  Abbott and Chau play this well enough, following the path stalwartly—but they don’t really make much of it.  (Remember, I had to sit with them for over three hours and listen to them kvetch.)  That’s soon grating and Elias and Jenny don’t come to terms with their issues.  They can’t, of course, because Baker doesn’t write conclusions, just final scenes—and no actors, no matter how talented, can change that.  Still, Abbott and Chau don’t imbue Elias and Jenny with a spark that might have made them worth spending so much time around.

There are a lot of reviews on line for this show, probably because John’s a world première by a newly-minted Pulitzer Prize-winner.  Several reviewers ventured guesses at what John was about, but even they were vague and unconvincing to me.  The rest confessed, like I did, that they had no clue.  Despite their admitted lack of understanding, the reviewers mostly had praise for the play and Baker’s work in general, which sounds like a case of the emperor’s new clothes to me.  (‘I have no idea what she’s saying, but it must be profound.  She won a Pulitzer, you know.’)  Now let’s see what they had to say. 

“If you’re looking for easy answers, ‘John’ will keep you busy,” warned Elisabeth Vincentelli in her first statement in the New York Post, noting that the play is “packed with cryptic conversations between long silences.”  “‘John’ is what you make of it,” Vincentelli informed her readers, guessing, “It could be a Freudian fairy tale in which youngsters find a strange house with its own rules . . . .  Or it could be about women dealing with repressed traumas,” and summed up with “my guesses are as good as yours.”  The world of John, according to Newsday’s Linda Winer, is “in current Annie Baker territory” with “many long pauses and painfully quiet stretches.”  This play, Winer averred, however, “is weirder, nuttier, scarier than any Baker play I've seen.  It is positively gothic—mysteries within mysteries, ghost stories on top of ghost stories.”  The “[w]eird, scary, slow-motion play,” said the Long Island reviewer, is “hypnotic,” but “never actually conclusive” which is nonetheless “riveting, unpredictable, altogether human theater.” 

“Annie Baker’s odd and compelling play, ‘John,’ reinforces her reputation as an American original, a playwright in whose hands the mundane becomes extraordinary,” proclaimed Joe Dziemianowicz of New York’s Daily News.  For instance, Baker “makes her own rules,” Dziemianowicz noted, filling “slow-mo stillness with big emotional stakes.”  The Newsman asserted that the world of the B&B as a “keenly observed universe proves a fascinating place to be.”  The Daily News reviewer, calling the play “this disarming and consistently engaging work,” found that John “is an everyday title for a play that’s anything but ordinary.  It takes a familiar story and sets it to life with its own beat—and timetable.”  Baker’s play, Dziemianowicz decided, is “about truth and intimacy and how relationships nurture and gnaw—sometimes viciously and endlessly” and its “key” is, “Relationships can do that, haunt you.”  (Ummm . . . aren’t about half of all modern dramas about that—like, maybe, Splendor in the Grass, or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or even A Period of Adjustment?  Most of Sam Shepard’s plays are about that and Neil Simon’s are, too, except they’re comedies.)

In am New York, Matt Windman declared that Baker and Gold “have a remarkable ability to break the basic rules of drama and get away with their transgressions.  Not only that, they succeed beautifully.”  Under Gold’s direction, said Windman, Baker’s “plays become mesmerizing, extremely detailed character portraits where every silent pause is meaningful and time passes quickly—even with three-hour-plus running times.”  (The amNY review-writer and I will have to differ on that.)  John, the journalist thought, is a “sorrowful but good-humored play . . . packed with seemingly trivial small talk and mysteries that are never resolved.”  (“At least we eventually learn who John is,” Windman quipped.  To which I amend: Maybe.)  “Nothing much has happened by the end,” observed the amNY writer.  “Nevertheless, ‘John’ is thoroughly captivating.” 

The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood called John a “haunting and haunted meditation,” adding that Baker “stretches her talents in intriguing if sometimes baffling new directions.”  “The membrane between life and death, the world of things and the realm of spirits,” continued the Timesman, “seems strangely permeable in Ms. Baker’s appealingly odd—and perhaps less appealingly long—drama, which is laced with shivery suggestions of a ghost story.”  Isherwood praised Gold for John’s dialogue, which is “orchestrated with intuitive delicacy” but warned, “Many will be perplexed by the play’s obscurities; others bewitched by a writer who dares to raise large philosophical questions . . . while at the same time drawing characters in such piercingly specific emotional detail.”  Isherwood concluded that, like many great works of art, John has the effect of “bringing mysterious comfort for reasons we cannot always articulate, even as they underscore how sad and solitary life often feels.”

“‘John’ is full of poetic, handsomely wrought scenes that ought to add up to more than they do,” wrote Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal.  “The problem,” the WSJ reviewer explained, “. . . is that Ms. Baker has drowned them in a sea of portentous pauses and protracted silences . . . that are meant to be atmospheric but end up being numbing.”  He added that “Sam Gold’s delicate staging makes the results just about tolerable,” but concluded, “I’m sure there’s a beautiful play in there somewhere, . . . but I can’t remember when I last encountered a playwright whose great gifts were so completely undercut by a greater lack of dramaturgical self-discipline.” 

John, said Tom Sellar in the Village Voice, “stretches a series of eerie unknowns across three acts” with “teetering plot points—teasingly unresolved” so that “the play steadily accrues possible symbols that never develop.”  While director Gold “labors to make the real-domestic-time aesthetic work with the drama’s portents,” Sellar found that “the production falters because it often feels stagy or contrived rather than disarming.”  The review-writer for the Voice concluded, “After threatening in the first two acts to coalesce into another kind of play—one promising poetic or mystical revelations—John ultimately settles for very smart psychology.”

“Annie Baker’s ‘John’ . . . is so good on so many levels,” declared the New Yorker’s Hilton Als, “that it casts a unique and brilliant light.”  He goes on to compliment all the elements of Baker’s play and Gold’s production—the acting, setting, dramaturgy—but saves his highest praise for Baker’s depiction, as a woman writer, of the female characters in John (her other major plays have all centered on male characters), particularly Mertis and Jenny.  In New York magazine, Jesse Green asked, “And what is Baker up to, filling three acts and three and a half hours with the homely minutiae of love, loss, and hospitality?”  His answer: “Quite a lot, it turns out, even though (as is typical for Baker’s plays) you first have to submit to a radical reorientation of time and scale to get there.”  For “Baker is trying to extend to characters in extremis,” Green observed, “the intense realism—not stage realism but real realism—usually denied them in plays.”  Still, the man from New York asserted, “John hovers on the edge of metaphysics. . . .  With no special effects except that player piano, she’s produced a real ghost story, which is to say a semblance of life.”  Ultimately, however, he found that John “is also so expansive that it becomes, in the third act, when you want it to buckle down, a bit unsatisfyingly diffuse.” 

While praising the performances and set dressing, Variety’s Marilyn Stasio complained, “Baker plays true to form in ‘John’ by depending on subtle suggestion rather than definitive action to make her point.  But what, precisely, is her point here?  If there’s an answer to that, it rests with the dolls.”  For Stasio, the central event of John is the conversation among the three women in Paris about dolls and how they each feel about them, but the Variety reviewer saw in that scene that “the only takeaway from all that buildup is the strong intimation that Jenny is getting ready to break up with Elias for treating her like an inanimate object.  And while it’s a valid conclusion to draw about a character, we could have had this whole conversation in a coffee shop.”  In his Hollywood Reporter review, Jesse Oxfeld wrote, in contrast to Stasio, that John is a “thoughtful, unhurried consideration of relationships that’s worth sticking around for.”  “This is a big show . . .  but also a humble, cerebral one, without bells and whistles,” continued Oxfeld, adding, “John is sometimes wry, but unlike Baker’s other plays, it’s not especially funny.”  For the HR reviewer, the play is an examination of the question Elias asks, but which Oxfeld posited that all the characters, as well as we in the auditorium, also ponder: “Have you ever been in something and just like had no idea whether you should go or stay?”  (I’d bet that some in the audience asked themselves that very question about being in the theater that evening.)  In Time Out New York, David Cote explained that he brought up the play’s running time “not to warn you about potential boredom (in the ordinary sense), but because duration is [the] key component of the experience, which lodges in your memory, emitting time-delayed puffs of meaning.”  After detailing the strange and eerie objects and events in John, the man from TONY admitted, “Like much in the cozy yet unnerving world Baker has created here . . . I don’t quite get the significance.  But if I lower the lights and wait,” he offers, “some glimmering form might appear around the corner.”

Among the cyber reviewers, David Gordon on TheaterMania, calling John “a conundrum-wrapped enigma,” labeled it “a challenging piece to interpret, one that will leave even the most perceptive audience members shell-shocked in ways good and bad.”  Gordon warned that as “the play gets weirder and weirder, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of what story is being told” because Baker “has a tendency to bite off more than she can chew.”  John has “a surfeit of themes and ideas, and [a] tendency to settle on none of them” which “dilutes the play’s overall impact.”  The TM review-writer, however, also acknowledged that “there's also much to be thankful for,” including Lien’s set design (“so realistic that Signature could potentially charge admission for an overnight stay”), Gold’s directing (deriving “so much out of so little”), Hostetter’s costumes, Barton’s “spellbinding” lighting, and Poor’s “eerie” soundscape.  The cyber writer ended by thanking Baker for writing and STC for presenting John, which he pronounced “isn't an easy work to sit through.”  Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater, calling the STC production of John “an exquisitely acted puzzle of a play,” said it “seems to be aiming to be some kind of ghost story, but winds up falling short of any kind of fully realized drama.”  “Too much of the play, however,” explained Mandell, “feels best suited for an assignment in a college literature course.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray practically hadn’t a single negative word to say about John, the writing or the production.  (He had one slight reservation in the region of performance, but dismissed it himself.  I suspect he’s a fan of Baker—or the Baker-Gold team-up.)  He labeled this play “perhaps . . .  the best to date” of the “masterful minimalist storytellers’” collaborations.  “Baker,” Murray asserted “builds up the suspense so gradually, but so completely, that eventually anything that pierces it invokes shivers” and expected that “you will undoubtedly find yourself on the edge of your seat during most of” the play’s extensive running time.  The playwright, the TB review-writer declared, “displays as an artist and a technician a total confidence and self-assuredness in John.”  He noted that Baker “hasn't deployed a single gimmick, but instead uses to the fullest every tool at her disposal.”  John, Murray concluded, “plumbs the soul, head, and heart so more fully, and more excitingly, than even the spookiest ghost story could possibly manage.” 

On CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman called John “haunting, intense, surreal, and also demanding” and suggested, “To some it’s a commendable conceit.  Others will find ‘no there there,’” even warning, “Audiences for whom life on the stage is best served in fast forward, are likely to have a hard time with Baker's plays.”  “A splendid cast under Sam Gold, Baker's director of choice,” wrote Saltzman, “are co-creators of a mood that will have you chortling one minute and sending shivers down your spine the next.”  The CU reviewer affirmed, “The title”—which he refused to explain—“may be familiar but the play is like none other,” although “it’s not easy to sum up with a simple ‘here’s what it's all about.’”  Tulis McCall, on New York Theatre Guide, praised the performances—especially Engel’s—and the set, but complained, “Oh yes there are pauses.  Pauses and pauses and pauses.  127 that I counted in the actual script. . . .  [In this play,] these silences feel contrived.  They take over the play and have a life of their own.  One gets the feeling that the actors are actually counting out beats in their heads while they wait for the appropriate moment for the next line to be spoken.”  McCall concluded with the wish, “Perhaps as [Baker] gathers speed her dialogue pacing will pick up steam as well.  One can hope.”

I don’t usually quote a review at length—it’s happened once or twice, but it’s uncommon and contrary to my rationale for the review round-up.  But here, one writer seems to have caught my response to John particularly clearly.  Michael Dale, describing the hallmarks of an Annie Baker play, wrote on Broadway World:

There’s the commitment to natural pacing that results in multiple instances of text-prolonging silence, the menial tasks characters perform repeatedly (also in silence), the scenes that take place offstage with muffled conversations the audience can’t understand, the oblique dialogue that continually circles around points without landing on them and the information contained in the script that’s never revealed to the audience.

There are a couple of new ones in John, very handsomely mounted by her steady collaborator, director Sam Gold.  A novel approach to opening and closing the curtain helps define a character.  A false ending to one of the acts is less effective.

Dale even described himself in terms that might fit me (if I’d had as much experience with Baker’s work as he seems to have had):

a playgoer who admires her experimentation, finds her initial ideas interesting, but is consistently disappointed and disinterested while sitting through her lengthy productions.  As with The Flick (and, to a lesser extent, Circle Mirror Transformation) her desire to replace the elevated realism of theatre with naturally-paced, indirect dialogue can have an alienating effect that diminishes the impact of her storytelling.

While the BWW reviewer lauded the performances (with special emphasis on Engel, of course) and Lien’s kitschy set, he comes down in the end to say, “One would think that the odd conversations and curious events that pop up throughout the evening would be building to something, but the dangling clues don’t add up and the open-ended questions go unresolved.”  Wondering if “the title is another one of Baker's dangling clues,” Dale added, “John can refer to a few things, none of which are significant enough to warrant naming the play for it.”

Baker has two more productions to come at STC over the next four seasons.  I haven’t yet decided how I’ll greet them if I continue to subscribe.  (Diana and I have skipped a season or two over the years.)  It’ll depend a lot on what else is offered in the season, but I suppose I’ll just have to play it as it lies.

'The Trip to Bountiful' (2005)

[At the end of his New York Times review of the current revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West 43rd Street, Ben Brantley mused about the 2005 staging by the Signature Theatre Company which starred Lois Smith as Carrie Watts.  Brantley had reviewed that production, too, and I saw it and wrote a short report on the performance.  Both Brantley’s and my responses to that revival were quite different from his assessment of the Broadway production which opened on Tuesday, 23 April (and is scheduled to close on 7 July), and I thought it would be interesting to look back at my account, written four days after I saw the performance, of the earlier presentation.  Of that production, Brantley recalled in the Times on 24 April: “The 2005 Signature Theater revival of ‘Bountiful,’ starring Lois Smith, left me drenched in tears.”

[Bountiful started its life as an hour-long teleplay. Foote originally wrote it for Fred Coe, producer of NBC’s Goodyear TV Playhouse, an anthology series alternatively titled the Philco TV Playhouse (because the sponsor varied).  It aired on NBC on 1 March 1953 with a cast headed by the legendary Lillian Gish.  (Foote’s first choice for the lead actress, though, was Shirley Booth, later TV’s Hazel from 1961 to 1966 who’d just won an Oscar for 1952’s Come Back, Little Sheba.  She turned down the role because she said she wasn’t ready, at 46, to play an old woman.  Gish was 60.)  Also in the TV cast were Eileen Heckart (Jessie Mae), John Beal (Ludie), Eva Marie Saint (Thelma).

[A few months later, the Broadway début of The Trip to Bountiful opened in a Theatre Guild production at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 3 November 1953 and ran for 39 performances before closing on 5 December.  Carrie was again played by Gish and Jo Van Fleet (who’d had a small part on television) was Jessie Mae under the direction of Vincent J. Donehue (who also staged the TV version).  Van Fleet won a featured actress Tony and Eva Marie Saint got a Theatre World Award for her performance as Thelma.  Signature’s Trip to Bountiful, which launched the theater’s two-season 15th anniversary celebration, opened at the Peter Norton Space on 4 December 2005, after starting previews on 15 November, and closed on 11 March 2006.  The revival was staged by actor Harris Yulin and costarred Foote’s daughter (and frequent interpreter), Hallie Foote, as the daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae.  The sets were designed by E. David Cosier, the lights by John McKernon, the costumes by Martin Pakledinaz, and the sound by Brett R. Jarvis and Loren Toolajian (who teamed to compose the original music as well).  The production won 2006 Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Director (Yulin), Outstanding Lead Actress (Smith), and Outstanding Featured Actress (Hallie Foote); the 2006 Obie Award for Outstanding Performance (Smith); the 2006 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play (Smith); and 2006 Drama Desk Awards for Best Actress (Smith) and Lifetime Achievement (Horton Foote).]

The Signature Theatre’s Trip to Bountiful, which I saw at the Peter Norton Space on 42nd Street near 11th Avenue on Friday, 9 December 2005, was quite excellent all around, and Lois Smith’s performance was superb.  I’ll describe it in a moment, but first, let me relate a true New York theater moment I had.

After the show, I made a pit stop in the men’s room.  When I came out, a line had formed and about three people from the door, I spotted Edward Albee.  Now, that alone is a New York theater moment—like the time I saw Colleen Dewhurst sitting alone, smoking in the upstairs lobby of the Uris Theatre (now the George Gershwin) during the intermission of Sweeney Todd.  But there’s more. 

As I was walking past the line, I heard the guy in front of Albee, whom I didn’t recognize at all, saying to him, “Someday I hope to do Virginia Woolf justice.”  Well, my initial instinct was to make a comment like “I kinda thought somebody already had” as I passed by, but I decided to keep my mouth shut.  So I did. 

I have no idea who the guy talking to Albee was.   Was he a director or a play reader or what?  No idea.  (It’s more fun to imagine . . . .  If the guy was a director, maybe he didn’t know that Albee himself had staged a Broadway revival back in 1976 with Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara.  I imagine the playwright feels he’d already “done Virginia Woolf justice,” don’t you?)  The man looked youngish—say mid-30s or so—and I wasn’t even sure that Albee knew him.  I don’t know if Albee’s like Woody Allen and doesn’t like to be approached in public, but he looked a little uncomfortable.  Since I was just passing by on my way out, I may have caught only a momentary reaction and be misinterpreting the whole scene.  Albee didn’t say anything, in any case.

(Actually, that wasn’t the only New York theater moment I had that evening.  As I was walking my dog, Thespis, before I left for midtown, a large gaggle of young people passed me on my block.  They looked like they were in high school, but I’m betting it’s college: I live near NYU and the New School, both of which have residence halls or classroom buildings within a two-block radius of my apartment.  Anyway, just as they were going past, one guy in the middle of the bunch asked out loud, “What do you know about Ionesco?”  A little guy in front—he really did look like he wasn’t out of high school yet—turned around and announced, “Ionesco?  I love Ionesco!”  At which point, he walked backwards right into a woman trying to make her way down the sidewalk.  If it had been Samuel Beckett, they’d have fallen into a heap on the pavement.  But they didn’t.  Just a brief pinball effect.)

And now, the play: 

Readers know, I imagine, that I have long come to distrust Ben Brantley’s opinions in the New York Times.  I truly think he lives in a bubble of his own imagination.  He nailed this one, however.  (Even a stopped clock . . . .)  Diana, my theater companion, remarked that this play of Foote’s comes close to Tennessee Williams, though I don’t feel the lyricism of Williams’s writing.  Foote’s words are far more literal and realistic, but there is a kind of mysterious force at work in Bountiful that may have disappeared in Foote’s later, more prosaic treatments of his Texas homeland.  [I wrote this, of course, long before I saw Signature’s magnificent production of Foote’s three-part Orphans’ Home Cycle.  ~Rick]  In any case, the 1953 play (made into a film starring Geraldine Page in 1985) is tender and poignant—perhaps a little too sentimental for today’s cynical world, but clearly heartfelt and genuine.  (I’m not sure, but Bountiful may have been Foote’s first play—or his first to achieve significant attention.)  I’ve never seen it before (not even the film), so I may be wrong, but my sense is that its success depends greatly on how the actress playing Carrie approaches the role—and, of course, how well she handles it.  If she’s too mawkish or spacey or eccentric—a possibility—the play takes on a strident tone, as if we’re being forced to sympathize with a truly difficult person—like we’re being manipulated.  If the actress gets the idea right but can’t pull it off with subtlety and honesty, we just won’t believe it.  Lois Smith, as Brantley said, is a marvel on both counts.  Her sense of being imprisoned in the Houston apartment and besieged by her insensitive and selfish daughter-in-law (Hallie Foote, the author’s daughter), is palpable, but not overstated.  This is not Blanche Dubois grown into old age—Smith’s Carrie is just an old woman with a bad heart who’s made some sad choices in life and now just wants to go back to the place where she was happy, probably to die.  The fact that Jessie Mae, the daughter-in-law, pretty much treats her as an unwanted house pet—Jessie Mae won’t let Carrie sing hymns in the house because they get on her nerves—only makes this all the more credible.  Carrie’s not eccentric or crazy—which is what Jessie Mae calls her, the only thing she does that actually makes her husband, Ludie (Devon Abner), angry—just a little sentimental in her old age, and suffering from terminal cabin fever. 

Carrie has a history of running away, trying to get to Bountiful, whenever she’s left unwatched and alone in the cramped two-room apartment—she sleeps in the living/dining room—in Houston, and this infuriates Jessie Mae, who confiscates Carrie’s pension checks as much to keep her tied to the apartment as to pay for her own visits to the beauty parlor and her Cokes at the drugstore.  (Ludie has just gotten a real job after a long unemployment due to an unspecified illness.  Jessie Mae not only doesn’t work, but doesn’t seem to do much housekeeping, either; Carrie does the dusting and cooking, it seems—despite her bad heart.)  I actually rooted for her to break loose, and when Jessie Mae reveals that a pension check, due that morning, seems to be missing from the mail, you just know that Carrie has glommed onto it and is holding it in reserve for a break-out.  When Jessie Mae decides to take a chance and leave Carrie at home while she meets a friend at the drugstore for a Coke—she can’t get a beauty parlor appointment until 4 p.m., and she just can’t sit around all that time—I root again that Carrie’ll get away this time, just as she does, in fact.  As Smith plays her, Carrie just deserves to get back to Bountiful once before she dies.  (It may be a bit contrived that, first, the bus doesn’t go to Bountiful—you can’t get there from here!—and, second, it turns out that the town has in fact simply died when the last inhabitant, Carrie’s girlhood friend, whom she had hoped to stay with, died a few days before.  Contrived, but perfectly apt: the dream she has, after all, is also a chimera.) 

The fact that Carrie charms everyone she meets, except for her daughter-in-law, from Thelma (Meghan Andrews), a young woman traveling on the same bus, to the ticket clerk (Frank Girardeau) at the town nearest Bountiful where she gets off to the sheriff (Jim Demarse) who’s been ordered to hold her until Ludie arrives to take her back to the big city (the sheriff ultimately drives her out to her old farm in Bountiful and stays with her until Ludie comes) is only proof that Carrie’s really just a dear lost soul.  Smith captures this absolutely perfectly.  There’s not an eccentric, peculiar, or idiosyncratic element in her performance—it’s just solid and real.  She’s not even especially sad or pathetic; she’s just a little driven.  Once she gets “home,” you can see that she’s satisfied her itch, even though she knows she can’t stay, even to die.  She’ll go back to Houston with Ludie and Jessie Mae and obey all the rules her daughter-in-law lays out—because she’s been home and seen the sky and the soil and the birds.  That’s all she ever wanted—and now she’s content.  Ludie may have learned something, too, by coming home—he remembers everything Carrie had been telling him about his boyhood there, even though he pretended not to have.  But Jessie Mae hasn’t, and you can guess that she’s in for some surprises back in Houston.  (Ludie had been contemplating asking his boss for a raise at work that morning, and we learn that the boss was pleased to give it to him.  I took this as a suggestion that he’s getting back his self-confidence, and something of the spine he must have inherited from Carrie.)

Hallie Foote does what I take to be a good job on Jessie Mae.  It seemed to me she was written as an unchanging single note, and Foote manages to pull off the once or twice she appreciates Carrie without making it seem contrived (by Horton Foote) or begrudging (by Jessie Mae).  As selfish as she is, this suggests that there’s a human being back there, though it’s not much.  If Foote’s portrayal is one-dimensional, I think it’s the play’s fault more than the actresses (or director Harris Yulin’s).  Ludie, too, is appropriately meek and submissive.  Not abject: there’s some indication here also that he’s not only what we see here.  I don’t know Devon Abner, the actor who played the role (he seems to be mostly a writer for stage and screen), but I don’t think that the character’s one-dimensionality is his fault, either.  (This is why I say that the success of the play depends so much on the actress playing Carrie.  Even the best director couldn’t do much with the other roles, and the script is the script.  Not that Yulin did anything wrong at all.)

E. David Cosier’s set (lit by John McKernon) was kind of nice, too.  It sort of reminded me of a pop-up book in a way.  Bountiful is a long one-act (an hour and 50 minutes without intermission), so each scene is like a new page of the story in a sense.  Each time the scene shifted, the old set moved off and the new set moved on, courtesy of electrical motors with low-tech assist (that is, stage hands or actors moving set pieces on dollies).  It isn’t in the least innovative, but it worked, and, as I said, it was like each time you turned the page, a new scene popped up.  (Well, okay—popped in.  Let’s not quibble over prepositions.)  I never felt I was being made to sit too long, though, and I have at other, shorter shows.

I guess the summation is that while The Trip to Bountiful isn’t ever going to be earth-shaking theater (it’s more like William Inge than Tennessee Williams, I think), it’s lovely, truthful, and, in this production, nicely done.  After so much bad theater over the last couple of seasons—bad plays or bad productions or both—this was more than a pleasure.  And Lois Smith, whom I only know from TV (mostly) and film, was a true delight.  She’s too young for the role to have been written for her (she’d only have been about 23 when the play was written)—but if Horton Foote had come around to see this performance, I suspect he’d have wondered if he hadn’t been clairvoyant half a century ago.

*  *  *  *

The press response, with one glaring exception, was nearly ecstatic, particularly about Lois Smith’s portrayal of Carrie Watts.  In 2005, I didn’t do the review survey that I customarily do now, so I’ll recap the critical reception here.  The only wholly negative review was Bob Kent’s in Variety, which noted that “the new revival of ‘Trip to Bountiful’ at Signature Theatre Company is regrettably flat and underwhelming.”  Kent acknowledged, “At times this production nails exactly the right bemused observational tone” but continued that “director Harris Yulin’s production remains stubbornly average.”  The Variety review-writer did observe, “By herself, Smith nearly makes this a worthwhile ‘Trip,’ but concluded that “it feels more like a faintly tiresome holiday gathering.”  No one else I read agreed, it seems.

Since I started this revived report with Ben Brantley’s 2013 Times review (and alluded to his earlier one above), I’ll continue with his notice of the 2005 STC restaging, which he called “beautifully mounted.”  Yulin’s direction, said the Timesman, “finds the emotional authenticity” of Foote’s script that makes it “seem newborn.”  Praising all the elements of the physical production, Brantley made special mention of the set design: “What follows the opening scenes has an almost mystical seamlessness, as Mr. Cosier's sets float on and off the stage.”  (By the way, Brantley’s remarks in his review of the 2013 Broadway revival about being brought to tears were rendered thus in 2005: “[T]his production . . . finds the emotional authenticity in a 1953 drama often remembered as a tear-jerking chestnut.  This is not to say that you should attend the show without an ample supply of handkerchiefs.”)  In New York’s Daily News, Howard Kissel wrote, “The production . . . is pure joy.”  Having compared Foote’s dramaturgy to Chekhov’s, Kissel added that Bountiful “has been given a radiant revival by the Signature Theater Company” in which, “under Harris Yulin’s skilled direction, every moment resonates deeply.”  Calling the production “genuinely moving,” Sam Thielman of Long Island’s Newsday especially complimented Cosier, who’s “set shifts quickly into various instantly recognizable configurations.”  Dubbing the STC revival of Bountiful “touching,” the New York Post’s Frank Scheck declared, “Foote’s play is a marvel of economy, one in which numerous important themes are conveyed through the simplest of situations and dialogue” which “Director Harris Yulin has staged . . .  expertly.”  After observing that “there are stretches of obvious exposition and a melodramatic monologue or two,” David Sheward of Back Stage summed the revival up by pronouncing it “a journey well worth taking.”  Sean O’Donnell of Show Business asserted, “Director Harris Yulin successfully weaves a quiet tapestry of nostalgic yearning in a production that is nothing short of breathtaking” and that the performance “resonates long after the curtain has fallen.” In Time Out New York, Robert Simonson affirmed simply, “Yulin, Smith and company have achieved something of quiet excellence.”

The cyber press was pretty much in line with the paper-and-ink reviewers.  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray wrote that “director Harris Yulin has lovingly interpreted Bountiful for the rich new Signature Theatre Company revival” and Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp said the “beautiful new production” was “a trip worth taking” that’s “remarkably timely.”  TheatreMania’s David Finkle reported that STC’s revival of Trip to Bountiful “is to be cherished” and that ”Harris Yulin has directed the play with compassion and tenderness.”  On nytheatre.com, Martin Denton described the production as “lovely, immensely satisfying, and . . . just about flawless,” a “fertile, generous, and lush a theatrical experience” that’s “about as perfect a production as one could wish for.”  Michael Dale of BroadwayWorld dubbed Signature’s revival “beautiful and tender,” having been “delicately directed with a selectively lazy touch by Harris Yulin.”  “Go and be enthralled,” he urged. 

It was the acting, though, that got most of the press attention, starting with TONY’s Simonson, who declared, “As for the rest of the ensemble, any aspiring actor seeking an object lesson on what can be made of a small role need look no further.  Even the nonspeaking actors shine—a tribute to the thoughtful, seamless rhythms Yulin has wrought.”  TheatreMania’s Finkle wrote that the production, especially the final scene, “is exquisitely acted by all” and, pronouncing the STC revival of Bountiful “acted with quiet skill by the best ensemble cast in town,” the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout added, “I doubt you’ll ever see it acted better, especially by Ms. Smith.”  As befits an actor’s journal, Sheward asserted, “Director Harris Yulin has assembled an ensemble of sensitive performers who inhabit Foote’s frustrated souls,” in Back Stage and Brantley of the Times found that the “supporting cast . . . never strikes a false note.”  And though most of the cast was singled out for mention in all the notices, Newsday’s Thielman praised Hallie Foote, who “wisely underplays one of her father’s least likeable characters,” and Kissel correctly observed that the actress “manages to catch  the humor of the daughter-in-law without making her an easy villain.” 

“But the evening ultimately belongs to Smith,” reported the Post’s Scheck, adding that “the actress seems to sum up the entire human experience in her memorable performance.”  The Postman declared, “Lois Smith creates magic of her own” as “the veteran actress delivers a performance that is at once heartbreaking in its pathos and uplifting in its spirit.”  Newsman Kissel described Smith’s singular performance as “incandescent,” specifying that the actress “does not minimize how difficult Carrie can be, but she also captures the poignance of precarious old age.” Asserted Thielman, “Smith’s sweet, sad senility as Carrie Watts gives Horton Foote’s ‘The Trip to Bountiful’ the tang it needs,” adding that in the end, “Lois Smith brings a real sense of loss to her part, making it sting as she discovers, bit by bit, that Bountiful, Texas, is barely on the map anymore.”  Back Stager Sheward characterized Smith’s work as “luminous,” and WSJ’s Teachout praised her acting as “so beautifully straightforward that you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on her.”  “Luminescence,” which is what David Finkle said Smith brought to her performance, seemed to have been a leitmotif in the reviews, though BroadwayWorld’s Dale used a near-synonym when he wrote that Smith “sparkles as Carrie.”  The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold wrote that “Lois Smith proves herself . . . with a performance that manages to be simultaneously feisty and moonstruck,” concluding that “Smith makes her unfulfilled goal as transcendent as Don Quixote’s knight-errantry.”  Feingold ended his praise of Smith with a gratuitous jab at our then-ruling family: “To watch her mingling of crab and saint is to feel a little of the wonder that Texas used to mean before the fake cowboys of Kennebunkport invaded.”  (I just had to include that little dig!)  While Talkin’ Broadway’s Murray quibbled about Smith’s portrayal in contrast to Lillian Gish’s, Sommer called her performance “solid gold” on CurtainUp. 

In his review, the Times’s Brantley also called “that fine actress for all seasons” Lois Smith’s acting “luminous,” but he seemed possessed by her “cerulean stare.”  As if mesmerized, he confessed, “I had never before realized how blue and bottomless her gaze is.”  Later, Brantley observed the Smith’s eyes “brim with the expectation of a child on the morning of her birthday” and even compares the lighting of John McKernon and the music and sound design of Loren Toolajian and Brett R. Jarvis with “the glow in Ms. Smith's gaze.”

*  *  *  *

[There’d been speculation, including some in the press, that STC’s revival might have a Broadway run in its future.  James Houghton, the company’s artistic. director, sought a Broadway theater for a transfer of Bountiful after its run at the Norton Space but none was available.  Having already extended the revival at the Norton as long as possible, Houghton rejected a transfer to a larger Off-Broadway house because the expense was too great for the potential box office benefit.  As a result, a rep theater show that was both popular and well-received critically didn’t get a chance at a broader audience.

[The Signature Theatre Company’s 15th Anniversary Season was divided into two parts.  In 2005-06, the company staged plays by previous writers-in-residence: Foote’s Trip to Bountiful and John Guare’s Landscape of the Body.  In 2006-07, STC scheduled the delayed August Wilson season that had been postponed when the playwright died in October 2005.  Previously, STC presented its first Horton Foote season in 1994-95, including Talking Pictures, Night Seasons, The Young Man From Atlanta, and Laura Dennis.  But Foote is the only playwright to whom Signature has devoted two complete seasons, mounting that monumental three-part, nine-play autobiographical opus, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, in 2009-10.

[I got to see Lois Smith on stage again subsequent to this marvelous performance when I saw STC’s presentation of Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, a translation and adaptation from Pierre Corneille, in June 2011 (see my blog report posted on 1 July 2011).  Smith played the sorceress, Alcandre, usually a male role, in the final presentation of STC’s Kushner residency.  I got to see her briefly after the performance—playing opposite her as Pridamant was a former teacher of mine, David Margulies, so I waited by the stage door to say hello to him—and I got to tell Smith how much I liked her work in Bountiful and even in HBO’s True Blood on TV.]