'Kafka on the Shore' (Lincoln Center Festival 2015)

Let’s see.  Characters include Colonel Sanders, Johnnie Walker, and some talking felines.  Are you sure this is a Japanese play?  Well, it is and it was my second and final show in this year’s Lincoln Center Festival: Kafka on the Shore, adapted by Frank Galati from the 2002 novel by Haruki Murakami.  (My previous visit to LCF was for Cheek by Jowl’s Ubu Roi; see the report on ROT on 27 August, which includes a brief background on the Festival.)  Directed by Yukio Ninagawa and performed in Japanese with English supertitles, the LCF performance was at the David H. Koch (formerly the New York State) Theater at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  The play ran from 23 to 26 July and Diana, my usual theater companion, and I attended the 7:30 performance on the evening of Saturday, 25 July.  A production of Tokyo’s Ninagawa Company, Kafka is co-produced by the Saitama Arts Foundation, Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, and HoriPro, Inc.

Novelist Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most esteemed, was born in Kyoto in 1949.  Now 66, he made his début as a novelist in 1979 with Hear the Wind Sing (published in English in 1987). Following the success of this novel he published a string of works, culminating with Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, published in Japan in 2014 and in English this year.  Marukami, whose work has been translated into as many as 50 languages (and has sold in the millions of copies outside Japan), also writes short stories, essays, children’s books, nonfiction, and translations of English-language books into Japanese.  Kafka on the Shore, published in 2002 in Japan and 2005 in the U.S., attracted readers around the world.  It was chosen as one of the 10 Best Books by the New York Times in 2005 and the writer has been recognized with many international prizes and honors.  A number of his books have been adapted for the stage, playing both in Japan and in the West.

As a youth, Marukami immersed himself in American culture, reading crime novels and listening to rock and roll.  His parents were both teachers of Japanese literature, but he grew up reading Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac.  He eventually became a huge fan of jazz and he and his wife later opened a jazz bar in Tokyo.  It was a popular and successful venture, but in 1978, while he was watching a baseball game, he was taken with the idea of writing a novel.  Needless to say, his interest in American culture led him to be influenced by U.S. writers like Raymond Chandler, Vonnegut, and Brautigan.  The Japanese literary establishment continues to criticize Murakami for being “un-Japanese” in his work, which is often described, ironically, as “Kafkaesque,” employing surrealism, fatalism, magic realism, and the existence of parallel worlds in its examination of alienation and loneliness.   

In 1979, Hear the Wind Sing was published and won a prestigious newcomer award.  Throughout the 1980s, Murakami wrote novels in contemporary colloquial language with narrators in their twenties, making his books very popular with young Japanese readers who’d felt put off by the affected and artificial prose of the usual Japanese literary fiction.  In 1987, Murakami released Norwegian Wood (2000 in the U.S.), a more conventional love story—at least by Murakami’s standards.  It became so popular that, among other social phenomena, a cover recording of the Beatles song of the same title rose to number one on the Japanese charts.  In 2007, Murakami published a memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008 in English), the title of which is a reference to the Raymond Carver story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

When his fame became uncomfortable for the novelist, Murakami left Japan and traveled the world, eventually settling in the United States.  Here he wrote the novel that many feel put him the ranks of the internationally renowned writers, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994-95 in Japan; 1997 in the U.S.), which some consider Murakami’s masterpiece.  Then, almost a decade later, Murakami, now back in Japan, released Kafka on the Shore, a novel that broke from the author’s past practices, not least by replacing his usual 20-something narrator with a teenaged boy.  In another variation, the story’s told in two parallel lines (which I’ll get to shortly because, well . . . so is the play!), and the book became another worldwide bestseller.  In an interview after Kafka was published, Murakami said:

Most of my fiction up till now has been first person narratives dealing with a male protagonist (and narrator) in his 20s or 30s.  A few years ago, however, I started taking a different direction and began writing in a different voice and perspective.  There’s something about that style of writing that suits me.  In any case, whenever I write a new novel I decide on a theme and attempt to do something new and different.

Though Kafka explores weighty ideas like the question of identity (which I’ll also get to when I describe the adaptation), Murakami doesn’t like to discuss analyses of his writing.  He considers his novels as no more than pure stories.  Nonetheless, there are identifiable motifs in Murakami’s novels: jazz as the background beat of many of his book’s scenes and, in the word of one publisher, “the sense that something is just a little out of whack with the world.”  Said Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center Festival, “It’s a world where most of the preconceptions don’t hold.”  Another motif, the frequent appearance of cats, is nearly central to the novel and the play. 

Yukio Ninagawa, who will turn 80 in October, was born in Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture, about 13 miles north of Tokyo.  He began his theater career as an actor in 1955 and joined the Seihai Theater Company.  He made his directorial debut in 1969, and subsequently founded his own companies, Gendaijin-Gekijo (1967-71) and Sakura-sha (1972-74).  He became a leading figure in Tokyo’s “underground theater,” a bit like New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway.  In 1974, however, the producer of the mainstream commercial Toho Theater invited Ninagawa to direct Romeo and Juliet at his theater, beginning the entry of the 39-year-old tyro into the ranks of internationally-renowned stage directors. 

In 1984, Ninagawa started the Gekisha Ninagawa Studio in Tokyo.  This became the Young Ninagawa Company in 1991 and then the Ninagawa Company Dash in 1996.  In 2004, the company once again changed its name to the Ninagawa Studio, which is what it’s called today—though it’s often known internationally as the Ninagawa Company (they’re the same group).  It was with this troupe of young actors that the director developed the adaptation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. 

Over the years, Yukio Ninagawa has directed a wide range of productions, including contemporary Japanese plays, classic Greek tragedies, and the works of William Shakespeare.  In fact, he’s mostly known internationally for his interpretations of Western classics, including six different versions of Hamlet.  (In Japan, he’s known as “the director who runs through time.”)  In 1998, Ninagawa launched a project to stage all of Shakespeare’s plays and in 2000, he directed a 10½-hour performance of The Greeks by John Barton and Kenneth Cavender (a combination of 10 Greek classic plays focusing on the Trojan War, originally created and performed over three nights in 1980 by England’s Royal Shakespeare Company).  

In 1983, Ninagawa directed his first production of Euripides’ Medea, which was performed in Greece and his work has toured internationally every year since.  His production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, known in the West as the Ninagawa Macbeth, was first performed in Japan in 2001 and then toured abroad (I saw it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2002); he staged Yukio Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays (2000 in Japan) as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005.  

In 2006, Ninagawa became artistic director of the Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater (one of the co-producers of Kafka) where he founded a unique troupe, the Saitama Gold Theater, for performers over 55, as well as the Saitama Next Theatre, a project to develop young performers.  (He’s also president of Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music and artistic director of Tokyo Bunkamura Theater Cocoon.)  With his production of Titus Andronicus (2004, Tokyo; 2006, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford, and the Theatre Royal, Plymouth), the director was invited to participate in the RSC’s Complete Works festival (2006-07) as Japan’s only representative.  His first Kabuki play, Twelfth Night, was presented as part of Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE) 2009 (an international festival a little like LCF: a round-up of performing arts events from around the world) and Ninagawa has participated in BITE now for several years.  In 2012, the Japanese director’s Cymbeline was presented in London as part of the World Shakespeare Festival.  Ninagawa was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2002 and a Gold Medal from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts in 2008, and he’s also received many theater awards and honorary degrees in Japan and abroad.    

Yukio Ninagawa has been unwell for a year, during which he nonetheless created Kafka on the Shore and a new version of Hamlet.  He’s recovering, but his doctors still prohibit him from traveling, so for the first time since he began participating in the Lincoln Center Festival (this is his company’s third time), he didn’t accompany his troupe to New York City.  The production was prepared entirely in Japan under Ninagawa’s careful direction.  In his program note, the director insisted that his soul would be “with . . . the company for every performance.”  After its stop at Lincoln Center, Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore moves on to Singapore (October-November 2015) and Seoul (November 2015).

The story of Kafka on the Shore is told in two parallel narratives, which overlap occasionally but, like parallels in general, never actually converge.  (In the novel, the strains alternate chapter by chapter, but the play’s scenes don’t unfold quite so regularly.)  In the first, a 15-year-old boy’s run away from his controlling father’s home in Tokyo to escape an Oedipal destiny and find his estranged mother and sister.  We don’t learn his real name but he calls himself Kafka (Nino Furuhata), after his favorite writer.  On the long bus ride to Takamatsu, a provincial capital of almost half a million inhabitants on Shikoku Island, Kafka meets Sakura (Anne Suzuki), who’s the first to reach out to him and on whom he calls later when he needs help.  (Sakura, in fact, tells enough of her background to make her seem like Kafka’s lost sister.)  During his journey he’s frequently accompanied by his alter ego or imaginary friend, Crow (Hayato Kakizawa).  (In the play, Kafka explains that the Prague writer’s name means ‘crow’ in Czech—hence the name of the boy’s avatar.  This struck me as questionable, so I looked it up.  Kafka not only doesn’t translate as ‘crow,’ but it has no known meaning.  An alternate, but less common, spelling, Kavka, doesn’t exactly mean ‘crow,’ but it does translate as ‘jackdaw,’ a member of the same family.  I suppose in Japanese, since the names sound alike, there’d be no difference in the written form—but in English, they don’t line up.)  In Takamatsu, Kafka ends up in a private library run by the mysterious and remote Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) who allows Kafka to stay in the library   The teenager befriends Oshima (Naohito Fujiki), a (gay, female-to-male) transgender librarian to whom he reveals his private thoughts and the two discuss life and literature every day.  For Kafka, it’s an idyllic interlude until the police come to question him about the murder of his father, a famous sculptor, back in Tokyo.    

The second narrative follows Nakata (Katsumi Kiba), a 70-ish-year-old man considered slow and simple.  When he was a schoolboy at the end of World War II, he was involved in a curious incident while on a school trip.  His entire class was left unconscious by a mysterious flash of light.  Young Nakata took longer to recover than his classmates and when he did come to, he’d lost his memory but gained the ability to communicate with cats.  For his disability, Nakata gets what he calls a “sub-city” from the government but he makes a small additional income as a cat whisperer to find lost felines in his Tokyo neighborhood.  (The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli called the character a “holy fool.”)  His current search for Goma, a lost tortoiseshell, takes Nakata on his first-ever road trip.  To help with the search, Nakata interviews stray and run-away cats, including Otsuka (Yukio Tsukamoto), an old black tom, and Mimi (Katrine Mutsukiko Doi Vincent), a Siamese named for the character in Puccini’s La Bohème.  (These aren’t the cats from Cats, but fully animal-costumed felines, wonderfully designed by Ayako Maeda.)  On the road, Nakata gets a lift in the long-haul truck driven by Hoshino (Tsutomu Takahashi), who becomes, first, Nakata’s ride, then his companion, and finally, his devoted friend.  In his search for Goma, the lost cat, Nakata encounters Johnnie Walker (Masato Shinkawa), dressed, like the whiskey logo figure, in top hat, walking stick, buff breeches, English riding boots, and red hunting coat, an infamous, and especially cruel, cat killer who preserves his victims’ heads like a bug collector does insects, eats their hearts, and collects their souls.  Hoshino and the old man also meet the mysterious Colonel Sanders (Masakatsu Toriyama), who may be a spirit of some kind in human form (an aspect of Noh in which a spirit or demon appears first as a “person of the place” and then is revealed as a supernatural being).  The fast-food icon turns out to be a pimp but guides Nakata to the portal he seeks to the spirit world. 

Through this convoluted narrative, Murakami explores themes of identity—Oshima’s transgender character; the possibility that Miss Saeki is Kafka’s long-lost mother; whether Kafka and Nakata are facets of the same person in parallel existences—and destiny.  Kafka’s storyline, which gets more stage time than Nakata’s, owes more than a passing nod to the Oedipus myth and there are echoes of several of Shakespeare’s plays throughout the whole story.  Like the novel, the stage adaptation blends magic realism, allegory, suspense, humor, dream, myth, and sensuality into the two entwined odysseys.  As most reviewers pointed out, however, the “tale . . . resonates viscerally but resists logical explanation.”

Frank Galati’s adaptation of Kafka on the Shore (translated back into Japanese by Shunsuke Hiratsuka after an English-language production by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in the fall of 2008) under Ninagawa’s direction ran three hours with one intermission.  (Galati, a long-time member of Steppenwolf, is probably best known for another adaptation of a novel for the stage: Steppenwolf’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1990 Best Play Tony-winner.  Galati also won the Tony for Best Direction of a Play for the production.  Previously, he adapted and staged two Murakami short stories, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” and “Honey Pie,” in 2005-06.)  As one or two reviewers agreed, the production of Kafka started out with promise—it looked interesting and theatrically innovative—but about two-thirds of the way through the first act (say about an hour in), it hadn’t advanced as a piece of theater—nothing changed; it all remained the same—and I started to peek at my watch.  As a three-hour adaptation of a novel, with which I have some long-standing issues, it’s just about all talk, and being in Japanese with supertitles, I was doing a lot of reading.  And head-bobbing.  It was a great let-down that ended up being terribly enervating.  I think I’d have been better off reading Murakami’s novel (which is 480 pages in English). 

Greater length is a common fault of plays adapted from novels.  (Galati’s Grapes ran two-and-a-half hours.  Even the musical adaptation of Gigi, based on Colette’s novel but with the MGM film by Lerner and Loewe as a template, was two-and-a-half hours long—and musicals tend to cleave to the standard two-hour length.)  Except for a few notable exceptions (Of Mice and Men; Look Homeward, Angel; The Member of the Wedding), I have serious reservations about all that genre—and length is only one of them.  Most novel adaptations go long because the writers try to squeeze in as much of the story as they can and novels tend to have more plot than plays (and more characters).  This is what I think happened in Kafka.  If they don’t follow that path, the writers tend to cut close to the bone and omit too much story and the play leaves too many parts of the plot unrevealed.  Another tendency for stage adaptations of novels, which also occurred in Kafka, is that the adapters focus on whatever action there is and eschew the intellectual aspects of the novel, which are more difficult for actors to convey on stage.  Kafka on the Shore is a heavily philosophical book, not terribly action-packed, so Galati dropped much of the deep thinking.  Even so, given how metaphysical the novel is, this still left the script mostly dialogue, almost all of it static two-character scenes.  (Another substitute for the missing action is narration, one of the least dramatic and theatrical devices known to theater.)  The set concept (realized by Tsukasa Nakagoshi and lit by Motoi Hattori), which really looked like a fantastic idea, helped reduce the scope of the production (on the large stage at the Koch, designed to accommodate dance companies and the accompanying movement) by isolating each scene in a smidgen of set and a tiny pool of light.  (It didn’t help matters that Diana and I were sitting in the third ring—of five—in the 2,586-seat house.) 

There have been, of course, stage adaptations from novels that have worked very well.  Usually, success depends on the choice of source and the judicious and theater-savvy nature of the adapters’ transformations (think the RSC adaptation of Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby or the National Theatre of Great Britain’s stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse).  Unfortunately, Kafka on the Shore didn’t turn out to be one of them.  Like many novels, Murakami’s Kafka has many scene locations, too many to recreate on stage one at a time; scene changes alone would lake as long as a one-act play.  So director Ninagawa and set designer Nakagoshi created a collection of different-sized Plexiglas boxes within which Nakagoshi built truncated portions of the sites, from a forest to a vacant lot to Miss Saeki’s library office to the cab of Hoshino’s long-distance truck, and more.  Ninagawa has said that he’d wanted to use dioramas in his work ever since he saw some at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he visited as a boy, and the set fragments (giving new meaning to “box set”), which are wheeled about the stage by black-clad stagehands who resembled the traditional kurombo of Kabuki theater or koken of Noh, are reminiscent of dioramas—but they also reminded me of terraria, miniature environments for living specimens.  (I was immensely impressed with the swirling movement of the rolling boxes as the scenes are reset without computer guidance or tracks—in the semi-dark, to boot.  How did they never collide, topple, or just hit the wrong spot at the wrong time?  Marvelous.) 

This, sadly, is one of the things in Kafka on the Shore that became a disappointment.  The weaving set boxes looked like a highly theatrical technique, but the process never changed.  Instead of surprising or intriguing it became routine and I just wanted it to stop so the play could continue.  In addition, the little set fragments, encased in Plexiglas and outlined by black frames, reduced the world of the play to little snapshots, like the videos on a smartphone in comparison to a movie screen.  Murakami’s novels, I gather, are mind-expanding, full of magic and metaphysics; this design concept shrinks the play’s scope.  Surrounding the scene in darkness with the silhouettes of the other boxes scattered around the stage only emphasized the isolation.  Motoi Hattori’s fluorescent lighting within the boxes, the metallic sound design by Katsuji Takahashi, and Umitaro Abe’s dissonant music supported the hypnotic character of the production but couldn’t clarify Murakami confusing concepts or Ninagawa’s breathless staging.

It was a tad difficult to form a clear impression of the individual performances in Kafka since I had to spend so much of the show reading the supertitles above the actors’ heads.  With so much dialogue—the French text of Ubu Roi two nights before was more compact (and, of course, I was familiar with that play and can still understand some French here and there)—it was a choice between knowing what the characters were saying and seeing what the actors were doing.  (I really much prefer the days of the headphones with simultaneous translations: I could watch the actors and still get the English explanation.)  Additionally, Kafka on the Shore is an ensemble play—even though the performance is divided into mostly two-character scenes—because each actor’s work feeds off of and into the work of all the others.  The one exception, to a degree, was Katsumi Kiba who played Nakata in so endearing and open-faced a way—Marilyn Stasio of Variety called his performance “disarming”—that the character nearly took over the whole production.  Kiba’s calm in the midst of everyone else’s tension and energy not only made him stand out but made him the eye of a theatrical hurricane.  The other notable performances were delivered by Yukio Tsukamoto and Katrine Mutsukiko Doi Vincent as the cats Otsuka and Mimi.  They stood upright occasionally and, of course, they spoke, but when they moved about on all fours and behaved like felines, they were as convincing as any computer-generated kitties on film—absolutely astonishing.  As for the rest of the cast, they were all clearly accomplished actors giving, despite Murakami’s and Galati’s fantastic material, excellent realistic performances, strong enough that I could often glean what they were feeling even without reading the titles.  If they hadn’t been tasked with so much to convey, I might have enjoyed their work even more.

Like Ubu Roi, the press coverage for Kafka on the Shore was scant—surprising considering the stature of both Murakami and Ninagawa and the prominence of Kafka as a centerpiece of this year’s LCF.  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli credited the Lincoln Center Festival “for taking on this staging of Murakami’s ‘Kafka on the Shore,’ with its talking cats, mysterious ‘gateway stone,’ occasional animal cruelty and possible incest” (Kafka has sex with Miss Saeki even though he thinks she might be his mother), and continued, “Even better, director Yukio Ninagawa and his cast pull it off—at least for the play’s first act.”  Visually, Vincentelli reported, the production was “stunning” and the “first half of this three-hour piece moves briskly”; however, in the second act, “things grind to a halt, the magic replaced by cloying affect and willfully confusing mumbo jumbo that will charm Harukists but bore everyone else.”  The Post reviewer put the blame largely on Murakami’s novel, but also laid some on “Ninagawa’s suddenly heavy-handed staging.  Like those wonderful cats, he should have trod more lightly.”  

“A sudden craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken swept over me at one point during” Kafka, quipped Charles Isherwood in the New York Times.  “It has been well more than a decade since I’ve visited a KFC, but those familiar with Mr. Murakami’s playful metaphysical mystery will recall that Colonel Sanders . . . is among the strange array of characters in the book.”  Calling the production “visually arresting but ponderous,” Isherwood pointed out that the whiskey icon Johnnie Walker is also a figure on stage and added that “by the conclusion” of the performance, “thoughts of crispy chicken had been swept away by a stronger craving for a bracing glass of that liquor.  Or indeed any other.”  Adapter Galati, said the Timesman, “does a smooth job of streamlining the book, but as is often the case with stage versions of philosophically inquisitive novels (or for that matter, nonphilosophically inquisitive ones),” just as I complained earlier, “story tends to take precedence over the less easily dramatized layers.”  Isherwood further explained: “As the plot develops, many more swirling currents develop, each as surprising, mystifying or simply bewildering as the one before.  Unfortunately, . . . the production does not allow for the characters to inhabit our imaginations as richly as they do in the book.  (And forget trying to parse the murky layers of meaning.)”  As I did, the Times reviewer also noted, “In the large theater, the performances likewise are unable to register powerfully, especially since the sometimes densely philosophical dialogue and the myriad oddities of the plot require us to pay close attention to the titles high above the stage.”  “Still,” he said, “the actors give winning if mostly economical interpretations of their characters.”  Isherwood ended by asserting that “in sum,” Kafka on the Shore is “a long, strange story.”

Variety’s Marilyn Stasio dubbed the adaptation “startling,”  but added that it “loses considerable magic by cramming in too many non-visual details from the novel’s mythic storyline.”  As a result, said Stasio, the “talky scenes also lose their intellectual zest on stage” and the stage adaptation of the novel became “less intimate” than the novel.  “The sense of enchantment that defines Murakami’s whimsical story,” reported the Variety review-writer, “comes across best in the amazing design work.”  While she praised the work of Hattori (lighting), Takahashi (soundscape), and Abe (music), Stasio ended by complaining that none of the production elements “can fully penetrate the deep, dark landscape of Murakami’s mind.” 

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck quipped, “‘It reminds me of some weird avant-garde play,’ comments one of the characters in Kafka on the Shore, and boy, is he right on the money.”  Scheck added that “this phantasmagorical stage production features so many ideas, themes, metaphors and literary and historical allusions that it threatens to burst at the seams,” but, said the HR reviewer, thanks to Ninagawa, “it somehow never does.”  It does make, however, for “one seriously strange evening of theater in which reality and fantasy are ever-shifting propositions” which covers “so many . . . subjects that the play should be accompanied not with a program but rather a syllabus.”  Scheck reported, “Visually, the production is a stunner,” but continued, “For a good stretch of its three-hour running time it’s all quite entertaining, thanks to the sheer audacity of its imagination and welcome doses of surreal humor.  But the longer the evening goes on the more frustrating and enervating it gets.”  He found that “there’s no denying that a strange new world has been dazzlingly conceived,” but concluded, “What it all means is anybody’s guess.”  The man from Hollywood ended by averring, “It’s fun to be there, at least for part of the wild ride,” then wisecracked: “Just don’t be surprised when you get home afterwards and find yourself tempted to discuss it with your cat.”

“‘Is it really possible for Kafka on the Shore to be a play?’ someone asked on Lincoln Center Festival’s facebook page. The answer is ‘Yes,’ but not without it’s problems.”  So wrote Susan Miyagi Hamaker on the website Japan Culture-NYC.  (It slugs itself as “All Things Japanese In New York City.”)   It’s not a formal review site, but I though it would be interesting to see what someone from inside the Japanese cultural scene might have to say about this performance.  Hamaker, a freelance writer and the editor of the site who calls herself a “Japanophile looking for all things Japanese in NYC,” summed up the experience of seeing Kafka: “It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t terrible”; she confessed, however, “I like focusing on the positive whenever I review anything Japanese-related.”  She felt that Ninagawa had “used this concept [of the Plexglas dioramas] to perfection in the staging of Murakami’s novel” and she pronounced the sets, of which this was a focal element, “Phenomenal.”  (Hamaker was especially taken with the work of the black-attired kuroko—as she called them, literally “black people,” the same as what I called kurombo or koken earlier.)  Our Japanophile was also taken with the performance of Katsumi Kiba as Nakata, who “tells the truth with his matter-of-fact delivery,” and the cats, “gorgeous and realistically cat-like thanks to flexible actors and to costume designer Ayako Maeda.”  Hamaker was less taken with Murakami’s story and its “multiple philosophical layers,” remarking, “To the production’s credit the story wasn’t wrapped up with a tidy bow, but there were many unanswered questions.”   Despite the production’s three-hour length, there “still wasn’t enough time to dive into the complexities of the story lines, the deep philosophical discussions, and the parallel stories of Kafka and Nakata that never intersected even though I kept anticipating it.”  “Despite its shortcomings,” Hamaker concluded, “it was visually stunning with delightful acting.”
Kafka on the Shore’s on a wide-ranging tour, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it shows up somewhere near where ROT-readers are.  I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the production—you see that most of the published press agreed with my assessment—unless you’re a fan of Ninagawa, Murakami, or Kafka on the Shore as a novel.  Another draw might be just to see how the director has handled the material—but three hours is a long sit just for that.  (Maybe you can second-act a performance.  But don’t tell anyone I suggested that.)

Dispatches from Spain 10: Italy & France Edition

by Rich Gilbert

Italy and a Bit of France

[European wanderers Rich and Sallie are on the move, this time into Italy and “a bit of France.”  You’ll have to pardon the delay in posting this dispatch, which Rich sent by e-mail from Valladolid, Spain, where he and Sallie stopped after the jaunt described here, but ROT scheduling prohibited me from getting it on the blog before now.  They’ll be traveling much farther afield than this next before returning to the States.  Check back for Dispatches 1-9 (30 November, 10 December, and 20 December 2014, and 14 January, 8 March, 20 April, and 23 July 2015) to catch up with the odyssey so far.  As usual, Rich’s account of his and Sallie’s travels is interesting and full of fascinating little details above the usual travelogue (which, in fact, he’s deliberately skipped).  I recommend that you all also check in at Sallie’s blog, Rambling Solo, at http://ramblingsolo.blogspot.com.es.]

Valladolid, Spain – August 2, 2015

The Trip in General

On June 3, Sallie and I left Malaga and flew to Rome. We had a trip planned with Sallie’s son, David, his wife, Heidi, and their daughter, Emily (Sallie’s oldest granddaughter); Heidi’s mother, Jacqueline, and her husband, Bill, were also along on the trip. Heidi had lived in Florence for several years before meeting David, and had brushed up on her Italian, which was to come in very helpful.  She also made contact with several old friends with whom we were to spend some time. For the most part we were all able to stay in single apartments which Heidi had rented on line. They were usually three bedrooms, with Emily sleeping on the living room couch. Heidi had also arranged most of the transportation.

Our first three cities were Rome, Venice and Florence. Since almost anyone who has been to Italy has been to one or more of these cities, I will not try to describe them in much detail, except to give general impressions and specific experiences. Our last two stops were in the Cinqueterra region and the island of Elba. After the others left we stayed a few extra days on Elba then made our way to Madrid via Genoa, Marseilles and Avignon. (Hence the “bit of France.”)

Rome

The rest of the group was already at the apartment when we flew into Rome and took a cab, for which we were overcharged, into the city. The apartment was a reasonably short walk to the Vatican, but a longer walk (30 minutes or more) to the ancient sights like the Forum and Coliseum. It had been over 30 years since I was in Rome and my major impression was that things were much more organized. For example, when I was at the Forum before, you could just wander on your own over the Capitoline Hill, but without any idea what you were seeing. Things are better marked now.  Rome has a subway now. (More about that later.) The Coliseum had been closed when I was in Rome before, so it was fun to see it, but even then there was a regular path to follow, and you needed a special tour to get down into the tunnels and rooms beneath what had been the floor of the arena.

The Vatican, in particular, really has the tourist thing down.  You must take a tour, either prearranged on line, or by signing up after waiting in line. There is much more to see than just the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s, although they are the highlights. In fact, I wondered how one ever gets to really see all of the art and artifacts hanging in all of the rooms we just whisked by, including a significant modern art collection.

David and Heidi made extensive use of their smart phones to locate good restaurants.  I am not sure that is the only way to do it.  Sallie and I have found some great restaurants just ambling until we saw something we liked, but after seven months in Spain, Sallie and I were eager for a change in cuisines. By and large we found the Italian cooking to be very good, even the pizzas.

Our only real misadventure occurred one day when we had walked to the Forum then spent several hours touring it.  Everyone was kind of tired so we decided to take the subway at rush hour. I had my wallet picked in a packed subway car.  They also took my Italian English dictionary from my rear pocket. To my good fortune they did not realize I had my passport by itself it my other rear pocket, probably because it was not noticeable. The wallet contained a fair amount of money and a couple of credit cards and a debit card, but no other identification. I got the cards promptly canceled without their being used and had new ones sent to Madrid, so I was basically “lucky.” I did have to rely on Sallie for money for the rest of that trip, however.

Venice

The rest of the group left for Milan after four days to see the Expo and they scored some tickets to see the Opera at La Scala.  Neither Sallie nor I wanted to go, so we headed to Venice, for a few days before the rest of the group joined us. I have always loved Venice, and Sallie had never been. We found an apartment in a part of town that was less touristy.  I watched Barcelona play Juventus, an Italian team from Turin, for the Champions League title at a funky bar downstairs that had set up a sheet and a projector outside.  Big crowd, and to my relief, not everyone was for Juventus. Barcelona won, but it was a decent match and no fights broke out, so a great evening.

There are some places, industrial areas and working class housing projects, which I found during my roaming that actually had almost no tourists, but that is only because there was nothing to see for the average tourist. Otherwise, Venice can be divided into zones where there are tourists intermixed with the locals and zones where the tourists simply inundate the city. In our three days alone, Sallie and I tried to see the first type of places, figuring that we would save the more high-profile tourist sites for when the rest of the group joined us. We had a good time, even though it was challenging to get around.

When the rest of the group joined us, we had to move across the city to meet them at the apartment they had rented for all of us. It was a lovely apartment near St Mark’s Square with two floors and a deck where we could hang out. As a group we went to see the Doges Palace, which included a trip over the “Bridge of Sighs” to the prison.  I had to laugh when the tour description said they rebuilt the prison during the Renaissance to make it lighter and more healthy.  I saw absolutely no evidence of this.

One of the things which surprised me was that the rest of the group had bought no vaporetto tickets. Since no vehicles are allowed in Venice, everything moves over the water by barge, water taxi, the established vaporetto routes (like bus routes), or the expensive gondolas. (To cover distances on land, there is an army of porters.) Right after arriving at the train station, Sallie and I bought passes good for a week on the vaporetti. The rest of the group arrived by water taxi and then did not get on the water until we left.

For me, much of the charm of Venice lies with its canals and waterways. So the last day, I decided to go off on my own and just ride around on the vaporetti.  That’s how I found the industrial area, the naval base and working class housing districts, but lots of other charms as well.  I took a vaporetto out to the Lido, which is a long island that lies at the head of the lagoon. Unlike Venice, vehicles are allowed on the Lido; there are even buses. It is kind of an upscale suburb and beach resort combined. I found a lovely restaurant on the Adriatic and had a terrific tuna dish. Then I headed back to Venice, stopping on some other islands that make up the city.  To tell the truth, I loved that day most of all.

Florence

After three days as a group, we took the train to Florence. Florence is where Heidi had spent most of her time in Italy and near where some of her old friends lived, so this was going to be her part of the trip. We had a large spacious apartment near the center of town. We saw the usual sites, the cathedral, the Accademia (where Michelangelo’s David stands), and the Uffizi gallery (with Boticelli’s Birth of Venus.) We met Heidi’s friends.  This is also where the worst misfortune occurred.  Heidi’s mother broke her foot when she awkwardly stepped off an uneven curb. Heidi had to take her to an emergency room; Heidi’s Italian was invaluable then. Eventually a cast was placed on the foot and she had to get around on crutches and wheelchairs, and even had to miss portions of the trip. It made things worse that her husband was coming down with bronchitis during this time.  I am sure they both have had much better vacations.

It turned out to be a particularly bad night to have to go to the emergency room because the “calcio historico” tournament was going on. “Calcio” is an Italian word used to describe football or if you prefer, soccer, but that is not what “calcio historico” is.  The old part of the city is divided into four districts, that each wear a different color – red, yellow, blue or green.  In the midafternoon, in a plaza just around the corner from our hotel, a parade forms up with numerous bands, and groups of men in historic dress carrying ancient weapons.  Very impressive.  The teams and their supporters join in the parade.  Wisely, the teams are separated from each other by the groups of men marching with their weapons and the bands.  That evening a match is played between two teams in a stadium set up near the cathedral.  (We watched part of game on TV.) “Calcio historico” is described as cross between soccer, rugby and American football – do not believe it.  They left out wrestling, boxing and mixed martial arts, with a bit of that old schoolyard standard, “kill the man with the ball” thrown in. In theory, one team is supposed to get the ball into a goal at the other end, but mostly what I saw was chaos.  Guys were squaring off fighting each other with no apparent tactical purpose. There were referees I think, but I do not recall them doing anything. Well, they were always carrying guys off the field injured or unconscious. The emergency room Heidi, Jacqueline and Bill went to was also apparently the emergency room for the red team’s district. Ambulances were arriving all night. I do not know who won the match, but I imagine the emergency room for the blue team was similar. (The next night was the turn for the yellow and green teams.) It is probably good that no one in the United States really knows about “calcio historico;” otherwise I could see groups of testosterone-crazed young men saying “well, that looks like fun!”

One day in Florence, we took a day trip to Siena which was much smaller than Florence but still had a medieval cathedral of great size and a circular plaza in the middle of the town. The plaza is where the famous horse races in Siena take place, although not while we were there. (The riders, representing their neighborhoods, ride bareback.  They often fall, sometimes with serious injuries, but it is the first horse over the line that wins, with or without its rider.) On the way back we decided to visit an even smaller town, San Gimignano, which I would recommend over Sienna as more compact, but still lovely.  We had a great meal there. Unfortunately, Jacqueline and Bill could not accompany us.

Pisa

We rented a van in Florence on our fourth day there and set off for the coast, but first with a planned stop in Pisa. Like Rome, the visiting experience in Pisa is much more organized than when I was there in 1974. Still, the Tower is open now after apparently being closed for a number of years.  I understand that they think they have stabilized the Tower. Of course, it would have been impossible for Jacqueline to make the climb, but she, David and Heidi ended up spending several hours trying to get a wheelchair they could rent for the rest of the trip. They succeeded, and finally we were off to Cinque Terre.

Cinque Terre

Cinque Terre is a region on the northeastern coast of Italy which consists primarily of five fishing villages surrounding by high hills that for generations left them cut off from each other and the rest of the world except by boat or by arduous footpaths through the hills and along the cliffs. Now there are some narrow roads that connect them and, more importantly, a railroad line with magnificent views, when they are not going through endless tunnels. We parked our van at La Spezia, the first large town outside the five towns, where there was parking, and took the train to Vernazza, the fourth town going from east to west.

Vernazza is a pretty small town, that obviously thrives today on the tourist industry. It has its own charm and some stunning views.  We stayed in two apartments. Because of Jacqueline’s foot, we put them, and Emily, in the lowest apartment, but still a long flight of stairs up.  David, Heidi, Sallie and I shared a two bedroom apartment numerous flights up, but with a deck that had a spectacular view of the coast. I am afraid that Cinque Terre was not the ideal place for Jacqueline and Bill as there was very little they could do there. (Bill’s bronchitis had gotten worse as well.) The rest of us hiked each day to the next village over, one day in one direction and one day in the next. David, Heidi and Emily are very fit, so had no problems. Although Sallie and I were reasonably fit, we still found the hikes arduous because they consisted entirely of stone stairs, of uneven heights.  We made it, but not as quickly as the others. We took the train back to Vernazza one day and the ferry the other.  One episode we all recalled was encountering an English-speaking family with a small girl and young boy. Although they had only gone a relatively short distance, the young boy was sitting and crying, stating “I hate steps!” Although we could all sympathize somewhat, it became an inside joke among our group.

Elba

After a couple of days in Cinque Terre, we took the train back to La Spezia and picked up our van and drove south to the port of Piombino where we took a ferry to the island of Elba. Most people only know of Elba as the first place Napoleon was exiled, and from where he escaped. (St Helena, where he was exiled after Waterloo, is isolated well down in the South Atlantic.) Elba is the third largest island of Italy, although much smaller than Sicily or Sardinia. It is still much larger than we thought. It is a beautiful island with numerous beaches, and high hills. Heidi had arranged for us to stay at a complex of apartments well outside of any town.  We had two apartments.  Sallie and I got our own apartment down the hill somewhat from the others with our own patio. The others were in an apartment adjacent to one occupied by one of Heidi’s old friends, Rafaele, and his family. This how we ended up in Elba in the first place. One of Heidi’s other friends, Paulo, had his own vacation place on the island and was able to spend a few days with us also.

Each day was primarily spent at one of the many beaches on the island. We might drive 20 or thirty minutes to get to the different beaches. They were usually developed with bar / restaurants and rentals for chairs, umbrellas, beach toys, etc. We might grab a light lunch, but dinners were cooked at our apartment complex.  Heidi is an excellent cook, as was her friend, Rafaele and his wife, so we ate fresh seafood or steaks, pasta, and salads every night, with plenty of good wine. No need going out.

One day the group, including Jacqueline and Bill, went to visit the house where Napoleon had stayed in the main port city.  It was interesting, situated between fortifications, but what we had not known was that on Elba, Napoleon is still viewed with affection. Apparently, when exiled, he was allowed to essentially run the island. His fertile mind, besides undoubtedly plotting his escape, also made numerous improvements to the island and its management.

After five days, the rest of the group had to return to Rome for the long flight back to Colorado. There were two more days on the apartment rentals, so with Rafaele’s help Sallie and I rented a car so we could stay two more days. We visited beaches and did some hikes on each end of the island. We did have to eat out, however.  The food was good, but not like what the group cooked.

Leaving the island was easy.  The rental car company was right down at the docks and ferries leave every 30 minutes or so. Getting to Genoa was much more of a hassle, as it turns out that the train station in Piombino was closed for repairs.  There was supposed to be regular buses to the next station, but we never did figure out where that was. We ended up taking a taxi. We got there, had an hour’s wait, then boarded a train to Genoa.

Genoa

Genoa is the main port city on the north coast of Italy, in the direction of France, which among other claims is the birthplace of Columbus. I had booked a hotel on-line.  It turns out it was the only hotel that did not feel the need to have a big sign, so we walked by several times, before discovering it. It was evening when we got in, so we walked down to the port area looking for a place to eat.  We were unimpressed and finally found a café on plaza nearby. We had some time the next morning before our train to Marseilles, so we walked around some more, this time up the hills.  In Genoa, like so many Italian port cities, there is very little flat land by the sea. The city quickly goes up. 

For much of its existence Genoa was a major port and at its height rivaled Venice for influence and wealth. Above the harbor level are numerous Renaissance “palazzos” or mansions of great size and design. One street containing nothing but such palazzos has been named a World Heritage Site.   Even the regular working class housing was clearly a cut above the harbor area.  It was almost like two different cities. After finishing our walk, we took the train to Marseilles.

Marseilles

We had booked a room near the train station on line and it was a disaster. Very small, no elevator to the first floor, no air conditioning, no screen on the window, no view and no internet. It was late when we arrived and while we were unpacking we heard what sounded like gunshots. Since it was late, we decided to take a cab down to the port for dinner.  As we were leaving, we saw a number of police cars down the street from  the hotel. We got to the restaurant I had picked out and had a lovely meal; the majority, if not all, of customers were French, but everyone accepted our broken French. No Parisian snobbery. They called a cab for us, but as we returned to the hotel, we noticed big flood lights down the street from the hotel.  It looked like a crime scene, and indeed that’s what it was.  The clerk told us someone had been murdered by the gunshots we had heard earlier. We got up after a fitful night, got breakfast (not in the hotel) and fled for the next train to Avignon.

Avignon

Avignon, one of the principal cities of Provence, was a short train ride away from Marseilles, but it seemed as if we were a world away. We were staying at a hotel some distance out of town; it was a lovely, bucolic place with a pool in which I could swim laps, more or less. We took a bus into the city, walked around, then, by happenstance found a charming corner restaurant, away from the tourist crowds.  The food was exceptionally good. Unfortunately, we did not understand that the bus back to the village where the hotel was located had stopped for the night.  Finally, a cab driver who was waiting for another fare took pity on us, called a colleague to take that fare, and drove us back.

The next day we went back to the city and wandered about the city walls, then crossed over to a large island in the middle of the river.  There is a free ferry which dropped us near a restaurant where we could sit outside and look back at the city. After a nice afternoon, we went back to the hotel.  Mindful of not staying out too late, we had dinner outside on the terrace at the restaurant attached to the hotel, which was operated by an apparently well-renowned chef and had a another great meal. Despite all of our wonderful meals in Italy and Spain, I continue to have a soft spot for French cooking. Alas, our current plans will not bring us back to France.

The next morning we took the high-speed train back to Madrid.  After a few days to rest up and do laundry at the apartment we had rented from our friend Mary C*****, on July 4, we rented a car and headed north to Pamplona and northern Spain. We are just finishing that trip, so it will be the next email.

Current Plans

As I write this, we are in Valladolid in the Castille y Leon region of Spain.  We will arrive in Madrid tomorrow and return the rental car.  We plan to spend four days there, again staying with our friend, doing laundry, refilling prescriptions, hopefully seeing some other friends and preparing to send everything home, except that which we take for the next two and half months. Having seen the value a smart phone can have, I may look into buying one that I can use in Europe and then take home.

We will head out by train on a long ride to Belgium on August 7, spend a few days there, then a few days in Amsterdam.  We will then travel to Copenhagen, where on the 16th we will see our friends Joan and Stan A**** who will be embarking on a Baltic cruise the next day. We will stay a few more days in Copenhagen, then our plans get vague.

Jumping to the end of the trip, we will probably arrive in Greece the middle of September. During the next, and final, month we will tour the Greek mainland, and try to visit a couple of islands.  We are also going to find a few days to visit our friends Sue R******** and Fred S****** who will be living in Israel then. That was not part of our original plan, but it is a pretty short flight from Athens, so we thought we would take advantage of their hospitality, as we might not get the opportunity again.

I have not booked the flight yet, but would expect to be back in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, October 15, 2015, a year to the date after we left on our adventure. We have made no plans for what we will do on our return yet, but hope to see the D.C. crowd at Tunnicliff’s on Friday, October 16.

[What a wonderful journey Rich describes!  It sounds a little bit like the three-weeker my family took back in the ’60s when we lived in Germany.  We put our car on a train in Frankfurt and unloaded it in Milan and then drove down the boot to Venice (with many stops along the way) and back.  

[I also took a school trip from Geneva to Provence one spring—it must have been 1964, but I’m no longer sure—and one stop was in Avignon.  Since we were all just kids, and half of us were French-speaking, as soon as we came to the famous Pont d’Avignon, we all ran out and danced on it. 

Sur le Pont d’Avignon

L’on y danse, l’on y danse.

Sur le Pont d’Avignon

L’on y danse tous comme ça!

[We’d discovered soon after arriving in Europe back then, by the way, that we could pretty much always get a great meal in Italy and France just by picking a restaurant, café, or roadside inn by the look of the place.  If we stuck to the local dishes, the simple meals on the menu, we had wonderful food.  This was less true in Germany, Switzerland, and, we found out later, England, where we needed to be more choosy.

[We went to the Palio in Siena.  It’s an amazing sight, to say the least, but not one I’d like to repeat.  First, it’s immensely crowded; people are packed into the square’s perimeter.  The usual weather is hot and bright sun, and there’s no shelter or shade, so we stood in a crowded-subway sort of mass (from which it was difficult even to see the “track”), in the blazing heat.  Many people fainted even before the race started and had to be passed out of the crowd over the heads of the rest of the spectators!  (Ambulances and medical assistants were, of course, out on the periphery of the crowd.)  

[Then the race itself has its problems.  I recall that the “track” in the middle of the square was, in fact, square, not circular.  The racing horses had to make sharp turns at high speeds and several were injured (and, I presumed, later destroyed) in the mêlée.  We saw at least one horse with a broken leg limping around the track until the attendants could maneuver him off the field.  The whole event, as I recall it, was very short—a coupe of minutes at most—but that could just be my memory.  (I was a teenager, probably 16 or 17, at the time; my brother would have been 14 or 15.)  The Renaissance pageantry, of course, which precedes the race itself—lots of colorful flag-twirling in Renaissance costumes, drumming and fanfares—was spectacular and, for a couple of kids, delightful.  The race, though, was disturbing in the end.

[Of course, I don’t run with the bulls—so maybe Rich’s perspective would be different.]

'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.