By William Wolf

JOHN  Send This Review to a Friend

Although meticulously staged by director Sam Gold and effectively acted by the four-member cast, “John,” a Signature Theatre presentation written by talented playwright Annie Baker, is largely an extended bore at three hours an fifteen minutes including two intermissions and seemingly longer. The two older characters, played by appealing Georgia Engel and Lois Smith, are weirdly amusing, but the young characters are painfully uninteresting in their misery.

Baker may be after some philosophical concepts with gibberish about minds being inhabited and thoughts about being mystically watched over. Mysterious occurrences like Christmas tree lights unexpectedly going on and off and a player piano suddenly starting to deliver music perhaps have a meaning. The set, designed by Mimi Lien, is a living room and dining area overstuffed with bric-a-brac, including lit-up little houses, enough of them to supply a lifetime of models for productions of Edward Albee’s “Tiny Alice.”

The location is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Georgia Engel as Mertis runs a bed and breakfast. In an initially charming but subsequently annoying gimmick, Mertis pulls the curtain open to reveal her home, and subsequently pulls it shut to end each of three acts. The beginning of the play is excruciating in its pauses with nothing significant happening, pauses that can make those of a Harold Pinter work look speedy. The play was getting on my nerves before anything really got going.

An unmarried couple arrives at the bed and breakfast—Elias Schreiber Hoffman (Christopher Abbott) and Jenny Chung (Hong Chau). It gradually becomes apparent that they have been having relationship problems. (Is the Gettysburg historic Civil War battle location meant to symbolize the couple’s strife? If so, that’s pretentious overkill, to say the least.) Elias indicates being consumed by paranoia, convinced that Jenny is a perpetual liar, while she rebels at his suspicions. The problem is that one can be hard-pressed to give a damn about either of them, especially as their angst escalates.

The play gets a lift with the arrival of Mertis’s friend Genevieve, who is blind. Smith makes her intriguing as she talks about how having left her husband, John, she felt as though he was still inhabiting her mind and judging her for years afterward. The playwright gives Genevieve a post-second act speech to the audience about her life and Lois Smith, a veteran play-stealer, makes the most of it. Her presence helps suggest a mystical edge, as does Mertis with her reactions to Elias when he opens up to her about his problems. Also, Mertis talks limitedly of her ill husband upstairs somewhere in the house, although we never meet him.

The production and performances seem faithful to what must be on Baker’s mind with this opus, but while one can admire the acting and staging, the result can try one’s patience. I also am getting tired of plays that highlight problems of young, uninteresting and sometimes exasperating characters thrashing around in their unhappiness. At the Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, Phone: 212-244-7529. Reviewed August 21, 2015.

  

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