John - Softcover

Baker, Annie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0573799814 ISBN 13: 9780573799815

Publisher: Samuel French, Inc., 2016

Synopsis

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. A simple enough description, but Annie Baker’s fascinating play takes a look at what theatre can be and builds a world all its own. Baker's hyper-realism bleeds into the eerily supernatural in this quiet tale, where actors and audiences alike delve into ideas of self, mortality, and the solitu

About this title

About the Author:

Annie Baker's works include The Flick (Pulitzer Prize), The Aliens (Obie Award), Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), Nocturama, and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theatres in the United States and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Review:

"John, like any great play, raises a lot of questions–not just about the human experience, but also about the state of contemporary theater, it doesn't provide many answers; it is not the playwright's responsibility to do so... In John she co-opts the viewer for her own aesthetic use, heightening the tension onstage and deepening the quiet relationships between her characters. Through John, she displays an understanding that the audience is part of the theatrical experience, an inevitability as certain as a Chekhovian gun."—Slate (2015-05-11)

About this edition

• Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0573799814
• ISBN 13: 9780573799815
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108