“Annie Baker’s John is so good on so many levels that it casts a unique and brilliant light…By not rushing things—by letting the characters develop as gradually and inevitably as rain or snowfall—Baker returns us to the naturalistic but soulful theater that many of her contemporaries and near-contemporaries have disavowed in their rush to be ‘postmodern.’” —Hilton Als, New Yorker
“Baker’s true masterpiece: an examination of the murkiness of human relationships in which one of those relationships is the one between an audience and a playwright…In John, Baker co-opts the viewer for her own aesthetic use, heightening the tension onstage and deepening the quiet relationships between her characters.” —Tyler Coates, Slate
“John is positively gothic—mysteries within mysteries, ghost stories on top of ghost stories—without losing Baker’s power to zoom in on the peculiarities in the oblique and blunt ways of real people.” —Linda Winer, Newsday
“John is a haunting and haunted meditation on topics Baker has made so singularly her own: the omnipresence of loneliness in human life, and the troubled search for love and lasting connection.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times
The week after Thanksgiving. A bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A cheerful innkeeper. A young couple struggling to stay together. Thousands of inanimate objects, watching. Annie Baker’s compelling new work, John, is revolutionary in theme and structure and challenges the boundaries of what theatre can be.
Annie Baker’s other plays include The Flick (Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Hull-Warriner Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), The Aliens (Obie Award), and an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Her plays have been produced at more than 150 theaters throughout the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the 2015–16 Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is a resident playwright at Signature Theatre.