When a guest in her B&B asks the little-old-lady host if she "is a Christian or something," she casually lets drop that she's a Neoplatonist. "I don't know what that is," says the young man, but before an explanation can arrive, some other household matter must be addressed and the brief exchange is left behind. I didn't know what is was either, and if you want to encounter one of Wikipedia's longest entries, just look it up. And you still probably won't really know beyond the fact that something called "the One" is considered both the source and end of all matter. It's unlikely a coincidence that, in a seemingly throwaway line, landlady Mertis Katherine "Kitty" Graven refers to the tchotchkes that overwhelm her home as "matter."
This is one of the warrens found down the rabbit hole of Annie Baker's John, now at ACT's Strand Theater. It has the simplest of setups: a young couple takes a vacation to try to repair a rift in their relationship. Some may find the three acts and more than three hours it takes to tell this story to be excessive, but much like Mertis' home, there is so much matter to take in, so filled with unexpected detours, and staged with such brave confidence in its moody naturalism that time for this theatergoer became a non-issue.
Several of Baker's plays have been seen in the Bay Area, including The Aliens and Body Awareness, while her 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Flick has yet to be staged here. John made its New York debut in 2015, with Georgia Engel (fondly remembered as Georgette on Mary Tyler Moore) playing the unfathomable B&B biddy, a role we are fortunate to have her recreating here. Engel's purring voice, eagerly receptive countenance, and unflappable empathy disarm both us and her visitors, yet there is an undercurrent of disruptive power about the character as her guests are enticed into sharing long-suppressed fears and emotions.
Maybe Mertis is bewitched, or maybe the house is haunted, but while the play teases us with suggestions of the supernatural, the bounds of reality are stretched but never punctured. The house is in Gettysburg, and the only guests currently in residence are there to see the historic sights. At least Elias is, with his girlfriend Jenny along to humor his Civil War passions. Their relationship has interludes of affection between passive-aggressive confrontations, leading to a horrific argument that Baker still finds a way to end with a surprise laugh.
Part of me wished early on that Elias and Jenny had broken up before the play began, so aggravating are their jabs. But then, for various reasons, they each spend time alone with Mertis that leads them into confusion and introspection that carries us into their contemplations as well. While Elias is off touring battlefields on his own, Jenny gets to meet Genevieve, Mertis' cranky and blind best friend, who describes in detail her years of insanity that are now behind her �" at least pretty much so. Elias has his own surprise encounter with Genevieve, but not before a casual conversation with Mertis in the home's "Paris bistro" nook turns into deep metaphysical broodings. No character John appears on stage, but his importance is best not explained here.
Ann McDonough has a steely intensity as Genevieve, for whom silence and talk, light and dark, are equally acceptable. As Jenny, Stacey Yen effectively plays the deceptively reasonable partner in her relationship with the testy Elias, while Joe Paulik bites into this character with an intensity that borders on out-of-balance harshness. Director Ken Rus Schmoll uses some of the same quirky devices that original director Sam Gold used in New York, from long silences that can make us feel like forgotten guests in the parlor, to having Mertis wearily pull open and shut the curtains between the acts of this play that resides in a world of WTF allure.
Postscript: Don't rush up the aisles as Mertis closes the curtains to signal the second intermission. There is a brief, weird and wonderful monologue from one of the characters that adds to the head-scratching in a play that may not need any more head-scratching moments. But such is life with John.
John will run at ACT's Strand Theater through April 23. Tickets are $25-$90. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.