Annie Baker - John

After seeing this remarkable play earlier this year, I wanted to read it to get a better understanding of what it was about, both in some of the specifics and in the general.

Specifics:

• When Mertis takes Genevieve's phone call, what she says is first 'It was John Henry Newman!' and then 'Numquam minus solus quam cum solus', which translates as 'Never less alone than when alone' and is a phrase of Cicero's that was apparently popularised by Newman, a 19th century priest, poet and theologian. Which makes Jenny's later stumbling words, talking to the two of them, all the more interesting: 'I felt ... I felt less alone being alone. I mean I felt more lonely but less alone. [Pause.] Less alone in my alone-ness.'
• That phrase of Mertis's, 'Deep Calling Unto Deep'. It's from the bible; depending on the version, something like ''Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.'
• Genevieve hears 'A rustling, a whispering, or possibly the beating of wings.' Later, when Elias tells Mertis that Jenny is in the Jackson room, and Mertis goes up to check on her, the stage directions indicate: 'Mertis makes her way slowly upstairs. Then some very faint and very strange sounds from a room upstairs. Maybe the beating of wings.' 
• When Elias picks up Mertis's notebook and reads out the various foreign words from it (and Mertis claims it isn't hers, but perhaps belongs to Genevieve) - 'satyabasanam karoti', 'rajanicara', 'putri', 'vastra putrika' etc - it seems like the words are Sanskrit, and meaningful; for example, 'vastra putrika' is defined in google's Sanskrit-English dictionary as 'f. a doll'.
• And when Elias asks Mertis if she's religious, her answer is that she's a neoplatonist, which is at least suggestive when you take into account the mystical experiences recounted by both Jenny (her New Mexico anecdote of feeling as though the universe was having sex with her) and Genevieve (in her between-acts monologue describing the time when she went mad, including becoming aware of a 'unus mundus' - the Jungian concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns - and feeling 'a deep but also disturbing connection with the soul of every person and every object that had ever existed') and the questions that circle through the play about being 'watched (over)' and the role of objects - or, as they're called, 'matter' - in that possible watching.
• Yes, the book from which Mertis reads to Genevieve is H P Lovecraft! Creepy.

General: reading the play made it clearer that one of its preoccupations is the difficulty of connection between people, as well as - relatedly - how we are ourselves, alone and amongst others. (As Huckabees memorably put it: 'how am I not myself?')

Also, again, how remarkable John is in its subtlety and effect.

It feels like ghosts may be having something of a cultural moment, right in time.