Proudfit’s chapter examines influences on Annie Baker’s 2015 play "John" including the theology of Rudolf Otto and short stories by E. T. A. Hoffman and Lovecraft.
Scott Proudfit, associate professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Elon, published a chapter titled “‘In the puppet or in the god’: Annie Baker’s John, Numinous Dread, and Unknowable Others” in the collection “The Figure of the Monster in Global Theatre: Further Readings on the Aesthetics of Disqualification.”
The collection is edited by Michael M. Chemers and Analola Santana, and the chapter was developed through the monstrosity-in-performance working group that Chemers and Santana regularly offer at the American Society for Theatre Research conference. The collection aims to redefine “monstrosity” to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant, whether by race, gender, sexuality, nationality, immigration status, or physical or psychological extraordinariness.
Baker’s play involves a young couple staying at a bed-and-breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Their relationship is crumbling, and this crisis is made worse by the fact that one of them believes an American Girl doll she once owned has “returned from the dead” to menace her, appearing ominously in the knick-knack filled parlor of the B&B. Proudfit’s chapter looks at the surprising relationship between objects and gods as radical others, and how encounters with both can produce what Rudolf Otto calls “numinous dread.”
The argument engages two intertexts especially: briefly, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and then, more closely, E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1816). In doing so, it shows how Baker’s play parallels romantic relationships and spiritual awakening as encounters with radical otherness that are thrilling but also frightening, whether this otherness takes the form of objects, gods, or both at once.
Proudfit also happens to be teaching an English course this semester which examines the plays of Anton Chekhov and Annie Baker through the lens of cultural materialist theory, and last year he directed Baker’s play “The Antipodes” at Elon.