Funny you mention that. I found myself recommending Heroes to some friends as the "best-written play in years" specifically with John in mind as the last high water mark. So then I got curious, and looked back at six years of Pulitzer names and best-of lists to see if I was forgetting anything since 2015. In my (obviously massively subjective) analysis, I wasn't; while of course there have been a lot of excellent and ambitious works that succeeded in many ways since then, no play has reached John's level since then for me -- both in its overall quality, and in its particular beauty and elegance at the sentence level. For me, Heroes was the first since to come close.
And yep, to your point, John came after The Flick and CMT, so it felt like a natural point of comparison just because it was most recent (and because Heroes too flirts with magical realism in an otherwise hyper-naturalistic setting). That said, John also happens to be my favorite of Baker's works, so it's always going to remain a particularly high water mark for me personally. |
