After seven years together, plenty of couples might start to take each other — or at least the occasional orange slice — for granted. Not the director Sam Gold and the playwright Annie Baker.  On a recent afternoon, he shouted to her across a cluttered rehearsal room.  “Baker,” he called. “You have to see the garnish options. They’re amazing.”  Ms. Baker, wrapped in an itchy-looking afghan, came over. Their new play, “John,” which begins previews at the Signature Theater next Wednesday, is set in a knickknack-besieged bed-and-breakfast in Gettysburg, Pa. Orange slices and other garnishes accompany the meals. No one in the audience is likely to notice them.  “This is beautiful,” Mr. Gold said, pointing to one possibility.  “A vagina tulip,” Ms. Baker said. “Perfect. And this one’s like a little Venus flytrap.”  “How do you even choose?” Mr. Gold said.  Rehearsal was already running long, and they were starving, but neither is the type to throw a sprig of parsley at a problem and then break for lunch. Time ticked on as they gazed at the arrangements in wonder.  Plenty of directors and writers work together steadily, though Ms. Baker and Mr. Gold seem an unlikely match. She’s got the vibe of a Northern California hippie, he the air of a New York intellectual. But their compulsions synchronize, producing a remarkable body of work, from “Circle Mirror Transformation” in 2009 to “The Aliens” in 2010 and Ms. Baker’s adaptation of “Uncle Vanya” in 2012. Their last show, “The Flick,” won Ms. Baker the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2014. Mr. Gold had just remounted it at the Barrow Street Theater when he received his first Tony Award, for the Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori musical “Fun Home.”  Ms. Baker and Mr. Gold, both in their mid-30s, met in 2008 at the urging of several mutual friends. The playwright Amy Herzog, who would marry Mr. Gold and was a member of Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood writers group with Ms. Baker, was one of them. “They’re both deeply interested in psychology and allergic to sentimentality,” Ms. Herzog wrote in an email message. “It seemed like a good bet that they’d like each other.”  It was a bet Ms. Herzog won. By the end of their first lunch (“at a place in Fort Greene with a horrible name,” Ms. Baker said), they’d decided to apply to the Sundance Theater Institute with the play that would become “Circle Mirror Transformation,” an oblique drama set in an adult acting class at a Vermont community center.  He had yet to read a word she’d written. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him direct. But they discovered a mutual passion for what Ms. Baker called “the slow awkward messiness of theater.”  Asked if that lunch was like a great first date, they were both mildly revolted. This is an artistic love story, not a romantic one. “I definitely felt when we met that we were like-minded and we could be friends and we could make work,” Mr. Gold said tartly. “I wouldn’t make it sound any more epic.”  The work they’ve gone on to make is sharp and sympathetic, funny and quietly heart-rending. Ms. Baker’s writing turns casual conversation into a kind of poetry. Mr. Gold calibrates the declarations and pauses and elisions with knife-edge precision. It’s a kind of theatrical pointillism: Observed up close, it isn’t anything like real life, but onstage it looks and feels and sounds that way.  “They dive into the mundane and ordinary and reveal the extraordinary in it,” said James Houghton, the Signature’s founding artistic director, who selected Ms. Baker as one of the Signature’s Residency Five Playwrights.  Mr. Gold and Ms. Baker are reluctant to disclose much about themselves or their work together. (Asked a personal question, Ms. Baker tends to wave at a reporter’s digital recorder and exclaim, “No, no, no!”) In rehearsal, they huddle together at a table with coffee mugs in front of them, leaning in toward the actors. They tend to laugh at the same time and look away at the same time. As Matthew Maher, an actor who was worked with them on “Uncle Vanya” and “The Flick,” said, “They’re very warmly conspiratorial with each other.”  At lunch, at a diner down the street, Mr. Gold and Ms. Baker avoided articulating just what makes them close conspirators. She ate her eggs, he ate his salad, and they talked around the question. Finally, she came back to their first day of rehearsal on “Circle Mirror Transformation” and how much she admired the way he works, which is relaxed and thoughtful and respectful of the actors.  “It was like the opposite of faster, funnier, louder,” she said.  For his part, Mr. Gold appreciates the “microscopic lens on the world” that Ms. Baker’s work provides and the emphasis on detail it demands. “Everything has to be right. Everything has to be honest. Everything has to be full,” he said. Watching them geek out over a plate of garnishes, you believe it.  They disagree very rarely, they say. When they do, it’s about how to make an aspect of the production more honest and full. Ms. Herzog recalled “an argument that went on for, I think, months about the precise shade of the paint color for the walls of the movie theater in ‘The Flick.’ ” Ms. Herzog doesn’t remember who won. “I guess they both did,” she said.  They began careers independent of each other. Ms. Baker, who studied dramatic writing at New York University and Brooklyn College, made her playwriting debut at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2008 with “Body Awareness,” directed by Karen Kohlhaas. Mr. Gold, who grew up in Westchester and attended Cornell University and the Juilliard School, assisted the Wooster Group for several years before directing “The Black Eyed” at New York Theater Workshop.  Ms. Baker has lately worked only with Mr. Gold; he, on the other hand, has directed successful premieres for playwrights like Will Eno and Bathsheba Doran, as well as less adulated Broadway revivals of “The Real Thing” and “Picnic.”  Happily, Ms. Baker claims to feel no jealousy when he directs for others. If theirs is a close relationship, it’s also apparently an open one.  Their collaboration is less a matter of Mr. Gold staging Ms. Baker’s writing (although he takes this as a fairly sacred duty) than of building a world together. A shared exactitude — regarding sock colors, dance moves, hula hoops, Dumpsters — makes the shows feel unexpectedly rich.  Ms. Baker and Mr. Gold like to kick off each play with a road trip. With set designers along for the ride, they drove to Vermont coffeehouses for “The Aliens,” which follows a couple of townies and a teenage barista, and to Massachusetts movie theaters for “The Flick,” which shadows ushers at a single-screen cinema. (The Barrow Street run was just extended to Jan. 10.)  For “John,” which centers on an unhappy couple, Christopher Abbott and Hong Chau, staying at a guesthouse presided over by Georgia Engel’s sweetheart of an innkeeper, they went to Gettysburg with the set designer Mimi Lien. They took exhaustive photos of several bed-and-breakfasts — the wallpaper, the hand-embroidered samplers, the spooky stuffed animals. Then they stopped at the world’s greatest indoor miniature village and a pancake house.  Such attention to detail has occasionally inspired criticism. A portion of the Playwrights Horizons audience for the initial run objected to the length and pacing of “The Flick,” which included several scenes of the ushers sweeping and mopping the aisle — the opposite, as Ms. Baker said, of faster, funnier, louder.  But both stand by their methods. (At three and a half hours, “John” isn’t any shorter.) During rehearsal, Mr. Gold urged Ms. Chau to recommit to a pause, making it longer and more awkward. “I know it must feel really unnatural,” he said. “But this is the fifth play Annie and I have done so I know it works.”  Clearly it does. And their friendship has endured even as both have earned greater acclaim. Ms. Baker was in the audience, crying, when Mr. Gold won his Tony. (She herself hasn’t made the leap to Broadway. It isn’t a leap that has ever seemed to interest her.) Neither is entirely sure what to do with their awards. At the urging of a friend, the actor Jeremy Strong, Ms. Baker used some of her prize money to buy “this like silken hippie frock from Barneys.” Mr. Gold hasn’t found a place for his Tony, as it’s not yet back from the engravers. He didn’t seem bothered by the delay.  A new project after such big wins might inspire anxiety, but both were at work on “John” before the awards were announced. Ms. Baker has no desire to replicate “The Flick” as she’d already felt herself moving away from it. “I’m just chronically dissatisfied with everything I write,” she said. “Everything I write, three years after I write it, it drives me crazy.”  “John,” she said, is the result of “a totally new set of obsessions,” though she wouldn’t share many particulars. With some reluctance, she provided only the first act of the script and access to a few of its scenes in rehearsal. She confirmed that in subsequent acts it veers away from naturalism, inspired by magical realist writers like Bruno Schulz and E.T.A. Hoffmann. “It hopefully gets weirder and weirder,” she said.  This isn’t Mr. Gold’s aesthetic. Neither is a fussy bed-and-breakfast. “All those tchotchkes,” he said, with mild revulsion. But he’s ready to direct whatever Ms. Baker hands him.  “I trust Annie,” he said, nodding to her across the remains of his salad. “Whatever she’s interested in is going to interest me.”  It’s All in the Details  No image or item onstage, even the smallest, seems to escape the notice of Sam Gold and Annie Baker and their collaborators. Here they talk about the set designer for the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production of “The Aliens” (2010), a three-character play that unfolds behind a New England coffee shop.  Ms. Baker Andrew Lieberman drove to Vermont with us to research “The Aliens” and took a million pictures of the backs of coffee shops and Dumpster areas. He became fixated with the asphalt tiles on the back of this beautiful little building in a parking lot in Brattleboro and recreated them in blue for our set. I remember Andrew staying up until 4 in the morning distressing them by hand.  Mr. Gold The texture is really unique and looks very different in front light than it does in side light. Also they are cheap so it was a very resourceful idea for a small budget production. He meticulously painted the tiles blue, but their glimmery texture came through.  Ms. Baker The set was very shallow, so all the action in the play happened right up against those tiles.  A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2015, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Going Steady on the Job. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Gold, a director, and Ms. Baker, a playwright, whose new show, “John,” opens next Wednesday, have been longtime collaborators with a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award between them.