Baker’s comedy-drama work in a single-screen (!) movie theater in Worcester County, Mass., realized in grungily acute detail by the set designer David Zinn. Baker’s frequent collaborator Sam Gold with the customary feathery touch he brings to her work, life’s messy nature takes mild metaphorical form. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight about the way people make messes of their lives - and the lives of people they care about - and then sink into benumbed impotence, hard pressed to see any way of cleaning things up. in Playwriting Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York.Love, friendship and the daily grind all take on a distinctly sticky quality in “ The Flick,” the moving, beautifully acted and challengingly long new play by Annie Baker that opened on Tuesday night at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan. She is a resident playwright at the Signature Theatre and a master-artist-in-residence and co-associate chair in the M.F.A. Her additional works include Body Awareness (2008), Uncle Vanya (adaptation, 2012), and The Antipodes (2017), and her plays have been produced at the Soho Repertory, Signature Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Royal Court, National Theatre, numerous regional theaters across the United States, and in over a dozen countries worldwide. (2009) from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. (2003) from New York University and an M.F.A. In mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another, Baker captures the humor, absurdity, and tragedy that result from the limitations of language and our fraught search for more meaningful human connections.Īnnie Baker received a B.F.A. Baker's empathy for her characters and their anxieties is also clear in John(2015), as a young couple grapples with spiritual and philosophical questions in a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, bed and breakfast run by a friendly but uncanny older woman. Idle talk of movies, art, and popcorn among the three young employees at a run-down movie house gradually gives way to tensions around class, race, and gender as their gestures of friendship and intimacy falter. Frustrated ambitions and workplace malaise are themes Baker returns to in The Flick(2013). The three disenchanted young men of The Aliens (2010), almost of a third of which is silent, inadvertently reveal their vulnerabilities in their verbal tics and cues, pauses and befuddlement. Baker's use of silence and slow, patient pacing illustrates that we communicate the most about ourselves in the gaps and blank spaces between the thoughts we put into words. Circle Mirror Transformation (2009) traces the emotional transitions and the relationships forged and broken among five participants in a community acting class, with each of several short scenes centering upon an acting exercise that draws out fragments of the characters' personalities and histories. In several plays set in Shirley, Vermont-a fictional small town-Baker creates seemingly simple stories about ordinary, working-class people facing familiar predicaments. With a keen ear for the subtleties of everyday speech, a masterful command of dramatic structure, and a willingness to allow silences to linger on stage (often to a point of discomfort), she brings to life the erratic rhythms of human interaction. Annie Baker is a playwright exploring the complexities of human behavior and the ways in which language is often inadequate to build true understanding between people.
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