We’re lucky to be living in the era of Annie Baker, a playwright who listens to people so carefully, who re-creates human speech with such amusement and care, that her characters feel startlingly familiar—so familiar, in fact, that you might wonder at first why they’re the subjects of a play. In “The Flick,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last year and which is in revival at the Barrow Street Theatre through January 10th, Sam (Matthew Maher), a movie-theatre employee, complains about not being allowed to wear his Red Sox cap at work. “I was like, Paul, we live in Massachusetts,” he says. “It isn’t like a … like a controversial hat.” His co-worker, after a while, responds that her roommate left a passive-aggressive note on her door that morning—it was “like seven Post-Its long.” We know these people; in real life, we might avoid them. But after three hours of watching them onstage—Baker’s plays are famously long—we only want more.
Baker’s plays are lessons in empathy. “The Flick” and “John,” her most recent play, both use representations of life to intensify the empathy: in “The Flick,” it’s movies; in “John,” it includes dolls, miniatures, and haunting stories. The way her characters take refuge in these representations of life and invest them with feeling—a cinéaste whistles a song from “Jules et Jim” as he sweeps the theatre floor; a woman at a B. and B. is tormented by an angry-looking American Girl doll—is endearing and eerily recognizable. It’s also an opportunity for transcendence.
“The Flick” begins in a simple, extraordinary way: with darkness, a movie projector’s beam of light over our heads, and the sound of the prelude from “The Naked and the Dead.” We hear drums, horns, pounding, the cadence of a march. We’re not watching a movie—we’re sitting in the dark, imagining one. It conjures thoughts of the Second World War, the twentieth century, the grand way of doing things in the past, the movies. The way we used to go to the movies, and the way we do now. That beautiful, pained, exquisitely alive feeling you get during the best moments of theatre—that life is too wonderful to be believed, and too cruel in its ephemerality—is with you right from the start. You’re basking in lots of good soupy emotion, and the lights haven’t even come on yet. Then they do, and you see the stuff of real life: a run-down theatre, brooms and dustbins, two awkward guys cleaning between rows of chairs. The projector—what it means when it’s on and when it’s off, what it means to the characters and to culture—is at the heart of “The Flick.”
“John,” which recently completed its run at the Signature Center, which blew our minds for a few glorious weeks, and which, if there’s any justice in this world, will be onstage again soon, has a different kind of extraordinary beginning. The earlier Baker plays that I’ve seen—“Circle Mirror Transformation,” “The Aliens,” and “The Flick”—are set in small New England towns, in somewhat blank places: an adult-ed acting studio, a break area behind a café, the movie theatre. The contrast between the plain sets and the richness of Baker’s dialogue is striking, tender.
“John” takes us somewhere different. The moment it began, when the actress Georgia Engel pushed open the stage’s red velvet curtains, was a revelation: a fully furnished, grandly cozy room, with French doors, a Christmas tree, a grandfather clock, the whole shebang, like a real house, or Broadway. This was a new dimension in Baker’s work as I knew it—it was like seeing a richly imagined theoretical world become a lavishly physical world, similar to the stunning innovation at the end of David Cromer’s “Our Town” at Barrow Street, in 2009. In that bare-bones staging, the surprise third-act revelation of a fully staged breakfast scene, complete with gingham curtains and the sound and scent of bacon frying, was almost too beautiful and real to bear.
This welcoming space in “John” is a bed-and-breakfast, run by Mertis (Engel), in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and her husband. A young couple, Elias (Christopher Abbott) and Jenny (Hong Chau), comes to stay for a couple of days, to visit Civil War sites on the way home to Brooklyn after Thanksgiving in Ohio. “We call this Paris,” Mertis says, of the dining area. It’s decorated with Parisian themes (the stage directions call for “pictures of the Eiffel Tower and tablecloths with little berets or mimes on them”), and the guests can serve themselves tea or cocoa “any time of the day or night, like a Paris café.”
The B. and B. is full of romanticized objets, beyond Paris. There’s a player piano, an array of dolls, a miniature village scene (including a town hall with “tiny people having, like, a tiny mayoral meeting around a tiny table,” Jenny tells Elias), angel chimes, an angel playing guitar, and a stereo made to look like a jukebox. The quilt that Jenny bundles up in, the script says, is “covered in pictures of little girls in bonnets.” Even the snacks that Mertis serves—Vienna Fingers, homemade sailor’s duff—evoke romantic other worlds.
As the story unfolds, we learn about everyone bit by bit, getting to know them as they get to know each other. Jenny and Elias argue, but try to be tender; Jenny hangs out with Mertis and her elderly friend Genevieve (Lois Smith); Elias confides in Mertis. “John” is a gradual and expert evocation of intimacy, mystery, solitude, togetherness. You begin to contemplate the impossibility of ever truly knowing anyone. There’s a theme of being haunted—by people, by memories—and of being under someone’s spell. Genevieve, who is blind, functions as a kind of crabby oracle; she tells a long story about having gone crazy. “I was convinced that my ex-husband had taken possession of my soul and that his spirit was trying to destroy me,” she says. They talk about the idea of feeling watched. Jenny worries about how people see her—and not just people. “Like, I’m always worried about objects and what they’re thinking?” she says. “I’m always worried that they’re unhappy.” The American Girl doll is the chief culprit.
“I always thought it would be a wonderful thing to be a doll,” Mertis says. “To be free of responsibility. To be able to provide joy to people without even moving. Without even saying anything.”
“You’re dead wrong, Mertis,” Genevieve says. “It’s a terrible fate.”
Baker explores the idea that empathy can be a mixed bag. When Genevieve went crazy, she “felt a deep but also disturbing connection with the soul of every person and every object that had ever existed. Not just the souls of departed conquistadors but also the soul of a picture frame, a toy trumpet.” When she went blind, that went away. It was just her. “No more trying to get in anyone else’s head.” No more worrying about what anyone thinks of her—now it was just her and her thoughts.
Meanwhile, in the seeing world, people are busy investing everything with emotion. Elias hates birds. “May I ask why?” Mertis asks.
“They look like little evil robot dinosaurs? They have sharp little beaks they could poke your eyes out with? They crap on you? They eat trash?” he replies. “People romanticize birds.”
“Oh, yes,” Mertis says. “I romanticize birds very much.”
Mertis has experienced pain—an unhappy first marriage, depression—and her cozy B. and B. was once the site of a field hospital for Union soldiers. (“So many piles of arms and legs outside the windows that you couldn’t see in or out,” she says.) But the world she lives in, the atmosphere she fosters, is sunny. The edgiest thing she says is “I’ll be dipped.” She loves Genevieve, and her angels, and her birds, and her mysterious husband, who saved her from a long period of sadness. Baker doesn’t portray Mertis’s romanticizing things as foolish—it just seems like a form of love.
In “The Flick,” Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten, in the production I saw), the ponderous cinephile at the center of the plot, writes an impassioned letter on behalf of keeping the theatre’s 35-mm. projector instead of going digital. “Film can express things that computers never will,” he writes. “Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow, and it is the light and shadow that were there on the day you shot the film. Digital movies—I think the phrase ‘digital film’ is an oxymoron—are actually just millions of tiny dots. These dots, or pixels, cannot express the variation in color and texture that film can.” He concludes that “projecting a thirty-five-millimetre film digitally is like looking at a postcard of the Mona Lisa instead of the Mona Lisa itself.”
Baker’s style, which famously includes pauses and awkward silences and realistically inarticulate bumbling, is very much like this description of 35-mm. film. It captures the light and shadow of everyday life, the nuance of human conversation. She allows them a generous amount of time. Sometimes people leave at intermission; a woman I overheard on a cell phone in the lobby at “John” said, “You could say it’s slow going.” I get mad when people complain about the length of Baker’s plays, or even joke about it, as they loved to do with “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s seven-hour “Great Gatsby” masterpiece. Three hours is insultingly long for a bad play or an indulgent play—ninety minutes can be too long—but three hours for a fantastic play not only isn’t onerous, it’s a gift. When an artist’s work is sensitive, disciplined, and well-structured, and when it listens to its subjects, portrays them thoughtfully, and treats their lives with respect, that generosity of time becomes part of the empathy, and we become part of the empathy, too. We’re paying them the respect of attention. The pacing is essential to the insight and to the rhythm of the humor.
In “The Flick,” Avery tells his therapist in a phone call that he had a dream in which Purgatory was represented by his father’s study, and that there’s a scanner that passes over his books and movies to see whether you’ve loved them enough. That’s what decides if you get into Heaven. He’s horrified when it’s his turn and the scanner passes silently over “Barry Lyndon” and “Pierrot le Fou.” Hasn’t he loved enough? he wonders. But then it does beep: the movie he most loved in his life, it turns out, was “Honeymoon in Vegas.” He was crazy for it as a little kid.
Baker’s extraordinary skill as an artist is to see the world accurately and to love it as it is, just as her characters love birds, a Red Sox cap, “Honeymoon in Vegas,” or Vienna Fingers. She sees them in their everyday wonder, without romanticizing, without criticizing, and shows us how to love them, too.