Triple play

What has the Annie Baker festival told us about its playwright?

The boys from New York, Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley, just love playwright Annie Baker. Isherwood called her most recent opus, The Aliens,"a gentle and extraordinarily beautiful new play" when it opened in Manhattan. And colleague Brantley seconded that emotion when he journeyed north (What?? He left the five boroughs???) to see the festival of her work currently filling the Calderwood Pavilion. After viewing Company One's production of the same script last week (it runs through this weekend), Brantley gushed that Baker was "seriously gifted" and thrilled to her "bittersweet sounds of silence."

But when I saw The Aliens, I . . . well . . .

I fell asleep.

Twice.

So maybe I missed the extraordinarily beautiful part. But you see, a third of The Aliens is performed in silence (as Baker dictates).  Which comes to, oh, almost 50 minutes of stage time. Longer than a lot of plays.

During these periods of being-but-dramatic-nothingness, we listen to the grass grow, or distant birds sing (even they twitter sotto voce, as if they were in a library).  Meanwhile the main character, KJ (Alex Pollock, below, with Nael Nacer) grows steadily more stoned. He smiles a lot, and sometimes hums to himself, lost in some reverie that we imagine has to be more interesting than what we're watching.

And if you're me, well, after about ten or fifteen minutes, you start drifting into your own reverie, just like KJ, and . . . well . . . all I'm hoping is that I didn't snore as loudly as a certain critical éminence grise often does. Because then I would have completely drowned out all those distant little birds!

Not that I can fault the production much in any detail for my slumber; from what I saw, I'd say it's easily the strongest thing I've seen Company One do.  The actors are all excellent, and make every melodramatic turn fresh and truly poignant.  I'm serious.  I gave a Hubbie to Alex Pollock when I first saw him about two years ago, so I wasn't surprised by his tour de force here - and it's nice he got his picture in the Times (below)! I've never seen Nael Nacer before, but he too seemed just right.  As the teenager drawn into their orbit, Jacob Brandt was perhaps slightly mannered, but was still basically fine. Director Shawn LaCount, of whom I'm not always a fan, has done well by all three actors (although I think Baker intends a trace more irony to cling to the show's final rendition of "If I Had a Hammer").  Meanwhile Cristina Todesco - who has designed the entire triumvirate of plays at the Calderwood - pulled off another subtle trick with a set that was just about perfect in every detail.

Alex Pollock and Nael Nacer in The Aliens.

So - why am I complaining?  After all, I got a good nap, didn't I?  Well, I'm sorry to get quite so snarky about Brantley and Isherwood, but there's only so much gentle afflatus of Baker's reputation that I can stand.  So let's turn back the critical clock to pre-millennial standards of awesomeness for a moment.  Why not - play along with me.  And perhaps I'll start the deflation of Baker's critical balloon with something that has been bugging me about her plays, and that's all this "Shirley, Vermont" crapola.  I mean, it's a cute marketing hook, yes - and I know it's all about "butts in seats" - but there is just no way anyone can truly believe Ms. Baker conjures an imaginary town in these three plays.  Not that anyone truly has believed that.  Brantley, for instance, in a classic example of his trademarked doublespeak, writes on the one hand about "assessing more fully the dimensions of a town called Shirley," and even half-compares Baker's hamlet to Wilder's Grover's Corners, but simultaneously backpedals with lines like, "But for all their specificity of locale, these plays are as notable for their sense of displacement as for their sense of place."  Translated from Brantlese, that means: What I just said?  Total bull!

Egg-zactly. Because Grover's Corners is, indeed, a fully-fledged "imaginary place," with a deep sense of  artistic reality - like Bedford Falls, or Maycomb. "Shirley, VT" doesn't rank with any of these - the overlaps between Baker's plays give them roughly the same amount of resonance that Petticoat Junction had with Green Acres. Because Baker isn't writing about a town, she's writing about a class - why can't we admit that? She writes highly attenuated, sentimental comedies of manners about a certain liberal, moneyed demographic. If you want to pretend there's a virtual "Shirley, Vermont" in Williamsburg, and Cambridge, and Berkeley - fine. But Baker hasn't bothered giving her fictional village nearly enough detail (her minimal technique prevents that) for anyone to claim that she has created a mythological place.  So let's all just stop pretending she has. Okay?

Okay.  So what we have with Annie Baker is a smart and highly skillful writer of sentimental material.  Very sentimental material.  In a word, she's kinda sappy, and The Aliens in some ways may be her sappiest work yet.  But she gets away with her Hallmark-card-level pathos by whispering it, or insinuating it through various gambits-at-one-remove, in tiny little blips; sometimes it feels like she's texting her well-wishers a sweet, sad little play. Which gives her themes the appearance of a sophistication they don't really have.

Take The Aliens.  Actually, a better name for it might be The Walking Clichés.  KJ, the gentle pixie at the center of the story, is a harmless stoner, who hangs out all day behind a coffee shop, and is also (maybe!) a mathematical genius.  But he's poignant because he has OCD, and maybe other, you know, psychological stuff wrong with him.  But he's cool to talk to.  (That is, when he talks.)  His buddy is different - he's like mad at the world, and even a little scary!  But you know, his girlfriend left him, so you have to cut him some slack.  And he plays guitar, and is writing this awesome novel, just like his hero, Bukowski - he, too, could be a secret genius!

Oh, Jesus Christ.  I mean seriously.  Two secret geniuses in a single backyard?  Isn't that pushing it?  But wait - there's more; enter Death, stage left!  Yes - one of our lovable friends is mown down in the prime of life. Just like in Arcadia, et in Shirley ego!

Well, that's one way to get around the fact that you haven't devised a plot for your characters. But to be honest, the actors actually make this out-of-left-field development touching, as shamelessly tear-jerking as it may be.  So why do I feel, somewhere deep inside, that I'm being taken for a ride?  Not by Ms. Baker, I should say - even though sometimes when I contemplate her, I imagine her with those big, sad eyes that waifs have in paintings on black velvet (only this time the waif has an iPhone).

No, I agree that Baker's talented, and a genuine craftsman - she has potential; someday, I think, she might begin to grapple with some real themes and write a great play, as Lydia Diamond suddenly did with Stick Fly.  And maybe I should count my blessings; yes, she's much better than the gratingly fatuous and self-indulgent Sarah Ruhl, who has been queen of the white-girl playwright hive for far too long.  Indeed, in some ways Baker is everything that Ruhl's not: she's disciplined, and self-deprecating, and even takes on political correctness, to some degree (in Body Awareness).

I don't think Baker has written a really great play, though - not yet; she has demonstrated her technical ability, and even developed a thoughtful technique that seems to map to her generation's attitudes. And she has written three pretty good plays in a row.  That's saying something.  She should be produced.  But should writing three good plays mean she should already have a career retrospective? I'm not so sure.  Because Baker seems unable to directly engage with the dark sides of her characters (they just don't have dark sides) or really with anything like the moral or political compromises (or other vicissitudes) of actual life.  (Even her big gambit in The Aliens happens off-stage.)  This struck me with all the more force as I was watching Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular in Providence this weekend.  Compared to Baker's plays, Singular seemed singularly layered and deep, and calmly savage with its character's flaws and failings.  Yet we're still arguing over whether Ayckbourn has any lasting value!

But then Ayckbourn critiqued his culture, while Baker subtly celebrates her own.  Indeed, sometimes she feels more like a symptom of that culture than an observer of it - I mean, we're going through the Great Recession, we've become a nation that tortures, a nativist-facist movement is on the rise, and in our theatres we're listening to Annie Baker sing a little song to herself about the Starbucks crowd?  Something about that seems - well, just wrong.  What's more, if this festival has done anything, it has shown a clear arc in her work - only it's in the wrong direction, toward smaller canvases and ever more distant delicacies, and perhaps more and more self-involvement.

Although somewhere (and I realize I'm beginning to sound like Ben Brantley here!) I'm aware that yes, these are desperate times artistically, so maybe I should just count my blessings with Baker. In a way, she's more than a poster child for the millennials - she may be the best they've got, and you can feel on the blogs a kind of rising tide of frustration with the fact that us grown-ups aren't as impressed with this generation's artistic achievements as they are themselves. Actually, they kind of know they're under-achievers, but to their minds, that doesn't matter, they should just be produced anyway! The recent dust-up over the Wasserstein Prize gives you some idea of what a pickle we're in - a prize specifically set up to honor young female playwrights literally couldn't find a script good enough to give the money to. That tells you something, doesn't it - only it wasn't what the millennials wanted to hear; their collective tantrum was swift, and damning. And almost immediately, the Wasserstein people backed down - they'll find something they can give that prize to, even if it kills them! Given that kind of environment, yeah, maybe Annie Baker counts as some kind of genius, and fluffing her makes perfect sense.

Body language

A Jock Sturges photo of his muse, "Misty Dawn," whom he has been photographing in the nude since she was 3.

Is being politically correct kind of like being autistic?

That's the implied thesis of Annie Baker's Body Awareness, now at SpeakEasy Stage as part of a three-part Baker festival running through November. (I gazed into another side of this theatrical triptych, Circle Mirror Transformation, here, and will see the final panel, The Aliens, later this week.)  Though close enough in style to form a family, these theatrical triplets aren't quite identical; if one watched them in the sequence of their composition (that is, Body, then Circle, then Aliens), my guess is one would perceive Baker becoming more and more self-conscious almost scene by scene.

For she is a dramatist all but obsessed, like many millennials, with not being overly "dramatic." Indeed, in the notes to Body Awareness, the playwright expresses pain over even being heard: "Speaking is a kind of misery," Baker (probably) whispers to her interviewer.  "We're all kind of quietly suffering . . . trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe." She goes further about her own methods of revision: "If I can hear [myself] writing, like if there is thinly-disguised exposition or a nudge to the audience or some kind of obvious point made, I go back and change it."

I was surprised, then, to discover that Body Awareness is full of rather obvious points.  Indeed, despite Baker's mania to never seem "stagy," I often perceived melodramatic mechanics operating beneath the surface of her script; people enter in tears, or break down while on stage, etc.  But then Body is the first of Baker's so-called "Vermont Plays" (because they're all set in a fictitious "Shirley, VT"); the playwright was, indeed, far more carefully guarded in Circle Mirror, and I understand that The Aliens all but disappears down a rabbit hole of pauses and silence.  (Which may be why I've heard most folks prefer the structure, and relative accessibility, of Body.)

What struck me most about the play's staginess, however, is that it derives from a highly developed schema - unlike in Circle Mirror, Baker wants to quietly posit an argument here, and even a political metaphor, with the crunchy downside of political correctness in her sights.  Her two heroines, Joyce and Phyllis, are a thoughtful lesbian couple, dealing with a problematic son, Jared (from Joyce's earlier marriage), who clearly has Asperger Syndrome, but just as clearly can't admit that.  Absorbed in the Oxford English Dictionary, unable to sustain empathy even for those he loves - yet all the while sucking on an electric toothbrush like some kind of techno-teat - Jared can't even hold down a job at McDonald's, yet bristles with violence whenever he senses anybody might think he's "a retard." At 21, he's also quite hot to lose his virginity, a state his helicopter moms are humiliatingly aware of ("We're glad you're masturbating!" they assure him. "Just please don't run up the phone bill!")  Meanwhile, at "Shirley State," where she teaches, Phyllis has organized "Body Awareness Week," a sit-in designed to heal the psychological wounds inflicted by "the white male gaze," etc.

And who should step into this simmering situation but a white male who, yes, gazes.  Photographer "Frank Bonitatibus" (we won't speculate about that moniker, but see what I mean about Baker being stagy?) has made his reputation photographing females - even under-age females - in the nude; he's obviously modeled on photographer Jock Sturges (typical images, at top and left) the sketchy lensman who got his start doing pictures of girls in nudist colonies, but eventually graduated from softcore to the "art-lite" demi-monde. Sturges' oeuvre may be uninteresting intellectually, but its sexual pictorialism is lovely because the women are, and a consensus has developed around him that nobody has really been hurt by what he does (although frankly, some of the girls in his photos look none too happy, and of course there are claims of a statistical link between naturism and pedophilia). At the same time, as the notion that nudity can be "empowering" (via burlesque, etc.) has gained ground among young women, Sturges' work has become inevitably embroiled in the spray of the various waves that crash in the tide pools of feminism. Thus, if you easily confuse politics with art, you can be seduced into imagining (as I think Baker has) that Sturges could be the genuine photographic article.

At any rate, once Phyllis gets a load of Frank, the sparks begin to fly - perhaps partly because Joyce (who after all was once into men) finds him kind of attractive. A showdown between rival forms of empowerment is soon in the offing, with Joyce edging toward stripping for Frank (who's giving Jared a little sex advice on the side) while Phyllis (short for "Philistine," perhaps?) slowly devolves into Andrea Dworkin as she issues intolerant ultimatums about sex, life, and art.

Richard Snee prepares to gaze at Paula Plum in Body Awareness.

Clearly Baker means us to see Phyllis as a kind of autistic academic, a feminist mirror of Jared; like him, she's unable to empathize with the "male gaze," and again like him, she's driven to near-hysteria whenever she has to deal with threat, or even change. Now I'm no fan of Phyllis's type (as Hub Review readers surely know), but at the same time I'm afraid I felt Annie Baker short-changes her Dworkin factotum - because she never gets a worthy antagonist.  Certainly Frank doesn't count as one; he's a pony-tailed Buddhist who likes women almost as much as he likes getting off on them; maybe he's horny, but he's obviously harmless - and so is Jared, a nervous boy who only wants to be a man. If all the guys in the world were aging hippies or man-boys with Asperger's, then we wouldn't have too much trouble with "the male gaze," would we - and we could write Phyllis off as a maniac. But of course that's not the case.

And how much more interesting Body Awareness would be as drama if Frank were a bit sketchier, a bit more of a pervy threat.  Or if Phyllis were able to simply score some points against him; but oh no, Frank's got a laid-back live-and-let-live answer to everything - so why can't Phyl just chill?  Even though sexual attraction kind of lacks empathy, when you think about it.  I mean isn't horniness like a mode of autism, too?

Of course limning these contradictions - or exploring why half of millennial girls seem to be starving themselves, while the other half are confidently showing their boobs on the Internet - would require Annie Baker to actually raise her voice, to stage a debate, to boldly declare that yes, she's really writing a play.  But she's never going to do that.  So we only get one brief feint, in a truncated conversation between Phyllis and Joyce, at the political issues her script raises.

But at least we also get, in Paul Daigneault's well-crafted and heartfelt production, a good deal of very good acting; the emotional issues at stake get a persuasive airing, even if the intellectual ones don't.  Center stage is the reliable Paula Plum, as the instinctive, wounded Joyce, giving another delicately shaded performance that I'm sure will put her on a lot of people's short lists for yet another acting award.  And she's ably aided and abetted by Richard Snee - her husband in "real life" - as that smooth-talking Frank; together, they effortlessly conjure an intimacy that many actors could easily overplay.  Both regularly have their scenes stolen, however, by newcomer Gregory Pember, who makes poor, pained Jared into a quivering bundle of tics of such verisimilitude that they're genuinely pathetic and threatening by turns.  Only the talented Adrianne Krstansky falls a few steps behind, as the unlikable Phyllis - but then she's hamstrung by the part.  And Baker throws her so many curveballs in the final scene - in which Phyllis suddenly seems to repudiate everything she has stood for so far - that it's a wonder poor Krstansky isn't suffering from emotional whiplash by now.

Thus once again, I found myself at a Boston production of a new play that seemed slightly superior to the work itself (even Cristina Todesco's beautiful set - which recalls a kind of natural-wood cave, or maybe cage - seemed better than the script deserved).  This is beginning to feel like a trend.  Indeed, could the most ironic thing about this ironic millennial playwright's festival prove to be that the high quality of its acting outshines the quality of her writing?  OMG!

Baker's Plays

I think it occurred to me the second time I found myself listening to the air conditioner run (above) in Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation (produced by the Huntington at the Caldwell Pavilion through November 14):

At what point does mumblecore become inaudible?

Now by that I don't mean to suggest this up-and-coming young playwright has nothing to say; far from it, in fact. She's a very intelligent and thoughtful - although perhaps not all that original - dramatist. My friend Art Hennessey has already admonished me, "Now don't go all Sarah Ruhl on Annie Baker's ass, Tom, she's a real playwright!" And she is a real playwright - whether she warrants a three-play retrospective here in Beantown I'm not yet sure, but I'll keep an open mind.

Certainly she has been given a superb production by the Huntington. Director Melia Bensussen is almost too attuned to Baker's don't-say-anything-aloud-that-would-like-not-be-cool aesthetic, and has capably drawn from Circle's circle of actors a suite of performances that are just about perfect in their nuanced indirection. I'm actually in awe of how much was suggested, vs. how little was stated, in this show; only a mime troupe could have said less. And, as with mime, we're suddenly impressed when we perceive - or rather piece together - the shape of dramatic incident moving behind the play's utterly nondescript surface.

This, of course, is an old trick. It's basically the same ploy as Chekhov's gambit of having someone's life smashed up casually, over breakfast; although to be honest, Baker more often reminded me (wait for it) of William Inge - indeed, Circle Mirror Transformation is essentially Bus Stop redux, set in a rehearsal room instead of a snowbound diner: a group of ordinary characters are thrust together (here, in a community drama class) and over time we learn everything about their emotional and sexual lives. Baker's gimmick is that we discover almost all of this "inadvertently," through theatre games the class repetitively plays.

Again, this is hardly a new idea. But Baker has a very precise ear, so we often enjoy hearing old tropes updated into the precise hesitations of millennial newspeak. When one of Baker's characters says a line like "Oh, yeah - no. Yeah. No," the context has been so carefully set up (and the performances here are so specific) that we know exactly what she means. And when the characters "play" each other, or trade "secrets" in class, we get to read two sets of tea leaves (at least) - both what the characters understand at this point about each other, and what they don't: in short, whether they're ahead of or behind us as their own audience.

Of course it helps in appreciating all this (as it did with The Method Gun) if you're a theatre geek; otherwise you may wonder sometimes what's going on - when the class launched into the "counting" exercise for the umpteenth time, for instance, my partner whispered to me, "What the HELL are these people doing???" Even he, however, began to get into the mumblecore groove, as Baker's poignant hidden drama made itself steadily clearer. Lives are, indeed, smashed up casually in Circle Mirror Transformation, and this is inevitably moving.

Still, it's worth pointing out, I think, that in the end this is elevated melodrama - indeed, Baker's script is at least as melodramatic as Bus Stop, it's just at infinite pains to disguise that fact. Not that there's anything wrong with that.  And if I like Inge, I should therefore like Baker too, right?

Well, maybe.  I was certainly touched by Circle Mirror Transformation, but doubts still gnawed at me about its author. She's certainly better than Sarah Ruhl, but she's also being "launched" in much the same way, and by some of the same people.  And Baker's smart, but she's hardly Chekhov, and sometimes I felt the reverent subtlety of this production was designed to fool me into thinking she is. And I found myself working hard to feel any sense of real discovery about the fictional New-Age Grover's Corners (dubbed "Shirley, VT," although it's no secret it's actually "Amherst, MA") in which her shy young slips of plays occur. I felt shocks of emotion whenever one of the sad arcs Baker's characters trace came clear; but then I quickly realized, "Oh, yeah - I already like, um, knew that, Annie. Yeah; no.  Yeah."

And there's a certain lack of self-awareness in the play's seeming confidence that the drama-school techniques it depends on "make you a better actor;" certainly as the theatre games grow more and more personal, it strikes us that Baker's crunchy class leader should know better than to play with the kind of emotional fire that's only appropriate to committed actors (don't try these tricks at home!).  In a way, the problem with the play is summed up unwittingly by the authorial factotum Baker places within it - the smart but withdrawn "Lauren" constantly, if self-consciously, questions the madness of the class's method ("Are we going to like do any real acting?" she finally asks).   It slowly dawns on us, though, that Lauren kind of serves as an inadvertent metaphor for the play she's in; like it, she draws attention to herself by struggling to disappear into the woodwork.  Yet  she comes around in the end; in a sweet, flash-forward coda (expertly limned by Marie Polizzano, in a performance that steals scene after scene from this polished ensemble) Lauren admits she now sees the light about the awesomeness of the class and how, like, everything changed but in the end everything turned out for the best, you know?  Hmmm. I'm not sure a great playwright would be so sure; in the end, Circle Mirror Transformation seems to validate rather than challenge its audience's quirky world view.  But I'll soon get two more chances to adjust that opinion.