For a certain segment of the American population – or, to be more specific, for that certain segment that is lucky enough to be familiar with the work of the playwright Annie Baker – she can do no wrong. Still young at 42, if not “emerging” now that she has a Pulitzer, MacArthur and Obie under her belt, Baker has been turning out disquietingly moving ensemble pieces populated by characters who live in ordinary pockets of New England and speak in dialogue that feels wholly undevised and quietly revelatory. The denizens of the Annie Baker milieu lurk comfortably enough in the margins, overgrown latchkey kids whose copious psychic scar tissue can be trusted to slowly reveal itself over the course of her productions. An impatient few might leave at intermission, but Baker is a masterful portrait artist in the tradition of the short story writer Lorrie Moore or the painter Alice Neel. She has a knack for seeing people’s weird innards and transmuting them into something transcendent.
Baker’s play The Flick concerned a handful of underachieving movie theater employees and searchers in a small town. Her Circle, Mirror, Transformation was an energetic knockout that focused on a band of actors rehearsing for a community center theater production. There were shades of Christopher Guest, but the meticulously orchestrated awkward rhythms and blurted-out revelations were indisputably from the mind of Annie Baker. Her latest play, Infinite Life, originally intended to premiere in 2021 but held because of pandemic, has finally opened at the Atlantic Theater Company, in a co-production with the National Theatre of London.
