Fuck Yeah Annie Baker

Greta Gerwig interviews Annie Baker

“Annie Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright with whom Gold has collaborated for nearly a decade, told me about an argument they had when they were making “The Aliens,” a play about three stunted young men, which takes place on the back patio of a coffee shop in Vermont. Gold and the set designer Andrew Lieberman felt that the set should be only four feet deep — “which is nothing, basically.” The idea of such a shallow stage worried Baker. They eventually compromised and ended up with a set that was six feet deep. “I just remember it changed in this incredible way,” Baker said. “It’s just these guys up against a blue wall for the entire play.” The actors could hardly gesticulate, much less move across the stage for dramatic effect. The picture the audience saw was so still, it was almost like a photograph.”

The original run sold out fast so they added an extension. 

The Flick is nominated for best new play at the Oliviers

A new play by Annie Baker, The Antipodes, will play Signature Theater in April 2017. Interesting that Sam Gold will not be directing. 

“I’ve seen people destroy their plays, their beautiful and mysterious plays, because they’re worried the audience isn’t going to get something, so then they make it really explicit and obnoxious. I really respect my audiences and I don’t feel like they need to have things explained to them. It might not be their taste and they might walk out. It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s not because I’m stupid. It’s not because the play’s stupid and it’s not because the play’s super smart.”

For those in London, don’t miss out on this discussion with Annie Baker and Sam Gold on April 15th at the National Theatre.  

The American playwright Annie Baker won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her story of three young people working in one of the last running independent movie theaters in Massachusetts. The popcorn-scented dialogues of »The Flick« will be read aloud and presented for the first time to a german audience, in a staged reading with members of the Ensemble.

I think it’ll be my Cheers. I haven’t felt this way about a work of fiction in a long time; that “suspension of disbelief” is an irrelevant term when we so clearly live among our favorite stories in a Brecht Evens painting of vitreous, overlapping worlds. The Flick restored my faith, reminding me that the closest thing I have to religion or the sense that someone, somewhere is watching over me is the assurance that everything I could possibly feel has been articulated by someone who I guess is just a mouthpiece for a screenwriter.

“ So what character has felt closest to you? The character of Genevieve in John — the writing of her was very much about me, really, two years ago, trying very desperately to figure some stuff out. And so I have a kind of fondness — she’s like a 90-year-old blind woman, but she’s a metaphor, certain characters are metaphors for moments in my psychological development. I don’t want to get overly personal, but I do feel like every character in every play I write is in the middle of a psychological struggle that I’m in the middle of when I’m writing the play.”

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards ($7,500 and $2,500): Three awards which honor a Master American Dramatist, American Playwright in Mid-Career, and Emerging American Playwright.

Also she’s not the first person I know who had that job.

In a private but widely shared post, Baker wrote, “I have always felt that the designers are the co-authors of my shows, and just as important as the playwright and director and actors. Getting to work with brilliant designers has been the great unexpected joy of my career, and these people already don’t get enough credit in a culture that undervalues composition and color and light and material and SPACE, for Pete’s sake, the very things that make our medium magical.”

Annie Baker

Marc Maron on Annie Baker’s comedy

Today’s the day. Annie Baker on WTF.  Where she admits she’s looking for a production of Guys & Dolls that will have her. Get casting America. 

Reminder all you Annie Baker fans that THIS is happening!