#231112 - On Annie Baker's INFINITE LIFE (Atlantic Theatre Company, NYC - September 2023)
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for November 12, 2023
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my irregular newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
This installment of #TheatreClique brings my first (of what I expect to be midmonthly) EXPERIMENTS IN THEATRE COMMENTARY, wherein which I will assemble some thoughts on a production I’ve seen in the previous month or so. These midmonthly installments won’t be reviews necessarily, but will be part of my ongoing (indeed, lifelong) exploration about how best to capture my thoughts about the shows I see. So, in the previous edition of this newsletter, I invited #TheatreClique readers to choose a show for me to write about and nearly half of the forty-one respondents thought I should take on Atlantic Theatre Company’s recent production of Annie Baker’s latest play, Infinite Life, as directed by James MacDonald. So to whet your appetite, I thought I’d share this lovely video feature in which Annie Baker reflects on her practice as a playwright…
And be sure to scroll through to the end of this mssage for a quick round-up of some noteworthy current remote performances!
#FiveClickityThoughts about Annie Baker’s Infinite Life (Atlantic Theatre Company, 2023)…
And as I rummaged for a format for this first experiment in theatre commentary on #TheatreClique, I found myself reaching way back to my old blogging days over at StinkyLulu where I occasionally offered my “5 Stinky Thoughts” on this or that. So, in a manner of digital upcycling, here are my #5ClickityThoughts — or the thoughts that have kept clicking — since I experienced Infinite Life on September 30, 2023…
THE WORLDS OF ANNIE BAKER — What I most savor about Annie Baker's plays is the trust that they invest in the capacity of her actors (and her audiences) to listen, to observe, and to be uncertain... or what Vogue’s Liz Appel describes as the “experience of attunement.” I find this to be an especially welcome invitation in the times we live in, which tend to so prize certitude and to so delight in assessing who's decidedly right and who's emphatically wrong. Baker's plays, in contrast, quietly insist on the simple necessity of unknowability. Without much in the way of pyrotechnical stagecraft or expository plotting, Baker’s worlds simply ask that you to remain present — to listen and to observe as these characters bump up against each other in word and in action, because what they say and do matters, even (or perhaps especially) when it immediately sensible. In Infinite Life, Baker invites us to remain present with five women (and one surprise of a man) as they undertake their respective cycles of an unnamed and unexplained pain-therapy at a possibly sketchy clinic somewhere in northern California.
REMEMBERING GEORGIA ENGEL — Arguably, Infinite Life has two central characters. There’s Christina Kirk’s Sofi, a forty-something wanderer whose arrival and departure (along with her intermittent declarations of the passing of time) mark the play’s beginning and its end. Alongside her is Marylouise Burke’s Eileen, a ninety-something stalwart, who happens to be onstage to witness Sofi’s coming and her going. The resonance and looping rhythms of Eileen’s gentle loquaciousness, in tandem with her superficially prim sensibilities and her dedication to Christian Science, stirred to mind the distinctive voice and indelible presence of one of Baker’s previous collaborators, Georgia Engel (1948-2019). I might mention that the vivid precision of Georgia Engel’s performance in Baker’s 2015 play John has stayed in my mind and heart more than perhaps any other stage performance I’ve seen in the past decade. So it’s perhaps little surprise that I could so clearly hear the whisper of Engel’s voice in my mind’s ear as Burke delivered Eileen’s lines. This is not to diminish Burke’s performance in any way; hers is an entirely vivid performance and distinctively her own, with Eileen's physical fragility and moral guideposts activated in particular ways by Burke's delicately emphatic hesitations. (Don’t forget that, in addition to playing the Engel role in the 2018 National Theatre production of John, Marylouise Burke was also the OG Kimberly Akimbo in the stageplay that, nearly twenty years later, provided the basis for the Tony Award winning musical.) Rather, the cadence of Baker’s writing and the clarity of Burke’s performance held the memory of Georgia Engel very close for me and allowed me to hear Engel in the character in ways that have reverberated in my imagination ever since.
THOSE BRICKS — One aspect of Annie Baker's dramaturgy that I find consistently compelling is how much she embeds her characters in the physical and aural particularities of specific mundane spaces, whether it’s an overstuffed bed and breakfast, a dilapidated movie theatre, a Hollywood conference room, or the outer patio of a suburban health retreat… There is always something so particular about the way these environments compel the characters they contain toward unwelcome, unlikely, or unanticipated intimacies. But what I loved most about the Infinite Life set (by design collective dots) was the particular variety of decorative cinderblock used to map the outer edge of the patio space. As a child of the desert southwest (and the kid of a contractor), I immediately recognized this particular brick — marketed widely for both its decorative and allegedly “cooling” capacities — so vividly I could feel the touch of its curves. I also loved how (whether by light or paint I can’t say) the bricks took on the color of a faint earth tone, to suggest it might be somehow as natural as it was industrial. This kind of ambient detail — like the piles and piles of tchotckes in John, or that heap of LaCroix in The Antipodes — strikes me as a design hallmark of Baker’s plays, simultaneously anchoring the scene in realism while also launching it into the realm of abstraction.
WOMEN WILLING TO TRY ANYTHING TO HEAL — In a great group interview for TDF’s Gerard Raymond, Kristine Nielsen described Infinite Life’s ensemble as “women who [are] willing to try anything to heal” and, indeed, the play does gather these characters to ponder the mysterious uncertainty of physical pain — what is its cause, what is its cure, will there be an end to it — in ways that also inevitably stir an alertness to general questions of mortality. The play’s youngest characters are somewhere in the embodied in-between of middle age, while the other four are further into the various depths of whatever lay beyond. And as career flight attendant Ginnie, veteran stage actor Kristine Nielsen gives perhaps the most restrained and least confused characterization I've ever seen her deliver onstage and it’s a thrill to see her dexterity in this other register. Everyone is so dang sincere in their pain, while also vulnerable to its reality being questioned, so Ginnie’s direct delivery of quietly acerbic observations peppers the play with a deliciously prickly humor. Likewise, Ginnie's keen alertness to everyone’s reality not only establishes her as a knowing guide but also cues Ginnie’s particular style of interpersonal defensive driving. She is, after all, a veteran flight attendant so she knows to remain kindly alert to which seemingly nice passenger on this journey might suddenly become a danger to themselves or others. And seeing Nielsen share not only a stage but many a scene with the likes of Burke, Brenda Pressley, and Mia Katigbak was a wonder. At one point, indie theatre legend Katigbak delivers an elaborately intricate speech — Yvette’s “ailment aria” if you will — and the thrill of seeing Pressley and Nielsen listen to Katigbak’s Yvette is the kind of thing that, were it available on YouTube, I would likely watch every week or so.
That Final Breath. The moment in Infinite Life that most caught my breath — a thing that sometimes happens to me at the theatre, when I find myself holding my breath out of some irrational fear that by breathing I might disturb an onstage moment — arrived somewhere in the final sequence of the play. Kirk’s Sofi is trying to say goodbye to Burke’s Eileen when, somehow, Eileen casually shares that her husband sometimes helps relieve her pain by allowing resting her legs on his back. Sofi drops her backpack and asks how she might do that for Eileen, if not forever then just for now; in the following extended but all-too-brief moment of nearly wordless intimacy, the two women find relief by being together. This simple sequence is not only haunting in its humanness but also distills the quiet provocation of Annie Baker’s play: there is no cure for living but there are ways we might find comfort with each other — to be present for each other as we each confront the uncertainty of the unpredictable and sometimes inexplicable pain that charts our respective experiences of life. This moment might also be why I keep thinking that Infinite Life stages the threshold of middle age and whatever it is that lays beyond it. For life is not infinite, and that's kinda the problem… And yet that’s precisely what Annie Baker somehow so humanely dramatizes with Infinite Life.
#ThisWeekInRemoteTheatre:
Wherein I highlight notable current, upcoming and often time-limited opportunities to engage remote theatre and performance…
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light • premiering on Sunday, 11/12 ~ available for 48hr on-demand rental thereafter ~ $3.99 rental (contact me if a discount code would be welcome) • written and performed by Joy Harjo with music performed by Larry Mitchell and directed by Madeline Sayet • talkback with Harjo, Sayet, and Paula Vogel moderated by Mary Kathryn Nagle, also available • a production of Bard at the Gate and McCarter Theatre, presented via BroadwayOnDemand.
Banned Together: The Anti-Censorship Cabaret • a two-part podcast streaming at no cost through November 30, 2023 only • directed by Raul Esparza, and featuring performances by Danny Burstein, Audra McDonald, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Brandon Uranowitz, Judy Kuhn, Javier Muñoz and many many more • a production of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund.
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding ~ Livestreamed from Broadway • livestreaming the final eight performances the acclaimed Broadway production of Jocelyn Bioh’s play ~ Tuesday thru Sunday, 11/14-19 only ~ $69 per livestream link • presented by the League of Live Stream Theater in partnership with the Manhattan Theatre Club.
Until next time, dear #TheatreClique, please share this newsletter with those friends, colleagues and students who might appreciate the opportunity to encounter the many voices gathered in each week’s edition. Errors and oversights published in the newsletter will be corrected in the archival versions. And, in the meantime, keep clicking those links — good writing needs good readers and our theatre clicks count!