I'm interested in representing things on
stage that haven't been represented before, whether they're thoughts or
gestures or objects or people. My name is Annie Baker and I'm a playwright.
With every play I write I'm trying to reassess what it means to watch a play
and what we think of as theatrically ordinary or normal, and so I think one of
the ways I do that is by picking as the ostensible topic of my play something
that sounds like the last thing you'd want to see a play about. In "The Flick"
it's ushers cleaning a movie theater, in my play "The Aliens" it's amatuer
songwriters getting high next to a dumpster, in my more recent play "John"
it's a couple spending a lot of time talking to the chatty proprietor of a
bed and breakfast. Everybody speaks in their own kind of poetry and I'm always
interested in listening with every person I meet to the particular
poetry of how they speak. Dialogue is sort of the last thing that I think about
because I think it's the thing that comes easiest to me and it's sort of
like the last thing I do. I've thought about the play so much and the ideas in
it and the characters that when I sit down to write dialogue that's the part
that comes easily and thoughtlessly. I don't usually notice there's a lot of
silence in my work until the play is performed. I do have a slow theatrical
metabolism I guess, because for me the theater is a place for contemplation and
so while the text is an integral part of the theatre for me
so is space and light and movement and shape, and so sometimes when the text
drops out you can take the time to notice those other elements. Because
theater is such a collaborative medium, I also feel grateful to all the people who
have made my plays with me, who I feel like have led me to the place where I
got this grant. Just the directors I've worked with, the designers I've worked
with, the amazing actors I've worked with, I feel like I got here carried by dozens
of very close and talented collaborators.
