\u201cThe Flick,\u201d a play by Annie Baker, had its premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2013. Its three hour and 15 minute runtime included long stretches in which the characters \u2014 three underpaid workers in a tired, single-screen movie theater \u2014 moved from row to row, sweeping the floor. The drama found a kind of poetry in everyday speech: the hesitations, filler words, abandoned sentences and otherwise awkward attempts to connect. A lot of the time, Baker\u2019s characters didn\u2019t speak at all.<\/p>\n
The show apparently tested the patience of some. \u201cWe\u2019d see a lot of empty seats after intermission,\u201d the actor Matt Maher said. A widely shared email from the Playwrights Horizons artistic director at the time, Tim Sanford, made reference to emphatic expressions of displeasure from subscribers and much hand-wringing behind the scenes. He wrote that \u201cwe had lengthy discussions about what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a recent conversation in a cafe in Chelsea, Baker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for \u201cThe Flick,\u201d said she was untroubled by the walkouts. \u201cI don\u2019t think of myself as a provocateur, but I also don\u2019t think of myself as an entertainer,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople walk out of my plays all the time. I don\u2019t get freaked out by it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker\u2019s best known works are partly symphonies of silence in which what might be mistaken for dead air is anything but. Her scripts call for comfortable pauses, uncomfortable pauses, weird pauses, confused pauses, horrible pauses and, in \u201cThe Flick,\u201d a happy pause that morphs into an awkward pause. When we\u2019re not watching unspeaking characters sweep up popcorn, we might be watching them mutely smoke, drink tea or hula-hoop. Her script for \u201cThe Aliens\u201d begins with a taxonomy: \u201cAt least a third \u2014 if not half \u2014 of this play is silence. Pauses should be at least three seconds long. Silences should last from five to 10 seconds. Long pauses and long silences should, of course, be even longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s a high priestess of silence and stillness,\u201d the director James Macdonald said.<\/p>\n
An Atlantic Theater Company and National Theater co-production of Baker\u2019s latest play, \u201cInfinite Life,\u201d directed by Macdonald, is in previews now and will open on Sept. 12. It is a play about the experience of pain \u2014 our own and each other\u2019s. \u201cInfinite Life\u201d also goes further than Baker\u2019s other plays in its exploration of stillness, Macdonald said. \u201cNothing appears to be going on for great stretches.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, in October, \u201cJanet Planet,\u201d Baker\u2019s debut feature film as writer-director, will screen at the New York Film Festival, before a wider release next year. Baker said the film used a natural soundscape but no musical score, and replicated the way time felt to her 11-year-old self.<\/p>\n
While she has said that some of her \u201cfavorite moments in all of my plays are usually moments when people aren\u2019t talking,\u201d Baker also insisted that she was not obsessed with quietude.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m interested in silence, I\u2019m interested in noise, I\u2019m interested in speed, I\u2019m interested in stillness. To me it does feel like writing a play feels a bit like composing a piece of music. There are the quarter notes and there are the rests.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the air and space that pervades her work, she added, \u201cIt was never a conscious decision or aesthetic cultivation on my part. It\u2019s just me trying to follow my own pleasure and my own taste and my own ear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ten years after the \u201cFlick\u201d fracas and ahead of the opening of \u201cInfinite Life\u201d \u2014 with productions of Baker\u2019s earlier plays still finding audiences around the world \u2014 it\u2019s worth contemplating what\u2019s going on between the lines in her low and slow theater. For starters, why do some audience members find silence so off-putting?<\/p>\n
Amy Muse, a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., and the author of \u201cThe Drama and Theatre of Annie Baker,\u201d offered a theory rooted in the metaphysical. \u201cWe fear silence because it seems to indicate an absence of meaning,\u201d she wrote in an email, adding, \u201cIndefinite stretches of time, like space, fill people with dread.\u201d<\/p>\n
More likely, she continued, \u201cthey\u2019re fearing they\u2019ve wasted time and money to be bored watching ordinary people doing ordinary things, instead of listening to the smart dialogue they expect from a play.\u201d<\/p>\n
For admirers, though, Baker extends \u201ca kind of sacred invitation to be present,\u201d Muse said. It urges a leaning in, sensitizing us <\/strong>to the minutest moments, gestures and expressions, and the ever-present ache of her characters. What\u2019s <\/em>said attains extra significance surrounded by what\u2019s unsaid, and details accumulate like snowfall, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker.<\/p>\n It was in the quietest moments in \u201cThe Flick,\u201d Maher said, when he could feel the audience most tuned in. \u201cLike I could just shrug or raise an eyebrow and could feel the audience clocking it.\u201d<\/p>\n Baker\u2019s preference for understatement stands out, not just when compared to most mainstream entertainment, but also much of daily life. \u201cTo me it\u2019s very countercultural,\u201d said the \u201cInfinite Life\u201d actor Christina Kirk. \u201cIn the sense that our dominant values are bigger, faster, louder, more. I think that generally Annie is interested in exploring smaller, slower, quieter, less.\u201d<\/p>\n In a way, the audience members who gave up on \u201cThe Flick\u201d were fooled by a fundamental deception on Baker\u2019s part. Not much seems to be happening, and yet everything is happening. Darker truths emerge, awful revelations occur, human cruelty, despair, shame and weakness come into shocking focus. As Chekhov \u2014 a key influence for Baker \u2014 wrote: \u201cPeople are sitting at a table having dinner, that\u2019s all, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being torn apart.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a specificity and precision required of actors and directors. \u201cThe biggest lesson as a director was that those pauses and silences need to be active \u2014 as taut and as fully inhabited as the most exhilarating monologue,\u201d said Mitchell Cushman, who has directed productions of \u201cThe Flick\u201d and \u201cThe Aliens\u201d in Toronto. \u201cI distinctly remember the work we did on \u2018The Flick\u2019, after first preview, to pick up the pacing in the long silences.\u201d The silences didn\u2019t get any shorter. Rather, \u201cthey got much more charged<\/em>. It made all the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n Macdonald provided the cast of \u201cInfinite Life\u201d with a mantra: \u201cStill bodies, alert minds.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThose moments of stillness can\u2019t be empty,\u201d the actor Mia Katigbak explained. \u201cThere has to be something happening. Even when it\u2019s at rest, it\u2019s active.\u201d<\/p>\n Not every production has adhered religiously to Baker\u2019s stipulations. One London staging of \u201cThe Aliens\u201d shaved its runtime from at least 100 minutes, with an intermission, to 75 minutes without. Perhaps even more egregious, Baker witnessed regional theater performances in which the pauses were halfhearted. \u201cI could tell they were counting to five during them,\u201d she said. \u201cNow I just don\u2019t see productions in my plays that I wasn\u2019t involved with.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other hand, for productions of \u201cThe Aliens\u201d and \u201cCircle Mirror Transformation\u201d in Moscow, the director Adrian Giurgea felt it more in keeping with Stanislavskian psychological realism to extend the stretches of non-dialogue to \u201cunbearable\u201d lengths \u2014 up to 11 minutes long, he said.<\/p>\n Some silences can feel more vibrantly alive than others, or suggest a porosity between the real world and the world of the play. Maizy Scarpa directed an outdoor production of \u201cThe Aliens\u201d in the Berkshires, in a tunnel under active railroad tracks. \u201cI had to remind the actors to acknowledge ambient sounds, not fight with them,\u201d she said. \u201cIf someone shouts in the distance, look up! If there is a car that honks during your monologue, react!\u201d Ultimately the audience \u201ccould absorb the whole experience.\u201d<\/p>\n In a production of \u201cThe Aliens\u201d at the Old Fitz, an 80-seat theater in a Sydney pub that allows patrons to bring in their drinks, the silences were relatively raucous, particularly on trivia night. \u201cThe audience really felt like they were in the yard, hanging out with the characters, having a beer,\u201d the director Craig Baldwin said. \u201cIf you think about an audience as always being a silent participant in a piece of theater, it was particularly magic when the characters joined them in that silence. Everyone in the backyard was silent together.\u201d<\/p>\n Which suggests another way to think about these moments: as audience participation. It\u2019s an opportunity \u2014 whether we accept it or reject it \u2014 to fill those silences with ourselves.<\/p>\n \u201cIdeas are often the most powerful when they\u2019re hidden,\u201d Baker said. \u201cIt\u2019s so delicious to feel a character having a thought and not know, not have access to what that thought is. I like to allow an audience member to make the discovery themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n