Humpday With Howard: Playwright Annie Baker

Hello! This week, I'll be delving into the biographical background of Annie Baker, the playwright of our second show, Circle Mirror Transformation.

The New Yorker relates an excellent anecdote about Annie Baker's career as a playwright, and it deals with one of those moments that every theatre-maker has, so I'm going to share it with you. When she was twenty-four, Baker's physician asked her what her job was. She replied with "I write plays, but you can’t be a playwright, so I have a day job, and maybe I’ll end up teaching or something." The doctor explained that he had another patient who was a prominent playwright. Baker responded by saying "Yeah, but you can’t make a living as a playwright. You can’t, like, be a playwright." Her doctor gave her a funny look.

Flash-forward nine years to 2014, and Baker finds herself at Columbia University picking up the Pulitzer Prize she won for her play, The Flick. After that encounter with her physician, she realized that it was possible to make a living as a playwright, and she has been doing it successfully ever since.

Annie Baker receives the 2014 Pulitzer Prize Drama
from Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University.

Baker was born in April, 1981, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has her undergraduate degree (in dramatic-writing) from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating and before working full-time as a playwright, she held a slew of miscellaneous positions including assistant residence-hall director for the School of American Ballet, contestant wrangler for The Bachelor, and writer for the television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - first writing throws (pre-commercial sendoffs), and later as one of the show’s researchers.

Her 2009 play, Circle Mirror Transformation, won countless awards and, during the 2010-2011 theatre season, was the second most produced play in the United States. Her writing style has been likened to the naturalist and realist styles of Ibsen and Chekhov, but it inhabits an entirely different category from those late nineteenth-century playwrights. Her plays are immensely realistic and down to earth, yet also contain moments of suspended animation and transcendence where action is and characters are transfixed. The awkward pauses and strange silences that often play a role in day-to-day conversation find a place in her plays, and as The New Yorker so elegantly explains, "Her goal is to explore what’s left unsaid along the edges of conversation: it’s the principle of looking at familiar stars so that the galaxies that can’t be seen head on appear out of the corner of your eye." What you see and hear in her plays are snippets of conversation you would overhear on the subway, in a coffee shop, on line at the supermarket. And then you watch someone hula hooping for a minute. The juxtaposition of these two elements-of  reality and transcendence-characterize Baker's unique, touching, and entertaining style.

On another note, when asked who her heroes are, Baker replied "Chekhov. Chekhov. Chekhov. Chekhov." It seems Durang isn't the only playwright we're producing this season who's a fan of Anton's.

Be sure to check out our production of Circle Mirror Transformation, which opens July 17th and runs in repertory with Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike and Unnecessary Farce until August 10th.