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.

Humpday With Howard: Vanya and Chekhov and Durang and Spike

Hello, all! For the next few weeks, the Rep's weekly newsletter will be featuring articles on the three plays we're producing this season in order to provide a little extra insight into the texts. I wrote this week's article and its focus was on our first show, Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and the play's Chekhovian roots. For those of you who don't receive our newsletter, I'm going to recap some of what I said in the newsletter, and then I'll go a little bit more in depth into playwright Christopher Durang's own background.

Durang likens his 2013 Tony award-winning play to Chekhov in a blender. It is not a parody, however, and no prior knowledge of the 19th-century Russian playwright is needed in order to enjoy this exceptional play. But it does make the story more fun!


Born in Taganrog, Russia on January 29, 1860, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a grocer's son who became one of Russia's greatest storytellers. His plays are considered comedies of the human condition, and they emphasize emotion and the exploration of character and existence in ways that his contemporaries had not done. Some of his greatest works feature characters in country estates mourning the lives they never led and living in excruciating anguish and boredom. This often makes his writing seem deeply tragic, but this was not Chekhov's intention. The playwright once explained that:

"All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life.

Enter Christopher Durang, a playwright born on January 2, 1949 in Montclair, New Jersey. This places him on planet Earth forty-five years after and 3,881 miles away from Chekhov's death (July 14, 1904 in Badenweiler, Germany). Durang holds a B.A. in English from Harvard College and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama. His writing style is darkly satirical and he uses "wit and absurdity" (The New York Times) to explore topics such as family and religion.

Durang's first professional production was the play The Idiots Karamazov, which he co-wrote with classmate Albert Innaurato. Prada-wearing Meryl Streep, a classmate of theirs at the time, starred in the play as a quirky 80 year-old at the Yale Repertory Theatre. His play, Titanic, premiered 1976 and was his first production to be transferred to off-Broadway. It starred yet another one of his famous classmates, the alien-hunting Sigourney Weaver. This was the beginning of a long line of collaborations with Weaver, leading up to her performance as Masha in Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

Left: Sigourney Weaver in Titanic.

Right: Meryl Streep in The Idiots Karamazov

Durang earned his first  nomination (Best Book of a Musical) for his 1978 musical A History Of The American Film. He earned his first Tony for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (which we'll be producing in July!). Vanya premiered at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, in September of 2012; was transferred to Lincoln Center Theater in October 2012; and was finally transferred to Broadway in March of 2013.

In Vanya, Durang pulls character traits, situations, and themes from Chekhov's four greatest plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, and creates a witty and contemporary play in dialogue with Chekhov's masterpieces. Be ready to see them on stage at the Nebraska Rep this summer!