![]() ![]() ![]() When it stops, and the lights are raised, we see rows of empty cinema seats staring blankly back at us.įor the next three hours, we follow snatches of conversation from Sam (Matthew Maher), Rose (Louisa Krause) and newcomer Avery (Jaygann Ayeh), three of the cinema’s employees, as they clean up dropped popcorn from between the aisles. The play begins in darkness, a point of light radiating out over the audience, the whirring of a projector the only sound. ![]() In Annie Baker’s The Flick, now on at the National Theatre, we watch people watching movies. In it, the stars kiss breathlessly, in true love.” A page or so later, now in a darkened cinema, Als says of the same man, “Watching him watch a movie, I noticed how his eyes would open and close slowly, like the folds in an accordion. He’s running the same old flick in his head again. #ANNIE BAKER THE FLICK MOVIE#A failure may be more powerful than her current success.Hilton Als’s White Girls begins with a man sitting “on the promontory in our village, deep in movie love. “The Flick” is as much about relationships as it is about the difficult transition into a not-so-rosy future - the last symbolized by the sale of the Flick and the switch from celluloid to digital, which horrifies Avery.īaker renders the tedium of petty jobs and the filling of hours with deadpan accuracy, and she doesn’t shy from the painful impact of betrayal.īut you also wish she’d get out of her comfort zone and test herself against greatness. Rose is a complication only one of them wants. The laconic Avery, on the other hand, is just taking a year off from college, where his father teaches semiotics. Sam has been at the Flick longer and is master of his very small domain - he’s in his mid-30s, and this is a real job for him. Large parts of the show focus on the latent rivalry between the two men. There are just three main characters: Avery, his fellow sweeper/concession hawker/ticket seller Sam (Matthew Maher) and the grouchy projectionist, Rose (Louisa Krause), who hides behind dyed green hair and Doc Martens boots. And at three hours, the show’s length is epic.īut this is no “Lawrence of Arabia.” The scenes are packed not with action but with Baker’s trademark willful pauses and stretches of more or less comfortable silence. David Zinn’s set reconstitutes the movie theater’s auditorium, complete with nine rows of red seats and a projection booth the audience sits where the screen would be. With “The Flick,” Baker is working on her largest canvas yet. Last year, she scored a critical hit with her deadpan adaptation of “Uncle Vanya,” staged - like most of her shows, including this new one - by hot director Sam Gold (“Picnic,” “Seminar”). Her breakout, 2009’s “Circle Mirror Transformation,” is now one of the most produced new plays in America. ![]() It’s good, sometimes very good, but it’s not even close to great.īaker, who casts a sympathetic eye on maladjusted, often emotionally crippled underachievers, has forged a thriving career. profound commentaries.”Īvery might as well be talking about this wispy play. “Those are all pretty good movies,” he says. Avery declares that there hasn’t been a great American movie since 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” - and ridicules Sam for suggesting “Avatar.” Sam counters with “Rushmore” and “Fargo.”īut Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), a hard-core cinephile weaned on the Criterion Collection, doesn’t budge. In Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” which takes place in the run-down movie theater of the same name, two employees start arguing as they sweep the aisles. ![]()
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