ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS: JUST SAYING ‘The anti-theatrical theatre of Annie Baker. BY NATHAN HELLER, Forty-second Street rehearsal stu~ dio. Card tables line one wall; the playwright and the director are seated at one of them, talking quietly. An actor enters. “THE AcToR:I saw*Who's Afraid of Vinginia Woolf?” last night, everybody. The director glances up and laugh. ‘Tue AcTOR: Iewas— ‘THE PLAYWRIGHT: Oh, yeah. ‘THE ACTOR: Itwas really good. ‘THe PLAYWRIGHT: Don't you think ‘Matt should play George? ‘Tue Director: Yeah, you were "THe AcTOR: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God . .. It didn’t make me feel—it didn’t make me feel wwonderf relationships. THE PLAYWRIGHT: It doesn't make anyone feel wonderfil THE ACTOR: No, thank you for say- ing that. Twas litle “He laughs self-conscious. Bat it was really good. THE DinecrOR: Its a great play. THE ACTOR: Its a great play THE DikécTor: Its like— Moment to moment, you're so— Its so enjoyable to watch people say language like that Tie ATOR: Yeah, AndII thought it was, like— I think it’s like all classics where you realize, like, Oh, wow, this was ‘new when it was done. Like, the whole about my Baker combines the texture of ordinary life with surreal moments of transcendence 30 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 25, 2085 idea of, like: Everybody, sit down, we're going to doagame! And it's like: A game? Tchappens now all the time. I fee like its such a cliché. Like, le’ play this game! THE PLAYWRIGHT: Its like two in the moming, and we haven't slept— ‘THE ACTOR: Yeah. But were going to see this through, ‘THE PLAYWRIGHT: Yeah. ‘Tre AcTor: I was like, Why— Tre Director: It’s a whole—it’s a ‘gente that he created. TH Actor: Yeah, he created a weird dramatic— ‘THE DiRECTOR:Its like the Marital- Game Drunken Drama. ‘THE ACTOR: Yeah. Like, very good. Ii’s good. And they are good. God. ‘THE PLAYWRIGHT: Isn't Amy Mor- ton amazing? ho goes to the theatre these days, and why? For decades now, se ous stage work has been regarded ten~ derly as the spotted owl of American art—briliant and nimble, breathtaking in flight, but unlikely to be found beyond a few scarce habitats. Every time we watch a trite blockbuster, fll asleep in front of bad TV, or click through to a YouTube video of yawning pandas, it’s said, our ca- pacity for theatrical attention dies alittle ‘more. And yet, forall that, the theatre has proved strangely resilient, selling (even selling out) cascades of seats and claiming more college degrees than film and ¢ cal psychology combined. Something is going right. Perhaps the question isn’t why some give up on the form but why others keep falling in love. What can the theatre do that books and sereens can't? Annie Baker, a thirty-one-year-old playwright, is one answer to this question; she wants life onstage to be so vivid, nat- tural, and emotionally precise that it bleeds Into the audience's visceral experience of time and space. Drawing on the imme: acy of overheard conversation, she ha oneered a style of theatre made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention. "Circle Mirtor Transformation,” Baker's 2009 ensemble piece set at a community-center drama class, won three Obie awards, and was, in the 2010-11 season, the second most produced play in America. (The first most produced w. “The 39 Steps”) Her work has been per- formed abroad in a dozen countries; last PHOTOGRAPHBY ZACH GROSS‘year, four of her plays appeared as a book. Alot of rites, trying to pinpoint Bak- ers appealing blend of naturalness and precision, have called her a “realist” or a “naturalist.” She thinks neither label works. “ fel like we lack any terms for playwriting that come after 1890,” she says. “Realism, naturalism—are you talk- ing about, like, Ibsen?” To watch Baker's wworkistobe drawn intoaworld that feels asunplotted as real life (characters chat at cross-purposes; costumes and stage set~ tings are uncannily real) but that breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence (a hula hoop being spun for almost a min- ute, in one case). Onstage, Baker exer~ cises meticulous control in order to make action seem as unrefined as possible. Her characters exchange the kind of knobby dialogue you overhearin diners on Friday ‘momings: mothers fretting volubly about their young-adult kids’ problems, twen- tysomething friends chasing back bleary silence with defensive nonchalance. (“Tm really hung over so you guys will have to excuse me if Tm like alittle low-energy.”) 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 comer of your eye. ‘The work requires tight codrdination— not just of scripted words and silences but of movements, gestures, costumes, music, and the whole immersive apparatus of the modem stage. From “Circle Mirror ‘Transformation’ Scriuutz: Were you abused as a child? Manrvel'm sorry? ScHULTZ: Were you abused as a child? ‘Maxrv,.. No. Um, No. don't think so, ScHuLIZ? Okay. "Cause symptom among, abuse survivors. Marty: Huh. Pause. ScHULtZ: Night terrors. MaxtvsIuh. Yeah, Maybe. don't know what ie was. ‘ScHULIZ: It was night terrors. ‘Makny: Yeah. Sciutiz: Becky went on medications for ... she went on some kind of epilepsy medication. It helped her. Mant: Huh, Pause. MARY: And it a real— ScHULT2: [tsa real thing I's. real thing. Look it up onli ‘When Baker adapted "Uncle Vanya’ fora SoFlo Rep production, last summer, she worked to keep the language from seeming high-flown. “I have a list of all the things Chekhov does with dialogue that seem initially counterintuitive to “writers who have learned alt about plot and action,” she explains. “People aren't Tistening to each other. People will be statement-and-response for twenty sec- nds, and then someone else will be like, ‘Ob, look what's in the newspaper!” In the graduate-playwriting program at N.Y.U,, where she began teaching last fall, she points to Chekhov asa model of social authenticity. “She uses the word ‘organic al the time,” Allie Solomon, one of her graduate students, sas. Baker's newest play, “The Flick,” opens in early March, at Playwrights Ho- tizons, the Off Broadway theatre where “Circle Mirror Transformation” pre- migred. Like all Baker's recent work, “The Flic’ isthe result ofa close, fruitful collaboration. Several years ago, Baker met the director Sam Gold, and soon came to feel that she had found her cre- ative partner; since their first collabora- tion, they've worked together on the premiére of every Baker play. “Every body’ like, ‘Oh! Itsan Annie Baker-Sam Gold!” Louisa Krause, who appears as Rose, the ply’ green-haired female lead, says, “Automatically, ifs got the aura” Since Baker started working with Gold, her writing has grown leaner. She's come to see her scripts as “blueprints,” in~ tended to be realized fully in rehearsal. “A. Jot of writers make their plays director- proof—extremely muscular, 0 that, no matter what the production is it will be the play—but Annie makes her plays re- ally fagile,” Gold said recently. “But the reason why they're not more muscular is that, if they were, they wouldn't be on a tightrope. They wouldn't be so fragile and sospecificand so perfec. She has toleave alot of room in them, because she wants them to be razor-sharp. Its the defining thing about the theatre—it’s not on the page.” Nhe Flick” is an elaborate tribute to a fading art. As a teen-ager, Baker ‘was an avid cinephile: at thirteen, she begged her mother to let her see “Pulp Fiction”; when she was in high school, the walls of her bedroom were covered with posters of films by Truffaut. Over time, though, she became disenchanted with what she found in the movie the- atres—it seemed pale and controlled be- side the live immediacy of the stage. Today, Baker doesn't watch much TV. (She originally started taking some screen assignments mostly for the Writers Guild health insurance; her one idea for a cable series, about life on a commune in Boli- nas, California, became a pilot script that never got made.) About five years ago, Baker went to the IFC Center to watch one of her favorite films, Bergman's “Fanny and Alexander,” and noticed something weird going on with the screen. “I was like, There's something ‘wrong, there's something wrong! Im not enjoying this; something's wrong! She realized that the movie, originally shot on 35-mm, film, was being projected digi- tally. “To me, it changed the whole phe- nomenal experience,” she says. “The Flick’ draws from the disorientation she felt that day, butt plays formally wth the idea of the theatre audience, too. Bakers plays tend to be set in odd places: a com- ‘munity center in “Circle Mirror Trans- formation,” the house a divorced mother shares with her midlife lover in “Noc- turama” (written in 2006), a trash area behind a coffee shop in “The Aliens” (2010). The Flick’ takes place in a small movie theatre in Worcester County, “Massachusetts, bt the vantage is the op- posite of the moviegoer. Here, the audi- ence sits where the movie sereen would hang; rows of cinema seats climb the stage, facing outward. ‘One Saturday moming, Baker, Gold, theiractors, and the plays main crew met for a rehearsal, on an upper floor of the Playwrights Horizons building. “The Flick’ has three main characters: Rose, ‘who's a projectionist; Sam, a thiry-five- year-old usher (played by Matthew Maher); and Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), a young, fastidious cinephile who is Sam's new protégé with the mop and the broom. Most scenes in the play take place in the witching hour between screenings, as Sam and Avery pass through the empty theatre with their dustpans, gabbing about movies and life. ‘The play, Baker and Gold quickly re- alized, was a nightmare to stage. An usher ‘who hasbeen snaking down Row 7, stage right, cannot suddenly cross the stage to deliver a line. Blocking became an elabo- rate chess game. Maer, Row 4, Seat 3, seucep, bend down to pick up wrapper, say the line, turn; Moten, pause in the aisle to catch the line, answer, begin sweeping Row 5. Maber, adwance two paces; Moten, speak without tuning. The play formalizes the “THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 25,20)invisible precision that’s become a hall- mark of Baker and Gold’ style. “Tm having a hard time, uh, ending the pause,” Moten said during one of sev- eral stops in the run-through. He and “Maher were working on a moment, in the second scene, when Sam, a Massachusetts homeboy, joshes the aspirational Avery about his “shit phobia’; there’s an awk- ward silence as Sam’s mind runs dry of further wittciss. “Itssometimes a gray area between an awkward moment between actors and an awkward moment between characters,” ‘Maher agreed. Gold nodded and told the actors not to worry; this was the feeling they were supposed to have. He is thirty-four, with patient deadpan, a weeklong beard, and tortoiseshell glasses. Much of his work, in rehearsal isto act as an ambassador from the gnarls of Baker's creative imagination, translating her cryptic silences and fussy requests into terms the actors can work with. (A characteristic stage direction in “The Flick’: “Maybe she incorporates & couple moves from bhangra and/or hip hop and/or West Atican dance classes in her past.”)“You have to learn to embrace thatbad feeling,” Gold said. “Te ahvays can sustain longer than you think, because you ride a second wave, often, in these mo- ments—ifit’s just long enough, its a fine ‘moment, but if you ride that second wave of awkwardness it gets good again.” “Go for another lap,” Maher sid “Yeah,” Gold said. “You want to go for another lap of awlawardness.” Baker, sitting beside Gold, furrowed her brow. “Wait, did you say ‘lap’ or “laugh?” she asked. She was wearing an open plaid shir, sleeves rolled, over a ca~ sual dress, and fun, sensible shoes. (A couple of years ago, she got into wearing sandals over socks, but the phase passed.) She has thick bangs and wavy blond hair that is usually damp from the shower until early afternoon. Her manner is friendly and reflexively casual. Maher asked, “You thought I said augh?” “Yeah.” “That's why you were like, Actors! Whores!” ‘The moment diffused into chuckles. But Baker's concern had been real. ‘Though her plays are funny, she gets alarmed when her work brings in giant, roaring laughs. In that case, she thinks, S52 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 25, 2085 you're laughing mostly because the peo- ple around you are laughing; you are los- ing touch with your personal experience cof what is happening onstage. The im- mersiveness of the experience starts breaking down as a result—and what's the point of seeing a show like that? en Baker was seventeen, she WV sated sureeptiioulytape-re cording people's conversations and tran- scribing them, trying to understand how people really spoke. “I was like, Holy shit!” she says. Reading the conversations on paper, she could see not just how peo~ ple spoke their minds but how they ailed to—al the filles, the obliqueness, the false starts. Today, she gives her N.Y.U. play- ‘writing students similar assignment, not using a recorder but transcribing what they hear directly by hand. “I can hear my students’ voices through just the way they listen,” she says. "T always tll them, Ifyou lose track of your voice as a writer, go back, eavesdrop, write down everything ‘you hear, and that’s it. That’s you listen= ing to the world.” ‘In Baker's case, the result ends to be both familiar and strange. Her plays contain intensely realistic elements— the studiously plausible scenery, the lack of obviously purposive action—but they don't always add up to a realistic effect. “They/re very strange plays,” says Adam Greenfield, the director of new-play de~ velopment at Playwrights Horizons, who first brought Baker's work to the company. “What she's doing is not just trying to imitate life really well. People Poke PP ery don't stop and watch somebody spin a hhula hoop in total silence for forty-five seconds.” The consequence is a kind of “zooming in,” he says, a reverent focus on the small, telling details of everyday life. “She's saying, "No, stop: look at this, ‘and look at this, and look at this, and lok at this.” Gold describes her work as being rooted in avant-garde formalism but “with an incredibly human and deeply psychological outlook.” Before Baker writes play, she spends about nine months reading, usually without a particular method or design. She reads history, fiction, and theory. ‘Many of her models, she insists, aren't dramatic—they include, instead, visual artists like Francis Bacon and Robert Irwin. “Inwin would never call himself theatre artist,” she says, “but I say that ‘what he was doing from the seventies on, which was making people walkinto a room and look at it differently, is a kind of theatre.” Baker fell in love with Nabokov when she was in her twenties. She liked “Pale Fire,” but she found herself haunted by “Pain,” Nabokov’ satire about the hap- less Russian émigré professor Timofey Phin, lost in the wash ofa foreign culture. Near the end of the book, after “house~ heating” dinner party he throws for him self—on the verge, unbeknownst to him, of getting fired—he begins doing the dishes, taking special care with an aqua- marine glass bowl, a gift from his ex- ‘wifes artist son, that is his talisman of se- curity and suc Iscsonant ln gas mie sound fll of muted mellowness a5 seed down t0 Soak. He rinsed the amber goles and the si Serva hapa owed en groped un the bub Jeane under the mel dio bor foc oby poo of epoen ares Snd retrieved ntfcrache, Fastious Prin fied ty and was wiping i when the leggy thing somehow dipped at of the owe fel i Ticainan oma ok eam cut witht intid-t, but this ony led to peo- pelicigo the ensure conceding foum of the tk mec an rng sk oboe as followed upon the plunge. nin hurled the towel into a corner and, raring awey, ood fora crescent erring at the blécknes Beyond the threshold of the Tie looked very ol with all open an afm of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes. ‘Then, witha moan of anguished anticipation, he wenrbacko hesakand, bracing himell, clipped his hand deep into the foam fapget of iss sung him. Cen he removed a be en goblet. The beautiful bow was intact Often, when Baker sits down to write, she says, this scene is at the forefront of her mind. aker says she has only two memories of her parents being in a room together, and has trouble, today, trying to envision what kind of relationship theirs might have been, When she was bor, in Apri, 1981, the family lived in Cambridge, Massachu- setts but she grew up mostly in the college town of Amherst, where her father hadbeen an administrator for the Five Colleges consortium and her mother worked toward a doctorate in counselling psychology. (Linda Bakeris now a psychotherapist and professor at Keene State College, in New Hampshire.) Baker’ fither, Conn Nugent, ‘was a gregarious Irish Catholic with a briskly pragmatic air; her mother came from a lefty New York Jewish family (*Baker” was originally Beckerman) and hasa more circumspect nature. Theyd met at a commune, in the nineteen-seventies, and shared an orientation toward progres- sive activism. If Baker had been a boy, she says, her parents would have called her ‘Timothy Nugent. When Baker was six, half a year after the family moved to Amherst, her par- ents sat her and her older brother down to make an announcement. The young Annie headed them off. “Tl bet you're getting divorced!” she blurted out. “She paid a lot of attention to what was going on around her, and to how people were interacting with herand with one another—she was very tuned in to all of that” her mother says. Custody was split; Bakers father moved out and, a year later, took a job in New York, where he eventually raised a second family. Baker continued to live in Massachusetts, with her mother, every year, they would raise caterpillars into butterflies. “Te was intense to go back and forth, especially because my parents have very different personalities that required very differen things from me and my brother,” Baker says. “T would train myself to be a ‘very sassy, super-assertive person around my dad. Then Id get back to my moth ex's house, and she'd be like, “Why did you just speak to me that way?” “She thrives on confrontation,” says Baker's older brother, Benjamin Nugent, who isalso awrite. (Hislatest books the novel “Good Kids”) ‘I think our family was hard for her sometimes, because it ‘wasn{all that confrontational my mother and I were quietly depressed in the years after the divorce, and I think her impulse ‘was to try to hammer at our shells, to get usto be depressed more openly still see that shell-hammerer in Annie's work.” ‘When Baker went away to college, at Tisch, N.Y.U’'s arts school, she enrolled as adramatic-writing student. Today, she can't recall why. “I was interested in writ~ ings” she says. “And I was “interested in film an rerested’ in theatre. But I “Tsvant to start seeing richer people.” ‘wasttlike, Tim going to bea playwright!” She worked a string of odd jobs after graduation. She was an assistant resi- dence-hall director for student ballerinas at the School of American Ballet. (It gave her free apartment at Lincoln Center.) She was a contestant wrangler for “The Bachelor. (“Awful”) She took uncredited writing assignments for the extra cash. Her big break was with the quiz show “Who Wants to Be Millionaire?” which hired herto write “throws,” pre-commer- cial sendofis: “Don't touch that dial— ‘welll be back with John in the hot seat.” Later, she became one of the show's re~ searchers. But her sense of vocation re~ mained vague. Ata doctor’ appointment ‘when she was twenty-four, her physician, filing out her charts, asked what her job was, “Twas like, We-e-el, you know I ‘write plays, but you can't bea playwright, so [have a day job, and maybe Tl end up teaching or something," she recalls “And hhewas like, ‘One of my patients isa play- ‘wright! A very well-known playwright.” And Iwas lke, ‘Yeah, but you can't make a living asa playwright. You can't, lke, be 4 playwright!” Her doctor looked at her oddly. Tewas the first time that she real- ized this was an option, By then, she was spending evenings deep in her imagined world. “Body Awareness,” one ofthe pieces that Baker ‘was working on during this time, cen- tered on a middle-aged academic lesbian couple, Joyce and Phyllis; Joyce's twenty- one-year-old, etymology-obsessed son, Javed and a visiting photographer at the nearby college, Frank. As the four of them struggle with the issues of power and identity—Phylis thinks Frank’ pho- tography of women is exploitative, Joyce thinks Phyllis is envious and controlling, and both think Jared might have Asper~ gers syndrome—their intellectual and aesthetic certainties peel apat. Isa play about the emotional stakes of intellectual dogmatism, strung against a jaunty por- trait ofcollege-town culture, and, appear ing ata moment when theatrical taste an toward small and tight domestic dramas, itbrought Baker to national attention. Neil Pepe, the artistic director of the Atlantic Theatre Company, who grew up in southern Vermont, was taken with her portrait of crunchy New England home life when he read the play, in 2007."When youre looking around tying to find inter esting plays, the frst thing you listen foris the truth of the author's voice,” he says. Baker was by then living in Brooklyn, and ‘when Pepe called to say tha the phy was {going into production she fell down in the middle of Clinton Avenue. ne chilly afternoon in January, Baker went for a walk in Green- Wood Cemetery, a five-hundred-acre expanse south of Park Slope. She wanted some fresh air, and she took a southwest route over some hill, toward the ponds. After afew minutes, Baker wandered off THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 25,2005the path to take a close look at a particu~ lar headstone: LIFFCHILD Father Frank A. 1863. She rummaged in her purse. Names like Liftchild are the sorts of thing that Baker takes down in her notebook. (The notebook is a Moleskine, which embar- rasses her; she's afraid, she says, of being mistaken for the kind of Brooklyn writer who takes notes in Moleskines.) She writes relatively litle down—she goes through about one notebooka year—and sometimes can't read her handwriting. Butthe record of thought proves useful as she tries to distill several months of read~ ing into afew hours of unforced action. "The more intensely Baker has fo- cussed on stripping conventional dra- matic style out of her plays, the further she has wandered from her earlier work; today, she tries to distance herself from “Body Awareness”’s straightforward style. “ ‘Body Awareness’ was written with very little thought about physical space and time and duration and design and all ofthe things that I think are inte~ gral to writing for the theatre—the first things I think about now when I sit down to write,” she said, working her way around a curve in the cemetery path. ‘When the play was produced, he favor ite parts had little to do with the dialogue. Instead, she loved the drama's loose endo—details she'd put in on awhimy lke aasmall wind instrument that Frank inex- plicably carries in his pocket. ‘Trying to find a technique to help her draw out these moments, Baker went to graduate school in 2007, when she was twenty-six. She wanted to teach, and, even more, she wanted to work with Mac Wellman, a playwright, novelist, poet, and professor at Brooklyn College. A generation of young theatre writers passed through Wellman’s ands; his stu- dents included Young Jean Lee and ‘Sarah Ruhl. Although he considers Baker among the three or four best dialogue ‘writers he's encountered, he also believes that playwrights fuelled by nothing but their talents tend to burn out. Hemadea point of providing her with varied intel- lectualsilage—"Finnegans Wake,” Witt- genstcin, narrative theory, all seen through the dramatist’s eye—so that she'd have some means of reinventing herself if ¢x- hhaustion or shtick set in. ‘Today, most of Baker's playsbegin not ‘with dialogue but with a conceptual con- straint, In Wellman's class, she'd read ‘Mary Douglas book about circular plot structure, “Thinking in Circles,” and ‘wanted to write a circular play, with the focal point in the middle (a plan she even- tually abandoned). She had also been T don't know - is this truly the right career path for me? 7 a ZERO DARK THIRTY SOMETHING poring over transcripts of Fritz Perls’s Gestat-therapy sessions, at the Bsalen Institute, in the sixties. “Circle Mirror ‘Transformation,’ the play that arose from. this study, follows a six-week small-town acting class whose members progress through a series of drama exercises—re~ citing one another's biographies in the first person, improvising sentences one ‘word at a time—and, in the process, re veal so much that thei relationships start to strain and change. “The Aliens,” which premidred less than a year after “Circle Mirror Transfor- mation,” may stand as the purest distilla~ tion of her ambitions to date. It has only three characters: Jasper and KJ, two thir- tyvomething slacker frends ina small Ver- ‘mont town, and Evan, a wide-eyed seven- ten-year-old employee atthe café where they hang out. The dialogue is spare and aimless; almost haf of the ply is silence. “The Aliens” grew out of some readings of Wittgenstein that Baker did with Well- man. “The line between a really rigorous tractatus and a freshman in college going, “What if your red isn't my red?—it re- minded me of all these townies with shrooms Thad known,” she says. In one of the play's sharpest passages, Jasper, an as~ pring novelist who has just learned that his ‘ex girlfriend has found anew guy, recounts ‘@ conversation he had with KJ’s mother: Jasons I was talking to her about how I ‘was always lke getting kicked out of places anilikesleepingon floors or whatever and she ‘was like: this, ub, this in-between stat, this boeing unstable or whatever if you accept it— J Oh man, Was she talking aout her Gender sath? ‘SPER: No, No, She wa like: the state of just having lost something is like the most ‘enlightened state in the world. <] is silent. JasrER: And I thought of that lastnight, andall ofa sudan [fl like incredible. [was Simultaneously like being, stabbed in the heart over and over again with tis like devil kenfe but [also felt euphoric, And then Isat down and I wrote ike twenty pages. Back in Green-Wood Cemetery that afternoon, the light was getting low and nussety. Itwould not be long before the gates closed for the night. Baker's conver- sation had started to come in phrases; she was trudging uphill ata steady pace and panting slightly between thoughts. “Wait, sorry, do you think that belongs over there?” she asked. Nearby, a garland lay in an empty patch of grass. It was white with purple ribbons threaded through. It looked as if it might haveblown from a nearby grave. Baker wan- dered over and stopped. “Do we leave it” she asked. “Do we move it? That's not a grave.” She walked on a bit, and then stopped and turned around. “Oh, God, this kind of thing wll Kill me. Iwill actually go fucking ery,” she said. She picked up the garland and placed it delicately near the gravestone for which she thought it was intended. Ak are pulled these days between two warring camps. On one side ie ‘what might be called the Experientialists: those who believe that the point of artis to have the audience undergo a particular ex- perience in time—and that the audience's responsibilty’s to submit as fully as possi- ble. (Think of Antonioni, who kept his cameras open to the unexpected.) On the other are the Arrangers: people who think that the role of arts to order, bumish, per- form, and engage desire. (Think of Hitch- cock.) Experientialism honors the artst’s sensibility: “A la Recherche du Temy Perdu” may be dilated and slow, but i only by giving in to the author's method thatwe can experience its genius. Arrang- ing, by contrast, defers to the audience: what makes “The Great Gatsby” better than any ofa hundred novels wth compa~ rable cultural freight is that is economi~ cally written and smartly plotted, seducing us without special conditions. Diehard Experientialists accuse Arrangers of pan- dering with “easy art” and cliché, Arrang- ers mock Experientilists for self-indul- gence, tedious abstruseness, and bad faith (The lousy Experientialist claims that his disjointed, boring novel is suppored to be that way.) The ablest artists are those who inhabit a middle landscape, mastering the art of special attention while meeting the challenges of effortless appeal. Bakeris one of those artists. Although she has a distaste for anything too pol- ished or arranged, her work has an inti- ‘mate, vernacular allure. She feels perpet- ually beleaguered by interpreters who think she's trying to write small-town drama. She sees the emotional stakes of the world that she describes as higher and more ominous. Shortly after Wellman saw *Circle Mirror Transformation” and “The Aliens,” Baker asked him for his thoughts. “I said, T see a side to you that the New York crities’—who are smart about her—'don't see, and that’s a hard side, a nasty side,” he says. In fact, Baker's plays tend to centeron akind of mentorship. In “The Aliens,” Jasper and KJ act as adult models for Evan; in “Body Awareness,” Frank takes Jared under his wing; in “The Flicks” Sam is supposed to be showing Avery the ropes. The mentorship, however, is al- ‘ways dubious: the teachers are never peo~ ple one might entirely admire. “T think asa kid Twas a litle bit of an Alex. Keaton,” Baker says, referring to the priggish, conservative character on the eighties sitcom “Family Ties.” “My parents have each been married multiple times, and I didn’t have a nuclear family, and there were a lot of people coming in and out of my life growing up. I found that very destabilizing and, asa child, very infuriating,” ‘When her mother arrived home at night, she and Annie would sit at the kitchen table and talk about what people in their social circles were doing, and what that behavior might mean. Sometimes disputes arose, usually because of Annie's stern moralism. That attitude lingered until she was twenty-three. “I got really depressed, and was immobilized by regret and self-hatred,” she says. “Td never felt like that before.” The realization that she, too, would make mistakes and hurt peo- ple “annihilated” her, she says. It’s this cri- sis in her understanding that helped impel herto make the emotional teachers in her play—the beacons of moral honor—peo~ ple who are themselves filing in full- fledged adulthood. “The story of their lives might not immediately appear to be ‘exemplary or what the younger character would want,” she explains. “But there's a kind of transcendence and nobility they embody through having not ived the lives they wanted to.” Something must break forthe glass bowl to stay whole. ‘he basement of a Washington Square bar. Several tables have been pulled together to make one long one; about a dozen students have crowded around it. They have finished the last class meeting of the term. The teacher sits in the middle, with a Scotch-on-the~ rocks: her drink. The room is filled with cross-conversation; Lady Gaga's “Tele- phone” ison the jukebox. A STUDENT: I don't know—I think the most dangerous thing is that I would stop and think problems and stuf. think screenplays—you just want to talk story. ‘And a play isn't so much about story, it’s about the poem, and— THE TEACHER: You know what I re- cently started doing—and I want to high- light this—I now negotiate in my con- tract for screenplays that I won't write outlines. ‘Two STUDENTS (together): Ooh! ‘THE TEACHER: I feel like if we all started doing that that would just— A STUDENT: Woo-hoo! They dink glasses. THE TEACHER: I feel like it’s the most dangerous— I actually feel like Hollywood hurts itself when everybody outlines screenplays. And then it trickles down to grad writing programs. Like, Im willing to sit around for hours to talk about what the screenplays going to be, and talk about ideas, and doodie grams on dry-erase boards, but I just wor't.... Because, by the time I finish the outline, it’s dead. fewweeks ago, Baker began teach- ing her second semester of graduate playwriting. She gives her students a se- ries of formal assignments trying toteach them how to develop their voices within constraints. She has had them write an “Acistotelian” play, with a classical dra- ‘matic arc. She guides them as they try to develop a full-length script. A particularly fruitful exercise, Baker thas found, is one she calls the “scrambled” play. It’s meant to be an antidote to pre~ dictable narrative. Students writea play of at least four scenes. When they are done, they submit it to the class, and someone else in the class scrambles the order. Ifa student turned ina play with scenes in the sequence 1-2-3-4, they might end up ar- ranged as 2-1-4-3. The writing that the assignment generates tends to be excep- tionally strong. Is that because students are finally free from the stranglehold of ddeamatic convention? Or because, antici- pating the scramble, they double down on craft in every scene? Baker isn't sure. But the exercise may prepare students for the hardest part of being a playwright, which is handing your story over to other people and seeing it change—relinguishing con- trol and watching what happens onstage. “What everyone ahvays exclaims about, at the end, is how the order in which it was randomly serambled seems like it was per~ fect,” Baker says “None of us ever want to hear it again in any other way.” # “THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 25,2003 35