The Drama and Theatre of Annie Baker
- 208 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Drama and Theatre of Annie Baker
About this book
In the first book-length study of Annie Baker, one of the most critically acclaimed playwrights in the United States today and winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur "genius" grant, Amy Muse analyzes Baker's plays and other work. These include The Flick, John, The Antipodes, the Shirley Vermont plays, and her adaptation of Uncle Vanya. Muse illuminates their intellectual and ethical themes and issues by contextualizing them with the other works of theatre, art, theology, and psychology that Baker read while writing them. Through close discussions of Baker's work, this book immerses readers in her use of everyday language, her themes of loneliness, desire, empathy, and storytelling, and her innovations with stage time. Enriched by a foreword from Baker's former professor, playwright Mac Wellman, as well as essays by four scholars, Thomas Butler, Jeanmarie Higgins, Katherine Weiss, and Harrison Schmidt, this is a companionable guide for students of American literature and theatre studies, which deepens their knowledge and appreciation of Baker's dramatic invention. Muse argues that Baker is finely attuned to the language of the everyday: imperfect, halting, marked with unexpressed desires, banalities, and silence. Called "antitheatrical, " these plays draw us back to the essence of theatre: space, time, and story, sitting with others in real time, witnessing the dramatic in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Baker's revolution for the stage has been to slow it down and bring us all into the mystery and pleasure of attention.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Series
- Dedication
- Title
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Preface: The Magic of Slow Th eater
- 1 Listening to the Lonely: Chekhov and Baker’s Uncle Vanya
- 2 Botched, Beautiful Attempts at Communication: Body Awareness, Nocturama, and Circle Mirror Transformation
- 3 The Presence of Silence: The Aliens and The Flick
- 4 Stories of Complicated Desire: John, I Love Dick, and The Antipodes
- 5 Critical Perspectives
- Annie Baker’s Domestic Uncanny Jeanmarie Higgins
- Annie Baker: Building on Samuel Beckett Katherine Weiss
- Undressing the Wound of Theatergoing Whiteness In Annie Baker’s Nocturama Harrison Schmidt
- Afterword: The Fragility and Imperfection of Creating Theater
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Copyright