Though she is a soft-spoken, somewhat reluctant interviewee in her everyday life, Annie Baker does not lack the words when it comes to writing plays. Known for having a gift for extremely natural and realistic dialogue, Baker has made a name for herself as one of the most lauded and unique playwrights of her generation.
Annie Baker was born in April of 1981 and grew up in Amherst, Mass., the daughter of a college administrator and a psychotherapist/professor. Her parents, who had met at a commune in the 1970s, divorced when she was just six years old, something that she anticipated as an incredibly astute and observant child. She describes herself as a very sensitive person, someone who is highly attuned to everything happening around her, particularly with regard to human interactions.
Before she started on her path as a playwright, she thought she might want to write novels, but found that she didn’t have the proper grasp of language and correct grammar to produce the work she wanted to. She found that writing for the stage allowed her more freedom and creativity with her language.
“…playwriting was actually a way for me to celebrate my complete inability to write a sentence and speak a sentence.”
Annie Baker
So instead she studied dramatic writing at NYU and earned her BFA there, following that with an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College. As she was writing her earlier plays and trying to establish a career, she took various odd jobs, including work as a writer and researcher for the show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and a contestant wrangler for the reality show “The Bachelor”.
Baker says that it took her some time to realize that she could actually make a living as a playwright. Since making the realization, however, she has kept herself busy, producing new scripts every year or two for the last dozen years. Her works have been critically acclaimed and multi-award winning. Her 2009 play Circle Mirror Transformation, about a group of people taking drama classes at a community center in Vermont, won an Obie Award for Best New American Play and Performance. Her 2010 work The Aliens, about two 30-something year old men in Vermont and their dubious “mentoring” of a local 17 year old, won an Obie Award for Best New American Play.
Her most critically acclaimed and (arguably) most famous work, The Flick, won her an Obie Award for Playwriting, as well as the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play follows three movie theater employees, exploring the complicated nature of their relationships. For her work on the piece, Baker received a Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust Commission, and the Steinberg Playwright Award. The Flick uses Baker’s signature style of very realistic dialogue, complete with “likes”, “ums”, and, as is often given as a stage direction in the script, plenty of “weird pauses”. When the play debuted Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, it wasn’t well received by all of that theater’s subscribers. The long pauses (sometimes VERY long), lack of discernible plot, and three hour and 15 minute run time prompted some patrons to walk out. The artistic director wrote an email to their thousands of subscribers, acknowledging the unique structure of the play and that it wasn’t for everyone, but not apologizing for putting it on, as he believed that the quality of the work was greater than any of its drawbacks. The Flick has since been produced at multiple venues across the US, as well as in Europe.
Baker’s awards and acknowledgements have been substantial. In addition to the Pulitzer, the Steinberg Playwright Award, and the Obie Awards, she was also given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 for Creative Arts, Drama & Performance Art, as well as a residency at the Signature Theatre in New York, which guarantees her three world-premiere productions of new works over five years. In 2017, Baker was named a MacArthur Fellow and received their “Genius Grant”, which bestows a $625,000 amount over five years.
And though her work is highly praised, you won’t get much of a sense of grandeur from Baker herself. She has expressed frustration when reading her plays, earlier works in particular, feeling a lack of connection to them.
“There is the disappointment and dissatisfaction with your own writing, but then there is also the sensation that I didn’t do it. I’ve actually had the paranoid sensation that I didn’t write my play.”
Annie Baker
Despite this feeling, she works to share her knowledge and expertise, teaching playwriting at NYU, Barnard College, and for the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She also works as an instructor for the MFA in Playwriting program at Hunter College. At just shy of 40 years old, one can hope that her career remains largely still in front of her, with years to come of more beautifully crafted representations of human interactions, astute observations of the everyday minutiae that make up a person’s life, and plenty of “weird pauses”.
https://www.vulture.com/2015/12/annie-baker-on-memoir-reality-tv-and-hollywood.html
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/oct/24/playwright-annie-baker-the-antipodes-national-theatre
