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Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword, Mac Wellman (Donald I. Fine Professor of Playwriting, Brooklyn College, USA)
Preface: The Magic of Slow Theatre
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, The Antipodes
5. Critical Perspectives
— Caring About the Matter in Annie Baker's Drama, Thomas Butler (Eastern Kentucky University, USA)
— Annie Baker's Domestic Uncanny, Jeanmarie Higgins (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
— Annie Baker: Building on Beckett, Katherine Weiss (California State University, USA)
Afterword: The Fragility and Imperfection of Creating Theatre
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
