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    ‘Infinite Life’ Review: Is There a Cure for Pain and Desire?

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    Illness is no metaphor, and neither is pleasure, in Annie Baker’s weird and great new play set at a fasting clinic.A woman collapsed in a chaise longue on a brick and breeze-block patio is trying to read George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda.” Over several days, various acquaintances also taking the sun will ask her what the book is about, a question she finds hard to answer as she keeps getting stuck on page 152. Still, she calls the novel “very weird and great.”“If I’m not reading it all the time it seems really boring,” she says, “but once I’m into it it’s like the most entertaining thing in the world.”This might be Annie Baker’s mission statement, and, sure enough, her latest play, “Infinite Life,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater Company, is very weird and great. Like “The Flick,” “The Aliens,” “John” and other previous work, it peeps at the greatest mysteries of life — in this case principally pain and desire, and what they have in common — through the tiny, seemingly inconsequential windows of banal human behavior.Certainly, watching Sofi (Christina Kirk) try to plow through Eliot is no confetti cannon. Nor could you say that the four other women (and eventually one man) who show up on the patio do anything exceedingly dramatic by ordinary standards. You will be asked, for instance, to watch them sleep.Books of various sorts are also prominent. Yvette (Mia Katigbak) reads a memoir about a woman with Lyme disease who starts a white-water rafting company. Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen) ponders an existential question proposed in her paperback by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Elaine (Brenda Pressley) works at a coloring book. Eileen (Marylouise Burke) is in too much discomfort to do her own reading but asks the others about theirs.Buried in books or not, they are all looking for answers. The patio adjoins a clinic in a former motel in Northern California run by a Godot-like guru we never meet. This savior figure prescribes fasts — just water or green juice for as long as several weeks — to clear the toxins he says are the cause of this group’s various cancers, infections, autoimmune disorders, “thyroid stuff” and vertigo. Enervated by the treatments as much as by the extreme pain of their illnesses, his patients spend their days and nights in a kind of stop-and-go stupor, which is frequently, unlike the Eliot, hilarious.The excellent cast includes, from left: Kirk, Kristine Nielsen, Brenda Pressley and Mia Katigbak. “For all the detailed behavior that shows up at the surface,” our critic writes, “you always sense the greater weight of whatever lies beneath.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe get to know these women deeply over the course of 105 minutes. Ginnie is bossy about other people’s behavior and Yvette is a know-it-all about diseases, having had so many. (Baker gives her what amounts to an organ recital of maladies and medications, including a hymn to the “zoles”: “clotrimazole and econazole and fluconazole and ketoconazole and itraconazole and voriconazole.”) Elaine is very certain of everything she’s very certain of. Eileen, the eldest, is unfailingly kind but prim, especially when it comes to language.That’s a problem for her because the language becomes explicit as the play gradually reveals, beneath its accumulation of brilliantly observed details, a focus on varieties of desire. Yvette tells a story about a cousin who describes porn movies for the blind. (“In person?” Sofi asks.) The arrival of a shirtless and, at first, nearly wordless man (Pete Simpson) hilariously raises the temperature, as if a rooster has broken into what you suddenly realize is a henhouse. And in a series of cellphone messages we overhear Sofi leaving, we learn how pleasure and pain have begun to merge disastrously for her.Those messages — some to her husband, from whom she is separated — seem like a slight misstep; in a play that otherwise avoids exposition like a bad smell (we otherwise know only what the women tell one another) they are too on the nose. Still, they serve a purpose, besides being harrowing, in that they propel the play into its final third, in which the discussion of desire gives way to an opportunity to enact it. But if you think you see where that’s going, you will be both right and wrong; Baker’s structures are so strong and yet open that, within them, anything or its opposite may happen at any moment.Maintaining that tension between plot and anti-plot, while using it to deepen our engagement in a story that seems random but isn’t, requires the most exquisite directorial care. “Infinite Life” (a co-production with Britain’s National Theater) gets that and more from James Macdonald, who has notably staged plays by Baker in London and by the British playwright Caryl Churchill here in New York. Indeed, “Infinite Life” most closely reminded me of Churchill’s great “Escaped Alone,” in which four women sit in a garden chatting into the apocalypse.But Macdonald understands that Baker’s practice is not the same as Churchill’s. The women here (if not the man) are fully, almost floridly conceived, not just elements slotted into a formal conceit. Baker’s is a rich minimalism, as if the characters in a Tennessee Williams melodrama found themselves in an Albee one-act. Despite the difficulty of realizing that, the cast of six New York regulars is excellent: as good as I’ve ever seen any of them, and in the case of Nielsen, so wonderfully restrained, even better. For all the detailed behavior that shows up at the surface — the various ways the women sip from their water bottles, the shuffling or striding or creeping to their chaises — you always sense the greater weight of whatever lies beneath.That the characters also live in a world of ideas gives the play its intellectual heft and complex texture, both light and profound. The contrast is beautifully maintained by the physical production, in which even the breeze-block wall framing the patio, by the design studio dots, is on point: a tracery of concrete and air. The women’s stretchy sweats, batik pajamas and lightweight cover-ups, by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, signify comfort but also the need for it. Birdsong and road noise are the poles of Bray Poor’s bifurcated sound world. And in Isabella Byrd’s lighting design, the minute we get used to the nearly invisible night, with just a cellphone to see by, we are snapped into the harsh May sun of the following midday.They are all expressions of Baker’s refusal to reduce the world to a unitary lesson; “Infinite Life” offers moral philosophy but no moral. (If pain “means anything at all,” Sofi says, “then I don’t know if I can bear it.”) Illness, after all, is no metaphor. It has no purpose, is no judgment, cannot be done right or wrong; it is only itself, incomparable (though some of the characters compete over whose wretchedness is worse) and uninterpretable.Which does not mean it is useless to think about. (When first announced for 2021, the play was called “On the Uses of Pain for Life.”) Understanding suffering, like understanding desire, may help us when we face it, or when others do, and with any luck afterward. Which, by the way, is what “Daniel Deronda,” past page 152, is about — and “Infinite Life” is always.Infinite LifeThrough Oct. 8 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      In Annie Baker’s Plays, Pay Attention to the Pauses

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      Her work, including the new “Infinite Life,” involves silences full of meaning. But what exactly they convey can change depending on the director.“The Flick,” a play by Annie Baker, had its premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2013. Its three hour and 15 minute runtime included long stretches in which the characters — three underpaid workers in a tired, single-screen movie theater — moved from row to row, sweeping the floor. The drama found a kind of poetry in everyday speech: the hesitations, filler words, abandoned sentences and otherwise awkward attempts to connect. A lot of the time, Baker’s characters didn’t speak at all.The show apparently tested the patience of some. “We’d see a lot of empty seats after intermission,” the actor Matt Maher said. A widely shared email from the Playwrights Horizons artistic director at the time, Tim Sanford, made reference to emphatic expressions of displeasure from subscribers and much hand-wringing behind the scenes. He wrote that “we had lengthy discussions about what to do.”In a recent conversation in a cafe in Chelsea, Baker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” said she was untroubled by the walkouts. “I don’t think of myself as a provocateur, but I also don’t think of myself as an entertainer,” she said. “People walk out of my plays all the time. I don’t get freaked out by it.”Louisa Krause and Aaron Clifton Moten in “The Flick” at the Barrow Street Theater in 2015. When Playwrights Horizons staged it, the show tested the patience of some audience members.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBaker’s best known works are partly symphonies of silence in which what might be mistaken for dead air is anything but. Her scripts call for comfortable pauses, uncomfortable pauses, weird pauses, confused pauses, horrible pauses and, in “The Flick,” a happy pause that morphs into an awkward pause. When we’re not watching unspeaking characters sweep up popcorn, we might be watching them mutely smoke, drink tea or hula-hoop. Her script for “The Aliens” begins with a taxonomy: “At least a third — if not half — of this play is silence. Pauses should be at least three seconds long. Silences should last from five to 10 seconds. Long pauses and long silences should, of course, be even longer.”“She’s a high priestess of silence and stillness,” the director James Macdonald said.An Atlantic Theater Company and National Theater co-production of Baker’s latest play, “Infinite Life,” directed by Macdonald, is in previews now and will open on Sept. 12. It is a play about the experience of pain — our own and each other’s. “Infinite Life” also goes further than Baker’s other plays in its exploration of stillness, Macdonald said. “Nothing appears to be going on for great stretches.”Then, in October, “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut feature film as writer-director, will screen at the New York Film Festival, before a wider release next year. Baker said the film used a natural soundscape but no musical score, and replicated the way time felt to her 11-year-old self.While she has said that some of her “favorite moments in all of my plays are usually moments when people aren’t talking,” Baker also insisted that she was not obsessed with quietude.“I’m interested in silence, I’m interested in noise, I’m interested in speed, I’m interested in stillness. To me it does feel like writing a play feels a bit like composing a piece of music. There are the quarter notes and there are the rests.”From left, Nielsen, Pressley, Burke and Katigbak in “Infinite Life.” Katigbak explained that the silence isn’t empty: “There has to be something happening. Even when it’s at rest, it’s active.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn the air and space that pervades her work, she added, “It was never a conscious decision or aesthetic cultivation on my part. It’s just me trying to follow my own pleasure and my own taste and my own ear.”Ten years after the “Flick” fracas and ahead of the opening of “Infinite Life” — with productions of Baker’s earlier plays still finding audiences around the world — it’s worth contemplating what’s going on between the lines in her low and slow theater. For starters, why do some audience members find silence so off-putting?Amy Muse, a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., and the author of “The Drama and Theatre of Annie Baker,” offered a theory rooted in the metaphysical. “We fear silence because it seems to indicate an absence of meaning,” she wrote in an email, adding, “Indefinite stretches of time, like space, fill people with dread.”More likely, she continued, “they’re fearing they’ve wasted time and money to be bored watching ordinary people doing ordinary things, instead of listening to the smart dialogue they expect from a play.”For admirers, though, Baker extends “a kind of sacred invitation to be present,” Muse said. It urges a leaning in, sensitizing us to the minutest moments, gestures and expressions, and the ever-present ache of her characters. What’s said attains extra significance surrounded by what’s unsaid, and details accumulate like snowfall, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker.It was in the quietest moments in “The Flick,” Maher said, when he could feel the audience most tuned in. “Like I could just shrug or raise an eyebrow and could feel the audience clocking it.”Baker’s preference for understatement stands out, not just when compared to most mainstream entertainment, but also much of daily life. “To me it’s very countercultural,” said the “Infinite Life” actor Christina Kirk. “In the sense that our dominant values are bigger, faster, louder, more. I think that generally Annie is interested in exploring smaller, slower, quieter, less.”Kirk said she found Baker’s silences countercultural because “our dominant values are bigger, faster, louder, more.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn a way, the audience members who gave up on “The Flick” were fooled by a fundamental deception on Baker’s part. Not much seems to be happening, and yet everything is happening. Darker truths emerge, awful revelations occur, human cruelty, despair, shame and weakness come into shocking focus. As Chekhov — a key influence for Baker — wrote: “People are sitting at a table having dinner, that’s all, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being torn apart.”There’s a specificity and precision required of actors and directors. “The biggest lesson as a director was that those pauses and silences need to be active — as taut and as fully inhabited as the most exhilarating monologue,” said Mitchell Cushman, who has directed productions of “The Flick” and “The Aliens” in Toronto. “I distinctly remember the work we did on ‘The Flick’, after first preview, to pick up the pacing in the long silences.” The silences didn’t get any shorter. Rather, “they got much more charged. It made all the difference.”Macdonald provided the cast of “Infinite Life” with a mantra: “Still bodies, alert minds.”“Those moments of stillness can’t be empty,” the actor Mia Katigbak explained. “There has to be something happening. Even when it’s at rest, it’s active.”Not every production has adhered religiously to Baker’s stipulations. One London staging of “The Aliens” shaved its runtime from at least 100 minutes, with an intermission, to 75 minutes without. Perhaps even more egregious, Baker witnessed regional theater performances in which the pauses were halfhearted. “I could tell they were counting to five during them,” she said. “Now I just don’t see productions in my plays that I wasn’t involved with.”On the other hand, for productions of “The Aliens” and “Circle Mirror Transformation” in Moscow, the director Adrian Giurgea felt it more in keeping with Stanislavskian psychological realism to extend the stretches of non-dialogue to “unbearable” lengths — up to 11 minutes long, he said.“Circle Mirror Transformation” at Playwrights Horizons. A production in Moscow extended the silences to as long as 11 minutes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome silences can feel more vibrantly alive than others, or suggest a porosity between the real world and the world of the play. Maizy Scarpa directed an outdoor production of “The Aliens” in the Berkshires, in a tunnel under active railroad tracks. “I had to remind the actors to acknowledge ambient sounds, not fight with them,” she said. “If someone shouts in the distance, look up! If there is a car that honks during your monologue, react!” Ultimately the audience “could absorb the whole experience.”In a production of “The Aliens” at the Old Fitz, an 80-seat theater in a Sydney pub that allows patrons to bring in their drinks, the silences were relatively raucous, particularly on trivia night. “The audience really felt like they were in the yard, hanging out with the characters, having a beer,” the director Craig Baldwin said. “If you think about an audience as always being a silent participant in a piece of theater, it was particularly magic when the characters joined them in that silence. Everyone in the backyard was silent together.”Which suggests another way to think about these moments: as audience participation. It’s an opportunity — whether we accept it or reject it — to fill those silences with ourselves.“Ideas are often the most powerful when they’re hidden,” Baker said. “It’s so delicious to feel a character having a thought and not know, not have access to what that thought is. I like to allow an audience member to make the discovery themselves.” More

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      Virus Fears Prompt a Major New York Theater to Postpone Its Return

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      As the Delta variant spreads, Signature Theater delayed its planned October opening of “Infinite Life,” a new play by Annie Baker.Signature Theater, a prominent Off Broadway nonprofit, has postponed its return to the stage over concerns about the persistent coronavirus pandemic, becoming the first major New York theater to take such a step.The theater’s leadership announced the postponement Friday afternoon, just days before rehearsals were to begin for “Infinite Life,” a new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, who was also planning to direct the work. The production was supposed to run from Oct. 5 to Nov. 7.“Due to ongoing health and safety concerns, Signature Theater and Annie Baker have decided to postpone the upcoming production of ‘Infinite Life,’” the theater said in a statement. “Signature will continue, in discussion with artists, to evaluate on a case-by-case basis how to proceed with other programming planned for this season. The company and artist agree that this is the best choice for this show at this time.”Around the country, there have been a number of cancellations and postponements of pop music tour dates and festivals because of the rise in coronavirus cases caused by the spread of the Delta variant. There have been several theater postponements in California, including at Berkeley Repertory Theater, which recently cited the Delta variant in delaying until next year a Christina Anderson play that had been scheduled to begin in October.It is unclear whether the postponement of “Infinite Life” is an outlier or a first indication that the theater industry is getting cold feet about the many reopenings planned in New York this fall, on Broadway and off. Two Broadway shows, “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Pass Over,” are already running, and 15 more plan to start next month; there are also some plays already running in commercial and nonprofit venues around the city, and many of the city’s larger nonprofits plan to resume presenting shows during the fall.Broadway theaters are requiring audience members to show proof of vaccination and wear masks. And Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that all performing arts theaters must require proof of vaccination as part of a mandate that applies to indoor dining, entertainment, and fitness.Signature said it was still hoping to stage a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” in October. Although “Infinite Life” would have been its first stage production since the start of the pandemic, it would not have been the first use of its building: This summer, the nonprofit featured an installation called “The Watering Hole,” conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon, in its Frank Gehry-designed home, the Pershing Square Signature Center, a few blocks west of Times Square.Baker, who won a Pulitzer in 2014 for “The Flick,” writes plays that are sometimes hard to describe, and very little has been released about this one, but a spokesman said there was a six-person cast. In news releases, the theater has described “Infinite Life” as “a play about no end in sight” and “a new play that tackles persistent pain and desire.” More