Theatre in Review: The Flick (Playwrights Horizons)

	Matthew Maher. Photo: Joan Marcus

In plays like Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens, Annie Baker has created a universe populated by a distinctive tribe of losers and lost souls; using terse dialogue and some of the most pregnant pauses since Harold Pinter left the room, she reveals, with uncanny accuracy, the unarticulated dreams and unexpressed furies of her sad and sorry characters -- their pitched, passive-aggressive battles over nothing and loves that will never, ever speak their names. The Flick is her most ambitious project yet, which yields both good and bad news: It is both a summary of her considerable skills and a worrying indication that this particular lode of material may be nearly tapped out.

The Flick has a setup reminiscent of The Aliens, Baker's most recently produced work; both feature a trio of characters working in low-level service jobs, with a young newcomer who is deeply affected by his more experienced colleagues. This time, the action is set in an independently owned cinema in Worcester, Massachusetts; as realized by the set designer, David Zinn, with dingy orange and yellow walls, a dropped ceiling, ugly lighting, worn seating, and a general air of dilapidation, it is the kind of last-chance movie house that rarely hosts more than a handful of patrons. As the play begins, Sam, the senior staff member, is training Avery, a new hire. Sam is one of Baker's sorriest creations to date: In his mid-30s, he still lives with his parents, and, with a salary of $8.25 an hour, is going nowhere fast. There is no evidence that he has any friends; the most exciting thing to happen to him is a skin rash, identified by the "distinctive Christmas tree formation" on his back. Avery, a college student on leave, is suffering from clinical depression since his parents broke up. Together, they take tickets, man the concession stand, and clean up the deli sandwiches, beer cans, and sneakers that inconsiderate patrons leave behind. Rose, their colleague, is the projectionist, a job Sam covets.

With a typically sure hand, Baker depicts the edgy, but real, camaraderie between Sam and Avery. The latter is an obsessed cinephile -- he has chosen this job because the theatre still shows celluloid film, which he worships. (To him, digital cinema is the devil incarnate.) Avery is the kind of ultra-knowledgeable movie maniac who, when playing Six Degrees of Separation, can go from Michael J. Fox to Britney Spears almost instantly without even thinking about it. "You have like a...that's like almost like a disability," says the awed Sam. Avery's assertion that the last great American film was Pulp Fiction is challenged by Sam to no avail. (His deadpan dismissal of The Tree of Life provides one of The Flick's funniest moments.) With Rose on hand to goad Avery into taking part in the staff's long-held tradition of skimming a little off the nightly profits, the three of them establish a kind of peaceful coexistence.

But not for long: When Sam takes the weekend off to attend his brother's wedding -- in one of Baker's crueler twists, even Sam's developmentally disabled sibling is luckier in love -- Rose, previously advertised as a lesbian, makes a casual pass at Avery, with fairly disastrous results. Also, big changes are coming; the theatre is changing hands, the celluloid projector's days are numbered, and Avery's relationships with Sam and Rose will be revealed as shallow, brittle attachments.

Once again, aided by the direction of Sam Gold and a cast that has honed in on Baker's high-velocity wavelength, The Flick is given the kind of production other playwrights can only dream about. With his slightly sibilant speaking voice and uber-nerd manner, Matthew Maher can make lines like "I had to do soda and make a whole batch of popcorn by myself," delivered to a late-arriving Avery, sound like a sentence of hard labor. He makes the most of a dark confession, detailing the extraordinary circumstances that led him to leave an enchilada behind in another cinema, thus making him behave like the patrons he loathes. And in the pause that follows his discovery that Rose has taught Avery how to run the projector, he silently bristles with impotent rage. As Avery, Aaron Clifton Moten's flat-affect line readings are devastatingly on target. (Hearing that the theatre is for sale, Sam complains, "He can't sell it. That would be like one of the saddest things of all time." Nonplussed, Avery replies, "Uh ... I think the Holocaust is one of the saddest things of all time.") Moten also finds the terrible anguish when, in a moment of candor, Avery says, "Apparently there's some like amazing, awesome person deep down inside of me or something? I have no idea who that guy is." Louisa Krause scores with Rose's impromptu hip-hop dance, a prelude to her failed seduction of Avery, itself a brilliantly executed bit of stage business; she is especially effective near the end, when she suddenly, brutally decides that Avery's friendship is expendable.

Virtually every last detail of this production is lovingly worked out; the worry is that there are so many of them. At three hours and 15 minutes, The Flick is an astonishingly long piece of work. Even as it succeeds moment by moment, it's hard not to wonder why Baker needs the same running time as Doctor Zhivago or The Godfather to deliver what is, after all, a kind of short story. The first warning sign occurs in the opening moments when the projector, aimed at the audience, blinds us with light while music plays; it's supposed to be the final credit sequence for a film, and it goes on for an unconscionable length of time. I've seen Broadway musicals with shorter overtures. Even Baker's most ardent fans may begin to wonder why they are spending so much time with these people. (Everything else about the production is aces, including Jane Cox's varied lighting looks, drawn from the practical units on stage, and Bray Poor's sound design, which includes the whirr of the projector and several examples of bombastic film music.)

Baker remains a smart and talented writer, and it's possible that The Flick constitutes an apotheosis of sorts. The big question is, Where does she go from here?--David Barbour