Playwright: Annie Baker. At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. Tickets: 312-335-1650 or www.steppenwolf.org; $20-$89. Runs through May 8
Playwrights Horizons in New York took the unusual of step of drafting a letter to apologize to its subscribers who complained about the world premiere of Annie Baker's 2013 off-Broadway drama The Flick. Many were furious that The Flick, which ran more than three hours, featured long pauses where seemingly nothing happened.
But then The Flick went onto win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, backing up the acclaim some critics lavished on Baker's thoughtful drama. Those pauses touched upon the tedium and quiet traumas of employees working dead-end jobs in a rundown one-screen cinema called "The Flick" somewhere in Wooster County, Massachusetts.
So now that Steppenwolf Theatre is presenting the Chicago premiere of The Flick, local audiences get a chance to judge whether Annie Baker is a dramatic genius or someone who too artfully wallows in silences. I'm inclined to put Baker in the former category, since The Flick packs in so many things to contemplate culturally and emotionally. It also helps that Dexter Bullard has directed and cast The Flick at Steppenwolf with insightful grace to show off the strengths of Baker's artfully drawn-out script.
It's significant that Baker has set her drama in a movie theater where people go for Hollywood escapism, since she turns around that notion by finding her story from the stasis and gradually exposed sadness of the cinema's employees. If you were to pick a leading character, that would be the recent 20-year-old college dropout Avery ( Travis Turner ).
Avery is a bottled-up connoisseur of cinema, and he can easily connect many actors in less than six degrees proposed by his 35-year-old co-worker at The Flick, Sam ( Danny McCarthy ). Both are intrigued and obsessed by Rose ( Caroline Neff ), a green-haired projectionist who is supposedly a lesbian.
Watching these three work their tedious jobs, bits about their unhappy lives gradually get revealed. When the venue makes the inevitable transition from film to digital projection, we also find out the strength ( or lack thereof ) of the characters' individual honor when held up to lofty Hollywood ideals. There's a betrayal, but hopefully that brings about a change for one of the characters to move out of a crippling emotional and profession rut.
Bullard's ensemble is wonderful as they each imbue their characters with honest-to-God emotion that can be painful to observe. The production design all around is picture-perfectparticularly Jack Magaw's sticky auditorium set that gets magically replenished by spilled popcorn.
Some may accuse the The Flick of harboring too many longueurs. But the slowed pace of Baker's drama more than suits her material and the many things she has to say. My advice is to have patience and soak in the potent slow-release drama of it all.