Beccy Thompson provides a summary of the playwright Annie Baker's works and methods, which focus heavily on slow theatre.
Annie Baker is a playwright from Massachusetts, known for work that explores the complexities of everyday life. In recent years, her plays have been staged at the National Theatre, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick, John, Infinite Life and The Antipodes. Her style has been referred to as ‘hyper-naturalistic’ and ‘slow theatre’; ordinary events are illuminated and serve as the basis for her productions.
Influences
Baker has cited Chekhov, Beckett and Churchill as influences on her writing. In Amy Muse's book on her work (2024), Barker plays homage to a chance visit in the 1990s to Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysteric Theatre in New York's East Village, explaining that ‘somehow Oscar Wilde plus Guys and Dolls plus people behind a glass wall hitting each other on the heads with plastic hammers made me love theatre’.
Baker's plays therefore merge experimental theatrical approaches with a commitment to realism, rejecting traditional dramatic structures such as those defined by Aristotle and, according to Muse, emphasising the ‘consequential in the seemingly inconsequential’. Yet Baker does not base her characters on people she knows; rather they are figments of her imagination. That said, her upbringing in a New England town has occasionally provided inspiration.
Themes
Baker's writing draws on many themes associated with the existential intricacies of being human, such as longing, isolation and the quiet rhythm of everyday life. She also often includes characters that span different generations, gleaning multiple – often contrasting – perspectives. For example, John is set in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It centres on a young couple (Jenny and Elias) who arrive at a B&B while in the midst of a break-up. Their elderly eccentric host, Mertis, introduces the pair to her blind friend, who talks to them about being haunted by the spirit of her abusive husband, John. The effect of the characters’ cross-generational points of view render the play part ghost story, part exploration of introspective relationships.
Style
Baker's dialogue highlights nuances in human experiences. There are often long pauses, not necessarily used for dramatic effect, rather they contribute to creating the hyper-reality. Baker has said that she sees theatre as a place of contemplation. For instance, in Infinite Life, four women ponder their battles with chronic illness while laid on sun loungers, often pausing for what Matt Wolf (review in London Theatre in 2023) suggests pushes the audience ‘to breaking point and beyond’, while provoking us to question how we get through the day. This, combined with sometime mundane dialogue, has led to the label ‘slow theatre’ being attributed to Baker's productions.
An activity that could translate well into the drama classroom to explore this (which Baker uses with her own students) is to get them to listen to each other and write down what they hear. Unlike verbatim theatre techniques of transcribing recordings, Baker encourages students to listen live, which helps them develop their own ‘naturalistic’ voice.
Space
After a period of researching ideas, Baker starts with deciding on the central space or ‘container’ for the action to take place, crossing both physical space and time. For instance, in The Flick, a deteriorating cinema provides the setting. It centres on three workers, who endlessly complete everyday tasks including cleaning and sorting tickets, revealing their painful search for meaning in their lives. The space positions the audience as observers in the empty auditorium, emphasising the interplay between presence and representation in theatre. If working on a devised project, students could start by selecting a setting where different people might converge, before imagining the characters that might inhabit it. In John, Baker was inspired by writing about the spiritual life of inanimate objects, and the psychological relationship humans form with dolls, which became an integral part of the B&B set. Examining Baker's design could also be a good way to reflect on the use of motifs in theatre.
Approach
Baker also writes detailed biographies of each of character before starting her script, which could be an approach students could adopt when working on an original performance. Using a set as a starting point, parameters could be set about what the characters are aiming to do; in The Antipodes a group gather in a conference room and the characters share stories from their own lives as they seek to make sense of a world in crisis in what seems to be an entertainment industry pitch. Using Baker's approach to writing invites students to reflect on human interactions, offering them a more relevant take on naturalism than some of her influences traditionally taught in school.
Resources
- Muse, A. (2025). The Drama and Theatre of Annie Baker. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
- Kan, E. (2015) ‘Annie Baker’, BOMB Magazine. Available at: bombmagazine.org/articles/annie-baker
- Wolf, M. (2023) ‘Infinite Life review — Annie Baker's magnifi cent existential drama is by turns hilarious and harrowing’, London Theatre, 4 December. Available at: londontheatre.co.uk/reviews/infinite-life-review-national-theatre