The Vermont Plays: Four Plays

The style in Annie Baker’s four plays collected here in The Vermont Plays is a kind of hyper-charged, intensely poetic realism. Allied to that, there is affection for the misplaced souls of our time, who still have dreams of their own, however pitiful they may seem to those of us who are better off.The Aliens (2010) is about two exceptionally heavy losers. Jasper seethes with rage because his girlfriend, who is just as much a loser as he is, has just left him. He sees himself as a Kerouac or Bukowski manqué. He’s writing a novel, although he really can’t write, and he reads parts of it to his friend, KJ, as they molder their days away sitting on the back patio of a Vermont coffee house. As for KJ, for KJ the Sixties still live, though he probably wasn’t even born yet: he laces his tea with shrooms, talks some of the time for no purpose, chills out the rest of the time. And then there’s dweeby Evan: he actually works in the coffee house and alternates between fear that he’ll lose his job if he can’t get Jasper and KJ off the patio and fascination with these two aliens who have taken root on the back porch and say and do strange things --because Evan would like to do something strange for a change but his mother won’t let him. This is a strange play. It’s odd in the choice of characters and how the action hangs together, and the dialogue is elliptical rather than straightforward or narrative. But at heart, The Aliens is a buddy play –it explores how friendship can blossom in the most desolate environment. And the dialogue is awesome.Circle Mirror Transformation (2009) is amazing, the best play in a collection of four very good plays. It’s also one of the best plays about doing theater that I’ve read –most plays about the dramatic act quickly fall flat: they seem phony, about the surface business and rivalries of the stage and not about the act of creating or what ones creates for. In this play, five people –two men, three women-- meet weekly for an adult drama class. In the class, they do not plays or scenes but improv exercises. The first week, it is counting from one up to six, each person taking the successive number and determining how long to wait before saying it. Later, one person stands in front of the class and plays a classmate, presenting the other person’s life story as his (or her) own. This is the only time we see these people, and we see their lives primarily in the context of these abstract theater exercises. But gradually, over the weeks, a sense of their characters and aspirations builds up: we half-see, half-intuit hidden conflicts that exist between member of the group. There is a denouement of sorts but it would be a crime to unveil it. Suffice it to say, this is a superior piece of theater, drama in the best sense of the word.In Nocturama (n.d.), a twenty-seven-year-old loser loses his girl and moves back into his mother’s house. He has issues: he doesn’t see why he should try to get back on his feet by himself, he smokes his bong too much, one time he tries to climb into bed with his mother and her boyfriend. The boyfriend has compulsions of his own -for one, a computer game called Nocturama, which he plays obsessively-- and he’s already run through two failed marriages and is on his way to ruining this new relationship. When the son brings a young woman home for dinner, things go south quickly.In Baker’s sly comedy, Body Awareness (2008), a lesbian couple –Joyce teaches high school, Phyllis is a psychology professor at Shirley State—prepare for Body Awareness Week at the university. Phyllis announces each night’s events, introducing the various guest artists. Joyce has a son, Jared. Phyllis thinks Jared’s autistic, but Jared insists he’s not, just awkward with people. The couple takes in the guest artist for the week, a man who takes photographs of nude women. Phyllis is outraged –it’s male exploitation—Joyce is not, she’s intrigued, actually thinks of asking him to photograph her in the raw. As the week goes on, Phyllis progressively comes unglued. The language is at a more elevated level in this play than it is, say, in The Aliens or Nocturama –after all, Phyllis does teach college --and the dialogue and actions are more overtly funny (although there’s a lot of humor in all these plays). All four of these plays show Baker’s talent.

Every play I've read by this playwright over the past few days has rated five stars. Okay, her plots seem nearly as random as life (they're not, actually); nevertheless, they acquire peculiar, terrible suspense as they plod along, and her characters are so vividly drawn that they break your heart in their ordinariness.In a recent interview she claimed that she never thought about it consciously, but all four plays "are about how art can save your life." That was enough for me. I immediately ordered her Vermont Plays and stayed up all night reading the first two: "The Aliens", about two 30-something slackers and a teenager hanging out behind a coffeeshop (much more satisfying and less judgmental than Eric Bogosian's "Suburbia"), and "Circle Mirror Transformation", about five community theatre actors in a "creative acting class" who, without meaning to, reveal those tender, terrible secrets that make us all human. I know, both premises sound horribly unpromising, but her treatment of the characters is at once so unflinching and so compassionate that I found myself laughing out loud, tearing up, and wanting to shoot emails to all my friends about this amazing new playwright."Nocturama" was harder to take--it's about Skaggs, a self-hating, depressed young man who moves in with his mom and stepfather to recover but ends up abusing everyone around him. Darkly funny, "Nocturama" is far less flashy and mean-spirited than "August: Osage County" because the real protagonists are not the young man but the vulnerable, flawed people who try so patiently to love him back to health. (Baker has not yet allowed this one to be performed.) The final play, "Body Awareness," is about a lesbian couple and their son Jared, who may or may not have Asperger's syndrome. This one is closest to having a Big Topic to consider (namely, the White Male Gaze), but once again Baker's humanity prevails over political agenda. All four plays unfold in the mythical town of Shirley, Vermont, but while her un-cynical, unhurried stories may remind you of life in Horton Foote's Harrison TX or Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone, her beautiful, sometimes brittle voice is distinctly her own.I wish she'd have written twenty such plays, so I could just sit and eat them like juicy novels, but Annie Baker is only in her early thirties and seems to be turning them out as fast as she can. Her work made me love reading plays again.

I like Annie Baker, but I found this collection to be rather top heavy: it seemed like the better plays were at the front and the experience of reading them just went downhill a little bit as I progressed through. Not a bad collection, but my expectations weren't quite met.

Annie Baker is my go to writer for plays! It's almost like she watches people interact with each other, writes it down in a book, and then puts it into a play. Her characters come to life so easily and all of them are memorable. From the stoner-esque friends in "The Aliens" (my favorite of these plays) to the normal, paranoid couple of "Body Awareness" to the weird, meant-to-fail relationship in "Nocturama". I loved all these plays and hope to be in them in the near future!

I bought this book for my son for Christmas. He has read other books by Annie Baker (I saw them on his bookshelf), so I'm sure he will love this book. I may ask to borrow it, myself. :)

Annie Baker's THE VERMONT PLAYS was a welcome breath of fresh air. Miss Baker knows her people very well. Enjoyed everyone, especially Body Awareness. Am looking forward to see her new play, The Flick, this coming February in New York. A great buy and read. This lady can write!!

One of America's most exciting new playwrights. Characters that are simultaneously detailed living humans, and contemporary archetypes that resonate with a reality bigger than simple individuals.

Great colloquy. The dialogue grows randomly,yet realistically, into soaring improvisational insights. I was especially absorbed and dazzled by Nocturama and Body Awareness. Baker's plays compel you to discover what's going to happen next.