Wednesday, September 21, 2016

The feelz

Say what you want about the self-indulgent pauses and lack of drama (except the feelz) of the plays of Annie Baker, thanks to their skimpy dialog it's a freaking snap to read them. I've saved some serious dough ray mi by reading her plays in the bookstore.

Recently it was THE ALIENS which, like every other thing she's written, the critics are delirious over, exactly the same way they are for everything written by Mac Wellman (who? yeah, he was fashionable twenty years ago), as I discuss here. Wellman is apparently Baker's mentor. It took me no more than fifteen minutes to read ALIENS.

I thought it was OK. It was about young menz having intense but understated feelz. And I was spared the necessity of following the stage directions at the top in which Baker states that the play will consist of one third to one half silence.

At the end of the play there was something that I am beginning to think of as a Bakerism - appropriating another work of art in order to punch up her own decorous low-keyness with some actual drama.  In the case of THE FLICK it was reciting the entire Ezekiel 25:17 monologue from Pulp Fiction. In the case of THE ALIENS it was having a character sing "If I Had a Hammer." Here I was feeling guilty because I have a character performing a few lines of HAMLET in my JULIA & BUDDY. Guess I need to get over that.