THEATER

Barrow Street Theater
The Flick - Annie Baker

We're headed back to small theater in the West Village.  Read the reviews below.  The second is from the New York Times.

The play lasted 3.5 hours!  The first act was 1.5 hours.  The pace was slow with many extended moments of no movement and no talking.  It was a realistic style and as natural as possible.  It did win a Pulitzer, though.

Penn Jillette and his wife sat immediately in front of us.

Information regarding Penn Jillette.

Barrow Street Theater in West Village

The Flick Extends at the Barrow Street Theatre

 Annie Baker's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick has extended its return engagement off-Broadway through January 10, 2016. 

 Following its world premiere as part of Playwrights Horizons' 2012-13 season, the reprised production features its original cast made up of Alex Hanna, Louisa Krause, Matthew Maher, and Aaron Clifton Moten. Tony winner Sam Gold (Fun Home) directs. 

Set in a run-down Massachusetts movie theater, The Flick follows the heartbreaks, loneliness, and battles of three underpaid employees as they sweep up popcorn, mop the floors, play "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," and tend to one of the last 35-millimeter film projectors in the state.

Review: In ‘The Flick,’ Moments at the Movies, but Not on Screen

“People always freak out when like, you know, when like art forms move forward,” says Sam, one of the lonely souls working in a run-down Massachusetts movie theater in the wondrous Annie Baker play “The Flick.”

That line made me laugh out loud, although it’s hardly a punch line — and the movie whose radicalism is being celebrated happens to be, um, “Avatar.” No, the words resonate because Ms. Baker’s play is a notable case in point: a work of art so strange and fresh that it definitely freaks people out.

When this moving drama about the beauty and sadness in small lives was first staged at Playwrights Horizons in 2013, it won ardent admirers (most critics included, and certainly this one) but also irritated some viewers, who found its surface lack of theatrics and quietly observational pacing a trial. Walkouts at intermission — or indeed midact — were not rare.

But go figure: “The Flick” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize last year, in a rare case of the award’s going to a play that truly nudges the art form in new directions; more regularly it’s the traditional and easily digestible works that win that trophy. On the strength of such recognition, and the many who responded enthusiastically to the play, it has now been remounted at the Barrow Street Theater, where it opened on Monday night with the sublime original cast intact, once again under the deep-focus direction of Sam Gold.

I’d bet a pile that the response to the play will again run along similar lines. Nobody lurched up and stalked out during the (90-minute!) first act at the performance I saw, but the auditorium was mildly pockmarked with empty seats after intermission.

It’s less Ms. Baker’s matter than her manner that makes “The Flick” get under people’s skin, in ways both good and bad. There’s nothing radical about the language or the story, nor anything visibly avant-garde to shock the sensibility. No surrealism. No obscurity. No stylized acting. No puppets.

The story that unfolds is a sweet and simple one depicting the evolving friendship among three movie-theater workers: the genial Sam (Matthew Maher), who’s slouching through his 30s in a dead-end job but doesn’t quite know how to turn his life around; the younger, slightly intimidating Rose (Louisa Krause), who’s been promoted to the projection booth, to Sam’s consternation, and who favors unflattering shroudy clothes and black boots; and the newbie, Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), a movie nerd of spectacular skills who can connect the filmic dots between, say, Michael J. Fox and Britney Spears, without even skipping a stroke in his popcorn-sweeping.

They get to know one another, but not through the style of traditional naturalism, in scenes moving cleanly toward an emotional or dramatic turning point. Instead, they probe one another’s hearts, souls and sore spots the way we all do with our co-workers, in fits and starts, by making desultory small talk, by not letting on what’s really taking place inside, until gradually intimacy grows and friendship blooms (and perhaps withers, too). More than most playwrights working today, Ms. Baker really does have an interest in holding the proverbial Shakespearean mirror up to nature to illuminate the way we treat each other and the way we communicate — and fail to communicate.

The audience gets to know Sam, Rose and Avery at the same pace they do, which is what people may find disconcerting, as we spend a few long minutes watching Sam and Avery clean the theater, only breaking the silence to make (often very funny) comments on contemporary film or, eventually, trade details of their personal lives. More important, we come to know them as deeply as they know one another.

If you respond at all to the play, Sam’s slow-burning crush on Rose, resulting in a confession that ends badly, will break your heart just as it does his. Equally stirring is Avery’s one-sided phone conversation (with a therapist on vacation) in which he glumly muses: “Like maybe I’m gonna be that weird depressed guy and I should just like accept it. And that’ll be the life I get. And that’ll be okay.” Rose’s fumbled attempt at seducing Avery will make you cringe for both characters, so honestly is it presented. And the play’s final stretches are as quietly devastating as anything I’ve seen since.

The acting matches the fine-grained writing to perfection. I was happy to see the play again — a little over three hours, but just half of “Wolf Hall”! — to reimmerse myself in the superlative performances. Mr. Maher’s Sam, with his surface affability barely masking a soul in quiet torment, has grown much richer and more detailed. Ms. Krause’s Rose exudes a casually snarky vibe that’s amusing, but she also locates the character’s complicated humanity with clean precision. And Mr. Moten’s bespectacled (of course) Avery remains hilarious in his textbook geekiness — he’s hyper-articulate and speaks and even moves with a robotic awkwardness — but also reveals himself to be the most sensitive and morally mature character, younger than the others though he is.

In its attention to the lives of low-wage employees with little prospect of financial reward (aside from Avery, who’s taken a break from college to work), “The Flick” today seems more keenly attuned to prominent social currents. In ways subtle and smart, it glancingly addresses issues of class and race, of who gets ahead and who gets left behind, and why. And while its style might be called micro-naturalism, or naturalism on steroids, there’s much art in Ms. Baker’s construction and a large vision behind the play’s concept.

She might have written a similar play about workers in a fast-food outlet or a chain store in a mall. But by setting the drama in a struggling movie theater, Ms. Baker is also making a sly comment on what has become of our contemporary culture. (The terrific set, by David Zinn, shows us the grungy auditorium from the point of view of the screen.)

As the projector’s eye bores into your own, in interstitial passages between scenes, you may wonder about the uses and abuses of entertainment these days, and why “reality” has become so popular when, as Ms. Baker’s infinitely touching play makes clear, reality without quotation marks is so much richer and more rewarding to observe.