Rendering №6

The title of the article is “At This Movie House, the Drama Is Off Screen”, it was published on " on online version of “New York Times” on 12 March 2013.
This article is devoted to the play “Flick” by by Annie Baker.
Love, friendship and the daily grind all take on a distinctly sticky quality in “The Flick,” the moving, beautifully acted and challengingly long new play by Annie Baker that opened on Tuesday night at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan.

In “The Flick,” directed by Ms. Baker’s frequent collaborator Sam Gold with the customary feathery touch he brings to her work, life’s messy nature takes mild metaphorical form. The three central characters in Ms. Baker’s comedy-drama work in a single-screen movie theater in Worcester County, Mass., realized in grungily acute detail by the set designer David Zinn.
The plot of the play is the following: Mr. Maher’s Sam, already into his 30s, takes a modestly paternal attitude toward the new kid on the job, the 20-year-old Avery, who has dropped out of college for a semester after a family trauma. Drawing him out as he walks him through the monotonous routine, Sam discovers that Avery is a film geek with preternatural recall.

For all the delicacy and insight of the writing, the epiphanies certainly take their sweet time coming in “The Flick,” which at three hours (with one intermission) runs about as long as your average Shakespeare production. The emotional impact of the events that gradually leave one of the characters feeling alienated from the others is somewhat vitiated by the play’s inordinate length. (Ms. Baker’s plays “The Aliens” and “Circle Mirror Transformation” achieved equally potent effects at considerably shorter duration.)

And yet if you have any feeling for ordinary people in furtive search of those extraordinary things — requited love, true friendship, a sustaining belief in man’s humanity to man — that can ennoble any life (or blight it, should they be lost), this lovingly observed play will sink deep into your consciousness, and probably stay there for a while. Without question “The Flick” requires your patience, but it rewards that patience too, bountifully.

To sum it up I’d like to say that this playwright is a story, or even a small life, and people surely will enjoy this story. Here people can notice all sorts of people, because this is the play about everybody. That’s where I’d like to end.