The Flick by Annie Baker

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

Happy Halloween!

[weird quippy one-liner about my opening]. Anyway. I’m not doing a spooky/Halloween themed  play this week or anything like that, unfortunately.  BUT, I am going to do something super current. Last week I went and saw a play at The Barrow Street Theatre, and I fell in love with it. It’s a new play, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014, and the playwright is currently a Playwright in Residence at Signature Theatre, which is kind of a big deal.

This week I present to you:

THE FLICK

by Annie Baker

The play is about three people who work in a movie theatre in Massachusettes, one of those old, tacky-colored, one-screen deals that’s kind of faded out with the advent of multiplex movie theatre monopolies like Regal and AMC and Cinemark and the necessity for 3D technology. Sam is a 35-year old theatre usher with very little upward potential. At the outset of the play he’s training Avery, a college-on-hold student with an almost fanatic knowledge and love of movies. Rose is a 24-year old sloppy, vocal-fry narcissist running the old 35-mm film projector up in the booth. Sam is quietly in love with Rose, Avery is quietly depressed, and Rose is oblivious to both of them outside of their intersection with her life. Sam and Rose explain to a reluctant Avery the concept of “dinner money” which is essentially money they steal from the oblivious owner of the theatre and divide equally amongst themselves as complicit employees. Avery agrees. Sam goes away to his brother’s wedding for a weekend, and Rose and Avery have a malfunctional fling. Sam returns, senses something is different, and feels betrayed. The owner of the theatre sells it to a new owner who’s going to replace the film projector with a digital one. The new owner discovers “dinner money” and threatens to fire Avery, who doesn’t rat on his new friends, but asks them to stand up for him and admit their own guilt. They refuse, and he recites Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction (in his opinion the last great American movie ever made) before leaving. In the next scene, we see a new employee, Skylar, who’s replacing Avery from a multiplex nearby. Avery stops by later to pick up the replaced film projector that Sam has saved for him, and tells Sam that what he discovered while working there is that he shouldn’t expect everything to turn out well in the end, anyway.

It’s kind of a hard play to describe.

Annie Baker has a very specific style, which (I’m making this up but) I can only describe as Exacerbated Realism: as audience members, we spend a lot of the time watching these characters be human and do pointedly un-dramatic things - like spot-sweep popcorn off the floor of a movie theatre - in silence. Acting Annie Baker is like living in an uncomfortable dinner party -- lots of long moments between dialogue where everyone stares at their plate while trying to think of a way to say what’s on their mind. It’s weird. This one more than most I really recommend you watch the recording I have of it, to get a sense of the pacing.

We are, of course, looking at

ROSE

In this monologue (or, sort of monologue… I’ve once again spliced the shit out of a scene to make into a reasonable piece), Rose is talking to Avery after that “malfunctional fling” I described in the summary. They decided to put in an old movie after hours on the projector the weekend that Sam is out of town, and as they sat in the empty theatre, Rose gave the unresponsive Avery a non-unexpected-but-still-surprising handjob until his lack of response pulled her back. She ran upstairs, turned the movie off, and is now sitting on the other side of the theatre, confronting the weirdness that just happened.

(a long silence)
ROSE: Sorry.

AVERY: No.

    I’m sorry.

    (short pause)

    Oh my god.

    I wanna kill myself.

ROSE: Wow.

    Thanks.

(Avery removes his face from his hands and looks at Rose. another long silence)

ROSE: I um…

    Yeah.

    Wow.

    Can we just forget that this ever happened, okay?

    (pause)

    I feel like I molested you or something.

AVERY: You didn’t molest me.

ROSE: Yeah.

    I’m an idiot.

    (a short pause)

    Honestly I don’t even know why I like did that.

    I wasn’t planning on doing that.

    I swear to god.

    (a short pause)

    There’s something wrong with me.

AVERY: No, there’s something wrong with me.

(a long silence)

ROSE: Well are we just going to sit here and like freak out together in silence?

    Because then I’d/rather

AVERY: It’s just.

    This has happened to me.

    Before.

(pause)

So don’t feel - please don’t feel/like-

ROSE: Yeah, but you weren’t giving me the vibe and I went for it anyway.

(a long pause)

    … So you-like --

AVERY: I just have a hard time.

    Sometimes.

    When like - my mind goes blank and I like…

    I always just think: I’d rather be watching a movie.

(his elbows go onto his knees and his face goes into his hands again)

ROSE: It’s okay, Avery.

(she moves across the room and sits next to him again)

    What do you think about when you, like, fantasize?

    (no response. after a pause:)

    Do you ever think about/guys?

AVERY: I really don’t want to answer these questions.

ROSE: Okay.

    That’s okay.

(his face is still in his hands. Rose leans back in her seat, almost relaxed now, and props her feet up on the seat in front of her)

    Well, I’m fucked up too.

AVERY: (muffled) Yeah?

    (short pause)

ROSE: I can’t stay attracted to anyone longer than four months.

AVERY: … Huh.

ROSE: At first I’m like this crazy nymphomaniac. All I want to do is like have sex all the time. Like eight, nine times a day.

AVERY: Whoa

ROSE: And then it like totally goes away and I turn into a like this like dead fish.

    And then I fake it til we break up.

AVERY: Huh.

    (a long pause)

ROSE: And you know what’s even weirder?

AVERY: What.

ROSE: When I like fantasize I just like think about myself

    (a short pause)

AVERY: Really?

ROSE: Yeah. Like everyone else is totally blurry except for me.

    I’m like totally in focus.

    And I like look amazing.

    And everyone is like: holy shit.

    That girl looks so amazing.

    (pause)

    It’s really embarrassing.

(skip forward through Avery having a monologue about wanting to kill himself…)

ROSE: This is an awesome conversation.

SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE PAUSES?!

The play itself is three hours long.

Three.

(a long pause)

Hours.

But it IS an incredible acting opportunity, just because the style is specific, so I decided to give it a shot. At the very least, check out Annie Baker and her plays, others of which include Circle Mirror Transformation (my personal favorite) and Aliens. And as always, buy/read the play before you do the monologue and post what you come up with here! We’d love to see it!

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!