The Flick

For the past few years I've made it a point to see the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In fact, I've seen five of the last six (I passed on the musical Next to Normal, because I saw a portion of it during the Tony's and was immediately put off). Looks like my little streak will end this year, though, for two reasons--I know longer live a train ride away from New York City, and The Flick, the winner in 2014, has not had a revival after a limited run at Playwrights Horizons.

Sooooo, I read it! The play, by Annie Baker, is a gem, set in a rundown single-screen theater in Worcester, Massachusetts, largely among three characters, all employees at the theater. In a special kind of genius, Baker manages to address all sorts of topics among these three minimum-wage slaves: depression, racism, the crushing disappointments of life, unrequited love, and even the replacement of 35 millimeter film with digital projection.

The play's detractors found The Flick to be too long and occasionally dull. Indeed, there are many pauses and scenes where the actors are doing nothing but cleaning. Reading makes that go away, so I can't comment on what it would be like to see this in production. It's a bit jarring in that the set is the auditorium, with the seats facing the stage audience. I was immediately grabbed by her character descriptions, which are brief but are as selective as lasers. For example, Rose, the projectionist, is described thusly: "Twenty-four, Caucasian. Sexually magnetic, despite the fact (or partly because?) her clothes are baggy, she never wears makeup and her hair is dyed forest-green."

The other two characters are Sam, who is thirty-five and stuck in a dead end job (Rose was promoted to projectionist though she has worked there less than he has) and Avery, the new guy, a black college student who has an encyclopedic love of film (he declares that no great American film has been made in the last ten years--the film is set in 2011--and I can't say that he's wrong).

These three go through many nights of the drudgery of working in a movie theater. I got a kick out of it because I did it, too, and not as a high school student but as an older adult. They pull a stunt of reselling tickets stubs to get some extra money, which we didn't do, but there's a lot of familiar language about people who bring in outside food and then dumping it (they find a cup of pudding and wonder who brings pudding to a movie). Sam and Avery discuss this in philosophical terms--Sam believes that people are more unethical by bringing in forbidden food and littering, but Avery disagrees: "It feels so weird when I sold it to them. It's like, I gave you that popcorn. I like scooped it out myself and put it in the bag and handed it to you and you paid me and said thank you! And now it's all over the floor."

Avery is the center of the play. He has come to work at the misbegotten theater because it is one of the few left that has a 35 millimeter projector. Some people who work at movie theaters have no special love of movies, but I can testify that where I worked a good percentage did, especially the managers. Avery is a special case, though. He can play "six degrees" without using the Internet (he manages to connect Britney Spears and Ian Holm) and knows the dialogue of Pulp Fiction by heart. But he's also depressed, having attempted to commit suicide once. Rose asks him why he is depressed: "Because everything is horrible? And sad? And the answer to every terrible situation always seems to be like, Be Yourself, but I have no idea what that fucking means. Who's Myself? Apparently there's some like amazing awesome person  deep down inside of me or something? I have no idea who that guy is. I'm always faking it. And it looks to me like everyone else is faking it too."

That's very strong, as is a scene when Sam professes his love for Rose and can't even face her. She asks him, and it's very good question, "Is this the kind of thing where you want the person to love you back or you actually secretly don't want them to love you back?"

Baker takes some chances with The Flick. It is incredibly dated, with lots of references to current films and celebrities, and incorporates them into the script. Avery tells Sam, after the latter has betrayed the former, that this ending is the exact opposite of the ending of Manhattan, and later will recite the entire Ezekiel 25:17 scene from Pulp Fiction, which I know I wouldn't do but I think she gets away with it.

I enjoyed reading the play very much, and have a volume of Baker's other plays, but it's in storage somewhere. Perhaps I will get to see it performed someday, but probably not in Las Vegas.