The Vermont Plays

Posted by Tom Brogan on Friday, January 23, 2015

I've been slowly making my way through Annie Baker's Vermont plays. A collection of four plays all set in the same small town in Vermont. So far I've only finished the first one, The Aliens.

This is Annie Baker interviewed in Elle.

...Baker will gorge on reading for months before she even starts to write; then she tries to escape any "ideas" she has acquired in favor of building a world within an imagined physical space—the dueling theaters of The Flick, for example, or the fluorescent-lit community room of Circle Mirror. The obvious arguments and underlined messages of traditional dramaturgy don't interest her as much as the creation of minutely detailed living realities. "I tell students: 'If you have any comment to make, write an article.' Playwriting is about the present tense, one present after the other, and will eventually become a present tense for a group of people in the theater."

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