The playwright’s exquisite new comic drama, “Infinite Life,” nails the absurdity of having a body.
In “The Antipodes,” Annie Baker’s deadpan satire from 2017, the playwright, having spent some time writing for television, showed us her version of Hell. It looks a lot like a Los Angeles writers’ room, where a table of seven men and one frequently interrupted woman generate plot ideas by relaying intimate anecdotes from their own lives.
Not that it’s lush. The word “paradise” is from the Persian for “walled garden,” and in James Macdonald’s exquisite production, designed by the collective dots, the emphasis is on the wall. A brick patio full of deck chairs has been set against a concrete-block breezeway with a stylized floral pattern—reminiscent of both sixties motels and Moorish courtyards—which is itself set against an adobe wall.
Amid the women’s desultory, seemingly aimless chat, leitmotifs emerge, including the involuntary push-pull of the body , loss as moral instruction , and the futility of explaining a feeling, whether pain or desire or fear. Elaine tells a story about trying to stop her husband from yelling at her.
Baker is in a cohort of adventurous writers, like Anne Washburn and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who use surface realism to hint at deeper, more ominous currents: the greater part of the world, this school argues, is hidden. What sets Baker’s work apart is her dialogue, which wanders as naturally as if she’s overhearing it, and her silences, which she has said she counts out rhythmically as she composes.
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