Her furious libido, we realize, is also torturing her. At night, we hear her leaving anguished messages for her husband (“I thought I’d try to tell you what it’s like instead of just saying I’m in pain I’m in pain feel bad for me Pete I’m in pain”) and dirty messages for someone else. The older women may have passed through their marital storms, but Sofi is still in the middle of hers. They had settled on a safe word, “chimichanga,” for moments she felt terrified of his shouting, but, she tells the group, “I’d say chimichanga and he’d start screaming YOU CAN’T SAY CHIMICHANGA or you know THAT DOESN’T MERIT A CHIMICHANGA.” Elaine tells a story about trying to stop her husband from yelling at her. The other women are all decades older than she is: the knowledgeable veteran Yvette (Mia Katigbak), the fragile Eileen (Marylouise Burke), the wry Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen), and the confident Elaine (Brenda Pressley).Īmid the women’s desultory, seemingly aimless chat, leitmotifs emerge, including the involuntary push-pull of the body (“We also have tiny sphincters in our eyes,” Ginnie says, in the play’s least explicit reference to sphincters), loss as moral instruction (Sofi is reading George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda,” though she hasn’t reached the part where the heroine matures), and the futility of explaining a feeling, whether pain or desire or fear. “Twenty minutes later,” Sofi announces, as she slides her eyes toward us or “Seven hours later,” as the lights, designed by Isabella Byrd, snap from near-dark to blazing morning. Since her experience is the play’s time frame, she’s also in charge of notifying the audience when the clock jumps forward. The forty-seven-year-old Sofi (Christina Kirk, her voice humming with complaint) is on her first day of fasting when the play begins, and is leaving for the airport after her session when the play ends. They each have an invisible companion, too-pain so indescribable that they can only really talk about other things. (One might be reminded of the row of seated women in Caryl Churchill’s post-apocalyptic “Escaped Alone,” from 2016, which was also directed by Macdonald.) They have water bottles, a few books, and the strange, droll clarity that comes after not eating for days. We spend much of “Infinite Life” watching five women waiting out their treatments on these lounge chairs. 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. 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. The clinic is a Purgatory for its patients-but it’s also a kind of bizarre Eden. Where nothing is fed, nothing can grow, so nothing can die. “The Antipodes” and “Infinite Life” are both waypoints in Baker’s thinking about suffering, but, for all its references to pain-as-hellfire, “Infinite Life” isn’t infernal. As they starve, their metabolisms slow, and, for some, their symptoms recede. At a clinic north of San Francisco, patients are fasting to arrest the diseases-cancer, chronic Lyme-that are consuming them. It’s also a surprisingly sincere, even passionate answer to her earlier horror-satire’s question about affliction in art. A Biblical storm rises outside, and reality cracks open, as it sometimes does in a Baker play, to let the uncanny come through.īaker’s latest comic drama, the much anticipated and pandemic-delayed “Infinite Life,” at the Atlantic, is “Antipodes” ’s exact opposite: arid where the 2017 play is flooded featuring mostly women, with a single, token man. The entertainment industry’s appetite for narrative is bottomless, and, as the writers keep offering up private stories to feed it, the auto-cannibalizing starts to go wrong. 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. 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.
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