Those who seek to understand the state of American playwriting should peruse the work of Annie Baker, one of its most lauded practitioners. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Baker sticks closely to what has proved a winning formula in Infinite Life (at the Linda Gross Theater through October 8). Like many of her previous efforts, this one has no plot; features ordinary, relatable characters fumbling through discussions of various topics in naturalistic dialogue that delivers nothing like profundity or wit; revels in lengthy pauses; and glances at several themes without much effort to shape them, leaving the audience to suss out what the play is about. Baker’s scattershot dialogue doesn’t lead anywhere, perhaps because developing her ideas in any dedicated way would reveal that they’re fatuous.
The central theme of Infinite Life appears to be that women suffer physical pain that is tied up with their sexuality or sexual misdeeds, or that pain is sexy, or that sex equals pain. Or something. Baker doesn’t quite know: she’s just riffing about pain and sex. Any five audience members might have five different interpretations, and if that isn’t by design, it might as well be. The highest levels of the theater these days tend either to reaffirm the culture’s favored clichés, whether true or not (“racism is everywhere”), which gets them dubbed fierce, vital, and important; or to churn up a cloud of vagueness, which gets them dubbed deep, mysterious, and involving. The audience is under no illusions that anything much will happen in Baker’s plays. When an artist refuses to identify any particular destination, she can hardly be criticized for not going anywhere. It’s a curiously timid, low-ambition approach: Baker is accepted as a slugger but rarely aspires to do more than execute a perfect bunt. Plays that used intense human drama to explore big ideas via strong-willed characters speaking diamond-tipped dialogue—A Man for All Seasons, Amadeus—are entirely out of vogue.
Baker started out writing about modestly articulate college-adjacent slackers chatting aimlessly while hanging around outside a coffee shop (2010’s The Aliens) or cleaning up a movie theater (2013’s Pulitzer honoree The Flick, whose musings ran over three hours). She is now forty-two. Distressingly for those who think of her as a quintessential young playwright, her mind has now sunk deep into middle age. In Infinite Life, five women ranging in age from forty-seven to “is she dead or just napping?” spend a week or so in chaises longues overlooking a parking lot at a rinky-dink health spa two hours north of San Francisco seeking to fast away their sufferings. All five women endure chronic pain, have tired of hearing advice from the medical establishment, and are taking matters into their own hands by trying out this quack cure for such maladies as autoimmune disorder and even tumors. One lady, Yvette (Mia Katigbak), delivers a monologue about her cascade of conditions (her bladder caused her so much trouble she had it removed and now uses a pouch to handle its duties) that goes on at dizzying length and is very much of our moment.
The youngest person present, Sofi (Christina Kirk), the focus of the piece, is a protein strategist for a food-delivery service in Los Angeles who is guarded about the reasons behind her desire for a cleansing fast. In a much overused theatrical technique, Baker mistakes withholding information for suspense but around the midpoint of the two-hour play reveals that Sofie has both a physical problem and a relationship problem. The first is that she has intense bladder pain connected to her clitoris; orgasms are followed by excruciation. Meanwhile, her husband is no longer on speaking terms with her (late at night, she phones him desperately, failing to reach him every time) because he thinks she cheated on him. She didn’t, at least not in a corporeal sense, but there is a male coworker with whom she exchanges lusty, pornographic voicemails she finds therapeutic. Her husband, discovering these, turned his back on her. She explains all this to the one man present at the spa: a handsome, fit-seeming fellow named Nelson (Pete Simpson) who first bonds with her about his own nightmare illness (colon cancer, whose unpleasant effects he describes in nauseating detail) then flirts with her, noting that he is in an open marriage.
Besides having a typically uneventful resolution of this matter, the play otherwise rambles from topic to topic. A school shooting is mentioned in passing, as well as a wildfire, and though these two nuggets perhaps will be received as a meal for those who would fancy that the play is an extended metaphor about The Sickness Plaguing America, Baker is a miniaturist who isn’t actually interested in any such subject. She does, at least, sidestep cliché; the answer to the question “Why are so many women in so much pain?” would be, in the hands of a more conventional playwright, “Evil capitalists and their power grid” or, more obviously, “Men.” But Baker has managed to craft an intriguingly complex character in Sofi, one whose acknowledged missteps and unattractive cravings help maintain audience interest in a play in which not much happens and no conclusions are reached.
The power of loot is a curious thing: it can make a writer dust off a perfect, beloved screenplay, lard it up with glossy but inane musical numbers and lowest-common-denominator slapstick, then resell it to herds of eager tourists at $150 or so per head. So mortified was I by every moment of Back to the Future: The Musical that I felt alienated from the ordinary standards of New York City theater and wondered briefly whether I had taken a wrong turn on the way to the Winter Garden Theatre and somehow wound up in Orlando. Or perhaps I had stumbled aboard a cruise ship? The stage version of the beloved 1985 sci-fi comedy, which starred Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, is like a fan-engineered replay stuffed with corny effects, terrible songs, and acting so broad it’s as if we’ve gone back in time not to the Reagan era but a generation before that, when Lucy and Ricky would pull faces at each other every Monday night.
Anyone who has spent much time on social media will agree that Back to the Future is today either the single most admired movie of the entire 1980s, or very close to it. But what’s the point of repeating jokes and farcical situations that are not only drained of all novelty but now also amount to pop-culture catechism? “You made a time machine . . . out of a DeLorean?” “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!” It’s all there, including the equine laugh (here exaggerated beyond belief) of Crispin Glover, who originated the part of Marty McFly’s dorky father, George, this time played by Hugh Coles. Moreover, the two hit songs from the movie (“Back in Time” and the inescapable “The Power of Love”) are jammed in at the end to get the audience on its feet. Every decision is made to accord with the tastes of the extremely undiscerning, which is why the national touring circuit is the natural home for the show.
Making only moderate adjustments to the screenplay he wrote with Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale has constructed a book around the mismatched pair of the savvy teen Marty (Casey Likes, who just last fall also captured the lead in Broadway’s failed musical version of another highly regarded movie, Almost Famous) and the mad scientist Doc Brown (the wily Broadway stalwart Roger Bart). Beefing up the role of Marty’s dad, Gale gives Coles many opportunities to leave the other two watching his antics as he lurches around the stage like an arthritic scarecrow. Gale has also given the McFly family’s thirty-year nemesis Biff (Nathaniel Hackmann) some additional space for his Fifties-style bullying and even arranged an improbable fist fight between Marty and Biff. Biff speaks in the kinds of malapropisms that were a staple of lowbrow humor sixty years ago, when Norm Crosby infested the talk shows: “After we were so rudely interrupted the other day, I had a renovation.”
Gale has jettisoned the subplot about Libyan terrorists and, in keeping with today’s exquisite racial sensitivities, has increased the visibility of the town’s black mayor, Goldie (Jelani Remy), who, when the action jumps back to 1955, gets his own insipid I can dream, can’t I number. Fear of giving racial offense has also apparently inspired Gale to delete one of the movie’s most inspired and paradoxical jokes, in which the 1955 version of Marty McFly indirectly inspires Chuck Berry to write “Johnny B. Goode.” Surprisingly, two very Eighties developments that were characteristic of the leering nature of comedies aimed at Gen X teens (Zemeckis and Gale found it difficult to sell the project because it wasn’t raunchy enough) have been retained and even enhanced: one is that George initially meets his future wife and Marty’s mom, Lorraine (Liana Hunt), by spying on her while she’s getting undressed, and the other is the Oedipal complication in which she, as a teen, flirts heavily with the young newcomer to the Fifties she doesn’t know is her own son from the Eighties. Today’s younger audience is considerably more likely to be repulsed by these formerly expected sex-comedy flourishes, but Broadway remains one of the few institutions that principally targets an audience over forty.
The most amusing elements of the show are the set design (the proscenium is fitted out with retro graphics suggesting mid-Eighties state-of-the-art tech) and a few bright new jokes about changing times (Doc Brown discovers, via a dream sequence that takes him to a 1980s vision of 2020, that things will be much better then: “No crime, no traffic, no disease!”). Tourists will be wowed by the stagecraft around the DeLorean, which simulates high speed via projections to the rear of the stage and at the proper climactic moment zooms, or at least trundles, over the heads of the ticket buyers in the orchestra.
Sprinkled atop a very familiar story are a feeble series of songs with both music and lyrics credited to the team of Alan Silvestri (the septuagenarian who scored the original film and lately has composed the scores for several superhero films) and Glen Ballard (best known for producing the Alanis Morrissette album Jagged Little Pill). Neither of these two has much business being near Broadway, as they churn out forgettable music and even more banal lyrics (“a great idea can change the world”) that grow even worse when they strain for laughs: “It’s no malarkey/ our patriarchy/ will show the whole wide world how to live this way.”
So the performers put considerable work into selling the songs with lots of stage business. Of the two leads, Bart, an unshakeable pro, gets some laughs, but Likes is even worse than he was in Almost Famous, mugging and blanching and trying far too hard to sound like Fox. He is fueled entirely by a gangly, twerpy, unfortunate-child-of-a-stage-mom energy that amounts to begging the audience to love him as much as he loves himself. I declined the offer.
Twenty-three years ago the thriller writer Tawni O’Dell’s first published novel, Back Roads, enticed Oprah Winfrey to select it for her book club. O’Dell has since published several beach-read novels of the kind that critics tend not even to bother to review. Nevertheless, she is intent on bringing her cliché-infested style to the stage, which is typically unforgiving of writers who have little to say and only banalities in which to say it.
The production is literally creaky, its sets audibly trundling on and off stage under the unimaginative eye of its director.
In 2019, O’Dell’s rape drama When It Happens to You had a brief off-off-Broadway run. This summer she took advantage of the August doldrums, when many theaters are dark, to place Pay the Writer (ending September 30) at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, a stage owned by the Signature Theatre Company, which rents its stages to outside productions such as this one. The work is a dull one-act dramedy, running two hours, about an elderly black novelist, Cyrus Holt (Ron Canada), and his prickly relationships with his gay agent of many decades, Bruston Fischer (Bryan Batt), his favorite ex-wife, Lana Holt (Marcia Cross), and his fortysomething children, Leo (Garrett Turner) and Gigi (Danielle J. Summons). The production is literally creaky, its sets audibly trundling on and off stage under the unimaginative eye of its director, Karen Carpenter—not that any director could have breathed any life into this material, which suggests a certain floundering aspiration on the part of its author to imagine literary high life.
Of the three leads, two are familiar from television: Batt, who is serviceable as the agent, played the gay art director on Mad Men; Cross, who is so-so as the mother of Cyrus’s children, had a prominent supporting role in Melrose Place and later was a co-lead in Desperate Housewives. The third, the journeyman actor Canada, is dreadful as the supposedly leonine Cyrus, who is meant to stand for all of the gifted but arrogant Hemingmailers who cheated on their wives and barely knew their children. O’Dell intends to make him a huge figure, an exasperating genius whose boundless talent and macho charisma ultimately outweigh his failings. Canada, though, simply comes across as an ordinary old bloke who has as much physical presence as a bus driver and, judging by his dialogue, as much literary ability as one. Dying of cancer but too proud to invite pity by announcing it, he is prepared to meet his fate with open eyes and use his final weeks to heal the gashes he’s inflicted on everyone over his lifetime.
The play feels like an extended episode of one of those failing network-television shows you wouldn’t watch without substantial compensation.
O’Dell doesn’t overdo the maudlin aspects of the scenes in which Cyrus attempts to close out his four main relationships—there is only a little talk of dying and no lachrymose gestures of forgiveness, at least not while Cyrus is alive—but the extended farewells are never compelling. The characterizations are so thin, and the dialogue so uninspired, that the play feels like an extended episode of one of those failing network-television shows you wouldn’t watch without substantial compensation. Like an anti–Annie Baker, O’Dell puts everything on the surface: “I understand all that, but don’t you want to say goodbye?” asks Lana. “This is the end. It’s what you write when your novels are finished, when the story’s over, when nothing else can be added or taken away. Ever again.” Cyrus seems to be that rare type of great novelist who needs to have the concept of death explained to him. When O’Dell throws in passing references to Bruston being the victim of gay-bashing attacks, or of the interracial nature of Cyrus and Lana’s relationship attracting so much hatred that they were spat upon (in New York City? In the 1980s?), she gives off the sense that she’s been paging through a list of potential sources of drama and thought it best to throw in a couple of the most overused ones. O’Dell’s idea of indicating how French people talk is to have Cyrus’s most important translator say things like, “It’s good to see you, mon ami.” (Steven Hauck plays him with an outlandish accent and a scarf.) At her most cringe-inducing, she has characters single out one another’s remarks (hence hers) as brilliant. This one is meant to be an indicator of Cyrus’s genius:
I don’t think any of us ever get over the stuff that happens to us when we’re children. It’s when the clay of our psyche is being formed; when it’s still wet and anyone who can get their hands on us has the power to mold it into whatever they want it to be.
Lana exclaims, “Ooh, that’s good,” and Cyrus, very pleased with himself, pauses to jot it down for later. More amateurish plays than this one seldom get placed on such a prominent stage. I’d rather watch a gaggle of Annie Baker characters looking at their toenails.
