From play to play Annie Baker seems intent on not repeating herself. What binds her works are related themes, an insistence on offbeat — but never off-kilter — subjects, and an enduring intelligence.
Take Infinite Life, the newest, for an immediate instance. Even the title is a challenge, as it deals for 105 minutes with six characters whose lives suggest anything but contentedly healthy lives as they spend 10 or 12 days on a brick-floor patio furnished with several chaises longue (designed by the collective group “dots”).
Sofi (Christina Kirk), Eileen (Marylouise Burke), Elaine (Brenda Pressley), Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen), Yvette (Mia Katigbak), and Nelson (Pete Simpson) are pre-pandemic (2019) patients at a facility two hours north of San Francisco. They’re there for mostly limited stays where they are fasting, water or juice supplied.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
In her search, then, for a dramatic subject that hasn’t been extensively explored on stage, acclaimed playwright and MacArthur Fellowship holder Baker has steadfastly chosen pain. Make that Pain with a capital P.
Each of the five women and one man who walk as carefully to and from the chaise they’ve selected for that part of the several days Infinite Life covers is suffering from an ailment that manifests through rarely alleviating pain. Baker wants the audience to observe how they deal with it.
Indeed, the actors’ deliberately careful paces meant to demonstrate attempts at avoiding exacerbated pain are possibly the first rehearsal pieces of direction James MacDonald’s gave. Even when designer Isabella Byrd’s lights dim between scenes, the actors keep to their minimal treads.
Not surprisingly as the characters enter — almost always carrying whatever liquid is sustaining them — they lie back, talk about themselves, about their backgrounds, about what they’re reading, and other familiar matters. Sofi is reading and evidently enjoying, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
Even less surprisingly, discussions continually focus on pain endured, nausea the least of the complaints. Their chats are marked by frequent pauses and silences meticulously indicated in the script. It’s as if Baker learned their theatrical significance at pause-maven Harold Pinter’s knee.
Baker’s focus on silence, about which she’s spoken in recent interviews, comes as an unexpected reminder of the sentence that ends Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first book of his Alexandria Quartet. He asks, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
With Infinite Life, Baker, MacDonald, and cast make interpretation relatively easy. Sofi, Eileen, Elaine, Ginnie, Yvette, and Nelson are often silent because they’re experiencing pain of one intense degree or another. They’re hoping, perhaps against hope, that the fasting cure will help. Once or twice, they announce it is, if only temporarily.
At other times, their silences can be interpreted as thoughts of mundane matters, some aspect of the daily lives from which they’re briefly absent. Frequently, when Sofi has looked up from Daniel Deronda, a finger holding her place, she has to be thinking about the husband from whom she’s currently separated, the husband not responding to the urgent phone messages she’s been leaving. His silence may very well reflect his resistance to her confessed philandering.
Nelson’s late arrival, shirtless, surely has the women, now mum, wondering who he is. A nifty moment occurs when Nelson has just lain prone on a chaise. Ginnie applies lipstick, as a stage direction stipulates. There’s no question about interpreting that silence.
Much Infinite Life talk — yes, there’s plenty of it — is medical. The six patients are well versed on their maladies. Mutual interest runs high, which, at one point has Yvette giving a rundown of her history for group consumption. Only in part it goes like this: “They take my bladder out and I get a body wide fungal infection from all the antibodies I’ve been on and the fungus gets into my lungs and it’s resistant to all the normal antifungals, it’s resistant to clotrimazole and econazole and fluconazole and ketoconazole and itraconazole and voriconazole and they have to give me a life-threatening last resort antifungal that’s not a zole…” (Aviso: Infinite Life may not be an ideal ticket for hypochondria sufferers.)
Given the play’s concentration on pain, a potential patron may assume laughs are few. Not so. Not only has Baker seen that they’re plentiful, but for some listeners, she may raise musings on the function of jokes in such circumstances.
Some jokes represent the notion that pain of the sort eating at these figures is the only easeful way to deal with it. There’s quite a giggler when Sofi explains she’s had a job narrating pornography for the blind. Some of the chuckles emanate from genuinely witty minds. On the other hand, there are laugh lines revealing the awkward impulse to be funny and failing.
Handily, funny performers are here. For certain veteran New York City theater lovers, the mere idea of comic titanesses Marylouise Burke and Kristine Nielsen appearing on the same stage already has laugh muscles primed. Neither is asked to clown outright. Quite the opposite. Yet, they rise to the occasion when required. So do all the others, as directed by MacDonald with the sensitivity the dialogue — and frequent absence of it — demands.
If there is anything, um, debilitating about Infinite Life, it’s that the action — or inaction — is dictated by the halting rhythms of pain. Also, an acknowledged aspect of pain is that once it abates, it’s no longer felt. Audiences exiting likely won’t have felt actual pain in sympathy with the characters but maybe will understand its enervating effects as never before. Baker deserves much thanks for that.
Infinite Life opened September 12, 2023 at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through October 8. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
