Annie Baker's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick is playing at Theatre AUM, in keeping with that program's educational theatre charge to showcase new plays along with standard fare. Montgomery audiences and the AUM students have a chance to see plays that will be unlikely at other local venues.
At its debut, the critical responses to The Flick were mixed, largely because very little happened during its 3+ hours playing time [AUM's production comes in at less than 2-hours]; yet, the characters and their personal stories resonate truthfully, no matter how mundane the situations and the dialogue.
Set in a one-screen movie theatre in Worcester, MA called "The Flick", it is one of a few remaining movie houses still showing 35mm celluloid projections while others have embraced the new digital format; and AUM director Val Winkelman locates her audiences on what is usually their stage playing area facing the rows of seats they ordinarily sit in, and what would be the location of the "screen" for the characters in The Flick.
For most of the play's two acts, two of the play's three central characters go about their dreary jobs cleaning up the movie house of the debris left by patrons at the end of the working day. Sam [David Moore] has worked there a while in a dead-end job, and is instructing Avery [Tony George] on the routine job requirements while establishing his seniority over the newcomer who is only there in a stop-gap position taking a break from college. Both are movie nerds, and engage in countless games of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon".
Sam is also enamored of the projectionist Rose [Cathy Raneiri], a take-charge open-minded woman; but she does not return his interest and seems to be intrigued by Avery.
In a series of short episodic scenes stretching over the course of several days, these minimum wage earners reveal many layers of their personalities and individual histories that realistically replicate the ways in which we often hold conversations: half sentences, overlapping thoughts, filler words, and sounds. -- We learn of the sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes frustrating things that each has experienced, along with some consuming obsessions about work, race, class, family, social privilege, and the need for solidarity among them in face of imminent closure of their workplace by the never seen manager and owner of "The Flick".
The major challenges of Ms. Baker's play -- delivering her ultra-naturalistic dialogue believably, and sustaining her deliberately slow pace with its numerous lengthy pauses -- make it imperative for the characters' complicated lives to resonate with audiences. And Ms. Winkelman's cast [also with Chris Mascia as an eager-to-please new hire named Skylar], render the words with conviction, though sometimes with such naturalistic understated delivery as to be hard to hear.
These are lonely people reaching out to one another in ways that they find difficult to express. -- And we feel for them without being able to help.
