How Playwright Annie Baker Made the Movie of the Summer

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beloved playwright Annie Baker won the Pulitzer for Drama in 2014 for her play, The Flick. A decade later, she’s releasing her directorial debut, Janet Planet, through A24.

We begin by talking about her striking first feature (7:55): the Western Massachusetts origins of the project (11:00), the mother-daughter love story at its center (13:24), how Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” shaped Baker’s understanding of time (22:55), and why she’s routinely sidestepped the slippery-slope of “confessional” autobiography in her own work (30:30).

On the back-half, we discuss Annie’s early jobs in New York before she turned to the page and the classroom (40:00), the issues of class that continue to plague contemporary theater (45:00), a formative Rainer Maria Rilke poem as read by Sam (55:50), and whether she believes art “matters” in 2024 (1:00:18)

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Transcript

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1:02.1	I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham and this is Critics at Large, a New Yorker
1:06.9	podcast for the culturally curious. Each week we're going to talk about a big idea that's showing
1:11.4	up across the cultural landscape and we'll trace it through all the mediums we love
1:15.2	books movies television music art and I always want to talk about celebrity gossip too of course
1:21.5	we hope you'll join us for new episodes each Thursday.
1:24.4	Follow critics at large, today, wherever you get podcasts. Pushkin This is talk easy. I'm Santa Fe filmmaker and playwright Annie Baker. Her play, the flick, won the Pulitzer
2:18.2	Prize for Drama back in 2014. She's also written and mounted other off-Broadway productions, including Circle Mirror
2:25.2	Transformation, John, and most recently in 2023, Infinite Life.
2:31.6	Critics have long called her dialogue naturalistic, her stories imbued with a kind of realism.
	...

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