HER TOWN: ANNIE BAKER'S AMERICANS

I have a cast of like 600 characters in my mind.

-Annie Baker1

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?-every, every minute?

-Emily, Our Town2

In a trio of award-winning off-Broadway plays, Annie Baker fabricates a town that feels as real and recognizable as its combined parts of Vermont and her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. From the first play set in Shirley, Vermont, Body Awareness, which premiered in 2008 at the Atlantic Theater Company (dir. Karen Kolhaas) to Circle Mirror Transformation (dir. Sam Gold 2009 at Playwrights Horizons) and The Aliens (dir. Sam Gold 2010 at Ratdestick Playwrights Theater), Baker offers glimpses into the home of a Shirley State psychology professor, the community center's adult drama class, and the everyday goings-on behind the Green Sheep café. Shirley is at once a unique college town and composite of a particular swath of New England-bursting with ex-hippies, liberal leaning, small-farm friendly.

like the creations of other regional novelists and playwrights, Baker's town serves as a consistent and fully realized backdrop for possibly interconnected lives and stories. The audience can easily imagine Sandy Jano, KJ's "new-agey" mom in The Aliens and Marty, the drama instructor, in Circle Mirror Transformation, buying organic cage-free eggs at the same local market. Although Baker insists that her next play might not be set in Shirley, the place has a pervasive hold on her, and now on her audiences. In a made-up Wikipedia entry for the town, Baker describes the once-indigenous fishing ground, population 14,023, as home to curative spring waters, legal public nudity, and one of the country's first acts of biological terror (the town namesake, Lord Henry Shirley was responsible for distributing smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans in the 18th century).3 The town of Shirley is sensitive to cultural diversity and makes every effort to overcome its founding roots in genocide.

The town is vividly depicted within each play, and it becomes tempting to wonder where Shirley is on the map and give this fictional space a geographic place. In fact, the significance of Shirley as unifying dramatic place has only risen since the plays premiered in New York. In the fall of 2010, three major Boston companies (The Huntington Theatre Company, SpeakEasy Stage Company, and Company...