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The Vermont Plays: The Aliens, Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, and Body Awareness
Annie Baker
New York: TCG, 2012. 492 pp $18.95 paper
One of the pleasures of reading Annie Baker's Vermont Plays in quick succession is noting how she repeats thematic and structural motifs to create a world of essential inarticulateness, where the very act of speaking embodies a deeply existential quandary. The rhythmic alternation of pause and silence that defines her work serves as the structural linchpin to her exploration of the profound obstacles to human communication. Set in and around the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont, these intimate plays exist in an utterly familiar, yet off-kilter landscape. All are inhabited by contemporary, marginal characters attempting, with acute humor and pathos, to communicate with family members (most potently mothers and sons) and acquaintances. The primary representatives of her profound inarticulateness are her slacker characters: the two buddies in Aliens joined by a high school coffee-shop worker "in a constant state of humiliation," whose halting speech patterns intersect and play in rhythmic counterpoint to the other two; and Skaggs in Nocturama, who, like Jasper in Aliens, cannot overcome a fundamental rage against the girlfriend he just lost. In Baker's women this physiological tentativeness derives less from rage or narcotized depression than from a deep-seated suspicion of their own abilities to say (or do) anything meaningful. Her women also carry...