In 'Janet Planet,' playwright Annie Baker explores a new dramatic world
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker has been hailed as one of the preeminent voices of her generation, but the movies have long lingered in her mind and in her work
NEW YORK (AP) — The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker has been hailed as one of the preeminent voices of her generation, but the movies have long lingered in her mind and in her work.
In her play, “The Flick,” a trio of workers clean up between showings at a smalltown arthouse theater. In “The Antipodes,” a writers room brainstorming session grows increasingly abstract but has the conference-room shape and mostly male composition of a Hollywood pitch meeting.
Now, Baker, 43, has made a film. It’s a first-time feature but, thrillingly, the evident product of a masterful dramatic veteran. For Baker, it’s less a new beginning than the realization of a long deferred dream. When Baker moved to New York to attend college, she did it, she says, “to be as near as many movie theaters as possible.”
She nearly applied to film school but opted instead to study dramatic writing. Her career as a playwright took off. Her first play, “Body Awareness,” won an Obie Award in 2009, as did her follow-up, “The Aliens." Baker adapted “Uncle Vanya” in 2012 and, in 2014, won the Pulitzer for “The Flick.” In 2017, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
