Baker won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for this play, the latest in the series of extraordinarily affecting plays she has written. She’s a talent of the first water.
The Flick takes place in a past its prime movie theater, one of only eight left in the state of Massachusetts that still shows movies in celluloid. The play is about the three young to early middle-aged people who work there. It’s scut work –take tickets, serve popcorn and soda, clean up after the show. One of them --Rose, Caucasian, 24, baggy clothes, hair dyed green, who if she isn’t lesbian is doing an excellent job of looking like she is-- runs the projection. Sam, Caucasian and 35, is obviously working class. He’s had no college or his hopes peak with the job: ushering in a third-rate, close to failing cinema. Avery is 20, African-American, on break from college. In other words, he has a future beyond this cinema, which neither Rose nor Sam do. Avery also has issues: they surface in his interactions with Sam and Rose. Avery’s a movie buff: he likes celluloid only, no digital. Digital is dead; celluloid lives. The play unfolds in a succession of encounters, mundane on the surface, among these three workers, as they share their hopes, figure out how they feel about each other. Without pounding it to death, Baker conveys through their semi-articulate, tangential dialogue the frustrations of their jobs and lives. Their lives don’t get better in the duration of this play, they get worse, but somehow you feel hopeful (a bit, not a lot) about them. Maybe it’s just that they are so human.
The play is set in a movie theater: the audience is looking at the seats, window of the projection booth, exit doors. Much of the time a movie is playing but the audience doesn’t see it because it’s “playing” behind their heads, which is where the imagined movie screen is. It makes for nice effects: a drama unfolding in front of the spectators while a movie soundtrack, framing music for a different drama, goes on behind them. Sometimes the soundtrack reinforces the emotions on display on stage. Other times, it runs in ironic counterpoint to it.
In every respect –dramatic arc, characterization, mood, visual impact—this play is lovely.
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