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The Vermont Plays (2012)

by Annie Baker(Favorite Author)

4.38 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1559363894 (ISBN13: 9781559363891)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Theatre Communications Group

review 1: Cheston Knapp (Managing Editor, Tin House Magazine): While standing behind our booth at AWP in Seattle, I heard a lot of good-sounding pitches for fictional novels, but I also heard a lot about The Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison, which I picked up and read in almost one sitting and finished well before Tony Perez, who is a desiderata-blocker of the first order and from way, way back. Perhaps the best recommendation I heard all conference, though, one that edged out an intriguing nonfictional novella, was for Annie Baker’s The Vermont Plays. Seriously. Trust me. Some of the best fiction I’ve read in years and years. Funny/sad/hurty/smart. So, so good. Also read a harrowing, queasy-making story by Adam Johnson that the rest of you will have to wait until June to read (... morein our Summer Reading issue) but which is going to nail you all to the floor and maybe even flick a few boogs at you.
review 2: Baker's work is hard to describe if only because breaking her plays down to explicable plots cannot help but to lessen them to something standard or even boring. They are far from that. For instance, CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION (for my money her best play in this collection and one of the best plays of the decade), is, on paper, simply another play about a group of people "finding themselves" through evening, adult education drama classes. But it is not that. Well, that is to say that it is not *just* that. The intricacy and precision with which she writes, the jaw-dropping degree to which she trusts audiences, the sheer amount of information, of character that she hides in subtext, marks this out as supremely special. The joy, pleasure and sheer craft of Baker's work is not in the what of what she does, but the how of it. After years of (justifiably) being declared dead, forgotten and out-moded, Annie Baker has single handedly resurrected the purely realist form of theatre and made it one of the most exciting genres around. less

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