Between rehearsals for her new play, “Infinite Life,” and preparations for her directorial film debut, “Janet Planet,” we caught up with Annie Baker to discuss pain as a time experiment, the complicated offering of comfort, and the emotional wildness of film.
asks us to sit with people who are in pain. In the performance I saw, I was struck by the audience’s desire for laughter. Of course, some of the dialogue is extremely funny, but it was almost as if audience members were so uncomfortable sitting in silence with the suffering of others—especially those we can’t immediately help—that laughter almost became a form of resistance or insulation.
Some performances there’s a lot of laughter, some performances very little. Every audience is like its own crazy organism. I personally love a quiet Sunday matinee. I know what you mean about laughter as a form of resistance, but when I laugh out loud during a play or movie , it’s usually out of recognition, not because I find the scene or character particularly comedic. So I’d hate to diagnose any particular laughing person as resistant. They may in fact be feeling a sense of kinship.
This play also seems to be about how no two people experience pain in the same way, or maybe that we canif any two people experience pain in the same way. Is that part of what the piece is exploring? Definitely, yes. One of the many strange things pain does is thrust you back into your own specificity over and over again. It’s something only you can understand. When you’re in pain, only you know it, and if you try to tell someone about it, they may understandably doubt your account of it. It’s a hellish but philosophically ripe experience.
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