Our next production — Annie Baker’s Infinite Life — opens October 25th and runs through November 10th. With rehearsals kicking off this week, we sat down with director Rebecca Lingafelter to chat about her thoughts on the play and what she is looking forward to in the artistic process. A longtime Third Rail Company Member, Lingafelter is returning to the role of director after having led several productions here, including Annie Baker’s John in 2019.
Read the full conversation below, and get your tickets to Infinite Life today.
Infinite Life marks the second Annie Baker production you have directed at Third Rail, following 2018’s production of John. What keeps drawing you back to her work?
I have been a fan of Annie Baker’s work for a long time. I think the first play I read of hers was Circle. Mirror. Transformation. — first produced in 2009, when I was still living in New York. I then saw a series of productions here in Portland, including Body Awareness (produced by CoHo) and Third Rail’s productions of The Aliens and The Flick. Throughout those productions, I was struck by the transparency of the acting and the honesty of the dialogue. She has an incredible ear for the way we talk and the truths we betray when we think we are covering up our vulnerabilities. All of these experiences made me a fan, directing John made me a zealot. I really got to know the mechanics of her writing; everything is intentional and she is so meticulous in moving the beats of the play into surprising and tender moments between unexpected people. Her writing is also very funny, and I appreciate so much her humor throughout the plays.
Infinite Life follows a group of women undergoing treatment for a variety of medical conditions including cancer and chronic pain—but takes a decisively unsentimental, clear-eyed approach to the subject matter. What about this topic—and Baker’s approach to the topic—do you find compelling?
Coming out of the pandemic, I think a lot of people have a new relationship to the vulnerability of our bodies and the communities of care that emerge in unexpected places. Annie Baker brings us this idea through the bodies and experiences of a group of women who are mostly over 50. I am moved by the ways in which Baker is thinking about aging, chronic pain, friendship, and sexuality in a way that helps us to see a group that is so often hidden or ignored. There are also moments in the play that are shockingly exposed, painfully sharp, and moments that are achingly tender. Annie Baker seems to be asking herself a question about how to represent an experience that is so personal and subjective that there may be no way for someone else to understand — and yet she attempts to capture that experience — and in that attempt something is revealed about our shared humanity.
Annie Baker is known for her experiments with time and duration in the theatre. As a director, how do you engage with these aspects of her work, and in what ways do you see them as important?
I am obsessed with what Annie Baker does with time in her plays. So often in more traditional plays we are moving at the speed of the dramatic event, what happens next? But Baker asks us to slow down and move at the speed of human interaction. In John, there is a scene where a character reads an excerpt from a novel as the sun sets and we are left in a darkened room. Every night I would feel the audience shift and grow a little bored during this scene, but at some point the spell would begin to work, and the audience would quiet and we would find ourselves all in the room together with the character contemplating the mystery of our experience. Her plays demand a lot of an audience, but if we meet her offering, the rewards are deep and rich and long lasting.
What are you most excited for once you head into the rehearsal room?
I am most excited for the meeting of this extraordinary group of artists with this very special work. I have been struck by how many people resonate with the play and see themselves in the work, and I look forward to sharing that with our community in the fall.
