A dramaturgical note by Pancho Savery
We have all heard the phrase “talk is cheap.” What that has traditionally meant is that it’s easy to talk, but what truly, and only, counts is what you actually do. Annie Baker has taken this cliché and turned it on its head. In her work, talk is, generally speaking, all that happens. As an example, her Pulitzer Prize winner The Flick (2013) takes place in a deserted movie theater after the customers have left, and the conversation that takes place is between the workers cleaning up after, sweeping up popcorn and candy wrappers. Nothing really happens, except talk, and the pauses in the talk, and the silences. In writing this type of play, Baker has not emerged from out of nowhere. There are at least three playwrights who serve as major influences. There is Samuel Beckett, in whose Waiting for Godot, as was noted by Vivian Mercier in 1956, “Nothing happens twice.” There is the work of Chekhov. In The Three Sisters, the title characters both talk about the importance of work and the desire to move to Moscow, but they do neither. And finally, there is the work of Harold Pinter, in which pauses and silences are just as important as what is said or not said. This is not to say that things don’t change. What we get in her work is different perspectives on a theme rather than action. There are no deaths or marriages to nicely end the work. Her plays are plays of being rather than plays of happening.
Baker’s plays typically take place in an enclosed space in which it often seems as though there’s no way out. The plays almost create a sense of claustrophobia, in which characters can feel trapped. On the other hand, these enclosed spaces force/encourage characters to deal with each other and go beneath the surfaces of their lives. Infinite Life takes place in a health clinic two hours north of San Francisco, run by the one-named but never seen Erkin and his day nurse Bashka. The five women and one man, all between their forties and seventies have come there from all over the country in the hope of having their various diseases cured, or at least having the symptoms lessened. They are all on multiple days of fasting, restricted to either juice or water. Some are there for the first time, and some have been there before. Some are relatively local, and some have traveled thousands of miles. They sit in a row of chaises lounges. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they read, or try to, and sometimes they don’t. When they do talk, they tend to talk about their maladies and how many days they have been fasting. Sometimes they talk about their families. This is a play primarily about chronic pain, and about how pain and disease can totally take over one’s life. They talk, or not; they sleep, or not; and for the most part, time passes and nothing happens. They are hopeful and they are resigned. As Eileen puts it, “So I could be in this pain for the rest of my life or maybe a year from now things will be different” (58). This is the meaning of the play’s title. Living with constant, chronic pain creates an “infinite life.” And of course, an infinite life of pain is not what any of these characters wants. They constantly go back and forth between being optimistic about a “cure” and believing that their health crises will never end. What Baker explores is how in this essentially enclosed space the characters try to find/make meaning in their lives in the same way Vladimir and Estragon try to find/make meaning in the wasteland that is Godot.
The play explores multiple types of pain: the pain of disease, the pain of hunger, the pain of family, the pain of having a roommate, the pain of isolation, the pain of puking, sexual pain, the pain of isolation even when you’re with others, the pain of childbirth versus the pain of not being able to have children. The play also explores other issues and questions: the passage of time; the question of whether women are more likely to experience chronic pain; vulnerability; internal pain versus pain in the outside world (The Holocaust, school shootings, wild fires); pain when you’re younger versus when you’re older; togetherness and isolation; established groups versus “newbies”; pain versus pleasure; memory; how and why do we try to communicate; space as a character; the smell of the nearby bakery versus the smell of eucalyptus trees; the possibility of hope; the distance between people even when they are in the same space; is the enjoyment of pornography generational; what constitutes cheating on your partner; what’s the difference between a water fast and a juice fast; what is communicated when you are looking at someone as opposed to when you aren’t; is it possible to have the concentration to read an 800 page book when you are fasting; the disappointment/resentment a parent can have over a child’s accomplishments, or lack thereof; and then there is the topic of the different kinds of sphincters.
There are two interesting techniques Baker uses to help communicate these themes. The first, no doubt borrowed from Pinter, is the use of various forms of time. She makes use of ellipsis, “pause,” “short pause,” “a while,” and “silence.” Each of these lasts a different amount of time, which is unspecified. Perhaps most interestingly, the play has a unique form of narrator. At the end of most scenes, Sofi, the most recent visitor to the facility, as well as the youngest, announces how much time passes before the next scene, ranging from minutes, to hours, to days. These announcements are made directly to the audience, suggesting that at least in some ways, this play functions as a “memory play,” similar to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. The difference is that there, Tom Wingfield announces it to the audience and then slips into the action; while here, it isn’t as obvious, and it might take the audience time to figure it out. And so, Sofi, after the events, is recollecting them, whether in tranquility or not. She is therefore simultaneously both in and out of the action, which also means that she is simultaneously existing in two different realms of time. This can also be a reflection on the title. Sofi has an infinite life in the infinite realm of time. Think of the common ways we refer to time: time flies, time is on my side, a stitch in time, doing time, killing time, all the time, in the nick of time, time runs out, behind the times, wasting time, and turning back the time, just to name a few. As Eileen says in the middle of the play, “A minute of this is an infinity” (28). And so although there are six characters in search of a cure, this is primarily Sofi’s story. She is the only character who ever appears on the stage alone, and the play begins and ends with her.
In addition to the issues of the main plot, there are also some subsidiary issues that are interesting to consider. The first is that Sofi has chosen to bring as her reading, or attempt at reading, George Eliot’s final novel, the 1857, 883 page, Daniel Deronda. Why would this novel be her choice? It is certainly not the section of the novel that actually concerns Daniel Deronda. He grows up well-off, not knowing who his birth parents are; one day while out rowing, he encounters a woman who is about to drown herself. He rescues her, learns that she is Jewish, and decides he wants to learn more about Judaism. He eventually learns that he is himself Jewish, marries the woman he saved, and enthusiastically argues for a Zionist state for Jews. None of this aspect of the novel is of any interest to Sofi. In fact, when she reveals where she is in her reading, page 131, this topic hasn’t even come up yet. The other part of the novel, and the part of interest to Sofi, is the story of Gwendolen: self-assured, independent, refusing to abide by what the norms are for 19th century English women of a certain class. In Gwendolen’s world, the only expectation is marriage to a person of a sufficiently high class. Gwendolen is adventurous, sassy, and a rule-breaker. She turns down first one marriage proposal and then another, but then ends up marrying the second after her family fortunes turn to ruin. She finds her marriage unpleasant at best. Her husband’s goal is to totally control her; and when on a cruise he falls overboard and drowns, she, after refusing to try to save him, ultimately feels no guilt. At the end of the novel, Gwendolen is poised, having fallen in love with Daniel Deronda, but he making the choice to embrace his Jewish identity, is left alone and independent, a woman trying to decide her fate. More than one critic has argued that the novel should have been called Gwendolen.
A second issue to think about is race. In this production, three of the five actresses are women of color. Baker does not specify the race of the actors, but this directorial choice leaves an impact. It causes/demands that we think of the health care system in the United States, and that women, and especially women of color, usually get the worst treatment. The infant mortality rate for mothers of BIPOC children, the assumption by white doctors that women of color can more easily endure pain, and the general treatment in the health care system needs to be reflected on. While these issues are not directly addressed in the play, the fact that the director has made the casting decisions that she has inevitably raises this issue and forces us to reflect on it.
A third sub-topic to think about is Buddhism. About two-thirds of the way through the play, one of the characters quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Call Me By My True Names,” the point of which is that we cannot separate ourselves from the evils of the world; and rather than condemning the evil around us, which is easy to do, the more important thing is to see ourselves in everyone and to embrace the most important Buddhist principle, which is compassion. This principle is not only important for the characters to embrace towards each other, but also for the audience to embrace towards the characters. One distinct characteristic of Baker’s plays is that, as with Chekhov, no matter what the characters do or say, or don’t do or say, she wants us to have compassion for them and to remain non-judgmental.
A fourth issue to think about is the time of the play. It takes place in May 2019, ten months before the world is hit by Covid. At that time, most people probably would not have been that familiar with chronic pain; people could live in a bubble about the topic; but now virtually all of us have had a personal experience with it and can relate better to what the characters are going through.
A fifth issue is humor. Despite all the pain and suffering the characters both talk about and experience, there are also genuine humorous moments in the play. In other words, laughter is not only ok, but is encouraged.
Issue six is the cover art for the play. It is a piece by British artist Sam Green entitled Pangea Arch. Pangea was the unified landmass when all the continents were one, before there were humans. Superimposed over the black silhouette of a human is the white image of the landmass starting to drift apart from itself. This is a metaphor for the play. We are simultaneously apart and together. The characters come together, separate, but will always be a part of each others’ lives. Sofi, 47, from Los Angeles, works as the head of the Protein Strategy team at a meal kit delivery service, and as a result of this gets lots of free frozen meat. When the play begins, Sofi is on her first day of fasting. Her chronic pain is caused by ulcers on her bladder that make sex painful. As a result, she has found two forms of “relief”; one is watching porn, and the other is trading erotic phone messages with a co-worker. Despite the fact that they have never even touched each other, her husband of 23 years, when he finds out about the calls, considers that Sofi has cheated on him, and decided, against Sofi’s wishes, that they have to separate. Several times in the play, when Sofi is alone on stage, she makes phone calls to the two men. To Pete, her husband, she is both self-deprecating and remorseful. She wonders if she still exists. She wishes he could experience her pain, even for five minutes, wonders if she is going crazy, calls herself a monster, and tells him that everything at the clinic is horrible. Instead of talking about her pain, as she and the women do, she tries to describe her pain, describing it as both like being at the center of a blowtorch and also like endless throbbing. On the other hand, when talking to her phone-sex colleague, she is a completely different person, telling him what she wants him to do to her sexually in very explicit terms, and sounding as though she has managed to find some joy inside her pain.
Eileen is the oldest visitor, married nearly fifty years with two daughters, a Christian Scientist from Wichita, on day four of fasting when the play begins. For much of the play, she sleeps in her chair. She leaves twice to go to the bathroom, and again when the conversation gets too sexually explicit. Interestingly, she later tells Sofi that for two years after turning forty-nine, she became obsessed with sex, fantasized about every man she saw on the street, and even fantasized about her dog. She has Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, for which there is no cure. She therefore faces the possibility of a life of infinite pain. By the middle of the play, she is walking with a cane, and so her condition has clearly deteriorated. Her Christianity has caused her to believe that resisting pain is important because that is resisting “what isn’t true” (59). She also, like Sofi, steps outside the fourth wall at one point, recalling a moment when the other women heard her screaming, and she says that she doesn’t want anyone to tell that they saw her in this condition, and that Sofi said “ok.” By having the play be a memory play, there is an implication here that Eileen is accusing Sofi of breaking her word.
Elaine, in her sixties, has arrived from Dublin, New Hampshire, a town of only fifteen hundred or so. Before arriving, she has had to drop off her cat, Tony, at thyroid camp, originally thinking that Tony’s thyroid problems were a “hysterical response” (52) to her own thyroid problems, but it has turned out that Tony’s problems are real, and that he has to have “radioactive treatment,” and Elaine and her husband Craig watch Tony on “something called a Kitty Kam and they give you this code” by which they can watch their cat sleeping. Elaine has osteoporosis and chronic Lyme, and has been told by her daughter-in-law that “carbonation is bad for your bones” (11). She thinks listening to pornography would be “very depressing” (16), and spends much of her time drawing. She also purports to be somewhat of a food expert. She shares her recipe for gluten-free pancakes, notes that she only eats fruits that are in-season, and that “Organically grown doesn’t mean organic” (31). For the last twenty years, she has been giving puberty talks to middle school girls, but has recently been asked to elementary schools because there are girls getting their period in the third and fourth grades. She insists that the reason is pesticides. She also injects humor into the play when she tells the story of going to therapy with her husband because he screamed at her during their arguments, and that she learned to use a safe word with him when he was exhibiting this behavior, and that the safe word was “chimichanga.”
Ginnie, also in her sixties, is from Rio Vista, California, fifty miles south of Sacramento, sixty miles north of San Francisco, and famous for Foster’s Big Horn, a restaurant whose walls are filled with over 300 taxidermied animals, and home of the tradition that upon turning twenty-one, one hoists oneself onto the bar and kisses a moose. She has “autoimmune thyroid stuff,” but is mostly there because of her vertigo (13). This becomes retroactively funny and ironic when we learn that she is a soon-to-be-retired flight attendant (24). Ginnie somewhat functions as the group’s resident philosopher. She lectures the others on multiple topics, including: different types of sphincters, which day of treatment is the worst, the value of puking, the essence of compassion in the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, and how the Big Bang Theory causes “snow” on certain television channels, a topic she did a report on in high school. She also asserts, in response to Elaine’s comments on pesticides, that what is making everyone sick is “Bad sex” (32). She also reveals that her illness didn’t cause her to have a crisis, but it was when she learned that she “was never going to have children” (26). This comment proves to be at least somewhat ironic because we later learn that her “girlfriend has a son” (35), meaning that she has a “stepchild.”
The final attendee is Yvette, in her mid-sixties, who lives in Midland, Michigan, and who is Elaine’s roommate (We learn that solo rooms can be had for an extra fifty dollars a night). Yvette’s second cousin “narrates pornography for blind people” (15), and this generates a conversation about whether the women would listen to it and whether the desire to listen to or watch pornography is a generational thing. In response to Sofi’s saying that she has had a bladder problem, Yvette reveals that she has had her bladder removed, and that living with a pouch is better than living with constant pain. Yvette is the play’s epic storyteller, in long form. She starts one story with “Long story short” (19), and then goes on endlessly. She talks about a C-section nicking her bladder, having to pee constantly, her lupus symptoms, her night sweats, a rash on her face, a UTI, all the drugs she has been placed on, a body-wide fungal infection, blindness in one eye, the disappearance of the half-moons at the bottom of her fingernails, breast cancer, etc. She goes on so long that it resembles the catalogues of Walt Whitman, or the catalogue of ships in Homer’s Iliad. But what is most interesting about her is that in the midst of all her medical problems, she decided that she was “gonna take charge of my life” (20) and come to the clinic before she had to start chemo. She has been here for three weeks before, her tumor disappeared, but now her cancer is back. Still, she considers herself “this place’s number one fan” (21). Yvette is also the person who is most connected to the outside world. She announces “Another school shooting” (27) has taken place, and is reading a book about Holocaust survivors. She is also the first person to seriously talk about death. When the topic of the Thich Nhat Han poem about a Thai pirate who rapes a young girl comes up, Yvette correctly intuits Marx’s notion that being determines consciousness. In other words, if you grow up in the culture of the pirate, you are going to have his values, which is a somewhat different point from Thich Nhat Hahn, which is that we need to have compassion for everyone and see ourselves in everyone.
In this world of women, the final character is a man, Nelson, who, like Daniel Deronda, seriously enters the text relatively late. While men are occasionally at the clinic, it is apparently rare, and the women take great note of him, a relatively younger man who works in “Fintech” (Financial Technology) in San Francisco, who enters shirtless, and who is in an open marriage with his wife Ceridwen, named after a Medieval enchantress. The only rule in their open marriage is that they have to tell the other one before engaging in extra-marital sex. He has fasted before, and this time plans on twenty-four days. His problem is his colon, he needs radiation, and he thinks no one has experienced the pain he has had, including childbirth, when having had to defecate through his mouth. He and Sofi get into a very explicit conversation about sex, and he shows her his colonoscopy photos. In the three days after this conversation, no one has seen him, and Ginnie says, “I heard he hasn’t left his room” (52). This provides an interesting moment on the different ways men and women deal with pain. While the women are almost always outside together talking about their pain or their sleep problems, Nelson chooses to stay in his room and suffer alone. On Sofi’s last day, Nelson proposes a sexual encounter between the two; but when Sofi says she would like it to last seven hours, Nelson humorously replies that he could only handle ten minutes of making out, and so nothing happens .
By now, Sofi has been there twelve or thirteen days. Elaine, Yvette, and Ginnie have all left, and Eileen is the only one still there. They have this incredibly tender moment where Eileen reveals that her pain gets alleviated when her husband lifts her feet up in the air for fifteen minutes every night, and she then lets Sofi do it. After that, Sofi’s phone rings for her ride to the airport, and the play is over.
The play does not end. There is no conventional conclusion. It merely stops. There’s no indication that any of the women (or man) have been “cured.” Life will go on infinitely in whatever way it does. In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” we find the lines, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” This is meant to convey a kind of inertia, boredom, and lack of connection. Annie Baker is exactly the opposite. Here, the women come and go talking about their lives and their pain. In E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, there is the famous line, “only connect.” This is what the women do. They connect in profound ways, even if only for a short time. How they do that is through communicative speech acts. In Baker’s world, talk is never cheap; because ultimately, that is all we have.