Pauses, pain and the Pulitzer: How Annie Baker became the world’s coolest living playwright

Her three-hour play ‘The Flick’, about downtrodden ushers at a failing cinema, won Annie Baker the Pulitzer Prize and an ardent following of admirers. In a rare interview, she talks to Andrzej Lukowski about avoiding the spotlight, how being in physical pain inspired her new play ‘Infinite Life’, and why Brad Pitt would never be cast in her work

Annie Baker: ‘I don’t reread my old plays because I think I’d find it unbearable’ (Ella Pennington)

I wish I was one of those people who was comfortable with, like, a 45-second pause,” sighs playwright Annie Baker during a break from rehearsals at the National Theatre.

It’s hard to work out if she’s joking. No writer since Pinter has been so associated with pauses as Baker, and certainly none have been so acclaimed for it: her astonishing, Pulitzer Prize-winning breakthrough play The Flick – about a trio of ushers at a failing movie theatre – was a relatively conventional comedy on paper, but felt like some sort of cosmic trip in performance thanks to its gargantuan three-hour runtime, around half of which was silence.

She was feted more or less from the get-go: as a twentysomething she scored glowing reviews for her low-key, beautifully observed comedies set in smalltown Vermont. Two of those – The Aliens and Circle Mirror Transformation – made it over here, where they were warmly received. The Flick, however, changed everything. While somewhat divisive – not everyone wants to sit through a three-hour play that’s 50 per cent silence – it was the moment when people started to seriously discuss her as a contender for America’s greatest writer. Follow-up plays John and The Antipodes were flat-out astonishing, retaining the dry humour of her early work but adding wild metaphysical flourishes that thrillingly expanded her palette to include shades of everyone from Caryl Churchill to HP Lovecraft.