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Review Roundup: INFINITE LIFE World Premiere Opens At Atlantic Theater Company
Infinite Life is now in performances and opens Tuesday, September 12th for a limited engagement through Sunday, October 8th Off-Broadway at The Linda Gross Theater.
By: A.A. Cristi Sep. 12, 2023
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Atlantic Theater Company is presenting the world premiere production of Infinite Life, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker (Body Awareness) and directed by Obie Award winner James Macdonald (Cloud Nine). Read the reviews below.
Infinite Life is now in performances and opens Tuesday, September 12th for a limited engagement through Sunday, October 8th Off-Broadway at The Linda Gross Theater (330 West 20th Street).
The cast of Infinite Life features Marylouise Burke (True West), Mia Katigbak (Scenes From a Marriage), Christina Kirk (Clybourne Park), Kristine Nielsen (Tony Award nominee, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike), Brenda Pressley (The Lyons), and Pete Simpson (Is This a Room).
Five women in Northern California sit outside on chaise lounges and philosophize. A surprisingly funny inquiry into the complexity of suffering, and what it means to desire in a body that's failing you.
Infinite Life features sets by dots, costumes by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, lighting by Isabella Byrd, sound by Bray Poor, makeup, hair & special effects by Alfreda “Fre” Howard, props by Noah Mease, and casting by Caparelliotis Casting, Joe Geary, CSA. Laura Smith serves as production stage manager.
Jesse Green, The New York Times: That the characters also live in a world of ideas gives the play its intellectual heft and complex texture, both light and profound. The contrast is beautifully maintained by the physical production, in which even the breeze-block wall framing the patio, by the design studio dots, is on point: a tracery of concrete and air. The women’s stretchy sweats, batik pajamas and lightweight cover-ups, by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, signify comfort but also the need for it. Birdsong and road noise are the poles of Bray Poor’s bifurcated sound world. And in Isabella Byrd’s lighting design, the minute we get used to the nearly invisible night, with just a cellphone to see by, we are snapped into the harsh May sun of the following midday.
Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: Enthralling, strange, mordant, witty, jolting, mysterious: elements of Annie Baker’s new play, Infinite Life (Atlantic Theater, to Oct 8) echo some of her past masterpieces, like the Pulitzer and Obie-winning The Flick, John, and The Antipodes. A semblance of a real world, and very real people, stand in front of us, yet this also feels a world away from our own—and they too are like us while also more exposed, yet unknowable.
Dan Rubins, Slant: Baker’s rendering of her characters’ experience of pain and illness—or rather her rendering of their attempts to capture those experiences in language—is blazingly visceral, especially in those pauses. So much of what these visitors try to explain to each other are the knotty, naughty ways that their pain intersects or interferes with their pleasure, how their ideas of what the body is for warp and wither. And their emotional sorrow as they struggle to be understood ultimately stands in for the physical pain that fortunate, pain-free audience members can’t imagine. It’s the searingly silent search for words that ultimately expresses this agony most succinctly.
David Cote, Observer: At 105 minutes with no intermission, scenes that unfold in crepuscular dimness that snaps abruptly to bright daylight (scrupulously modulated by Isabella Byrd) and a script full, of course, of squirm-inducing fleshly woe, Infinite Life may trigger theatergoers of delicate sensibilities—in addition to the pause-averse. (I heard at least one mid-show exit the night I attended.) But lean in and surrender to the rhythm and you’ll find the most satisfying new work since last season’s Downstate, with an obscenely gifted cast.
Frank Scheck, New York Srage Review: The ensemble is composed of a gallery of estimable theatrical pros, but they have so little to work with that even such normally standout performers as Burke and Nielsen barely make an impression. Although Burke does provide some suspense merely by walking from one end of the stage to the other in such slow, plodding fashion that you begin to wonder if she’ll make it. Kirk delivers the most vivid portrayal, conveying her character’s emotional desperation and physical anguish with palpable intensity. Her performance is the most stirring element of an evening which otherwise has the feel of an ASMR video.
David Finkle, New York Stage Review: If there is anything, um, debilitating about Infinite Life, it’s that the action — or inaction — is dictated by the halting rhythms of pain. Also, an acknowledged aspect of pain is that once it abates, it’s no longer felt. Audiences exiting likely won’t have felt actual pain in sympathy with the characters but maybe will understand its enervating effects as never before. Baker deserves much thanks for that.
Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: As she has demonstrated from her very first Off-Broadway play back in 2009, “Circle Mirror Transformation,“ Annie Baker is skilled in suggesting that there is something extraordinary beneath the surface of everyday events in the lives of ordinary people. Her plays, long and slow with many moments of silence, have always required patience, but we’re often rewarded for our attention. The New York productions of Annie Baker’s plays have served as showcases for wonderfully talented casts, cluing us into what’s happening – emotionally, psychologically, even thematically — with the smallest and most precise of gestures and expressions. Those rewards felt fewer this time around. For one, the cast is, as usual, wonderful, but many are underutilized,
Elysa Gardner, New York Sun: Playwright Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work has sometimes been compared to that of the late Harold Pinter, due to the dramatically and emotionally charged pauses in her dialogue. Yet it might be more accurate, if similarly reductive, to describe her as the anti-David Mamet.
Lauren Mechling, The Guardian: Infinite Life is often mesmerizing and undeniably audacious. Usually, Baker’s pieces share similar contours: they start out in some seemingly random corner of the world and the pathos and poignancy slowly come bubbling up. Now she has inverted the equation and front-loaded a play with no less heavy a theme than female suffering. From there she works backwards to underscore the flat and funny undertones contained in her characters’ plights. In the age of Barbie and the trauma plot, Infinite Life is an undeniably important and timely work. But the levity and weirdness vibrate at a low frequency, and the Annie Baker seesaw feels treacherously out of whack.
Sara Holdren, Vulture: It’s dicey, and usually inaccurate, to start throwing around words like Chekhovian, but there is a reason Annie Baker has been compared to the immortal Russian doctor, and it’s not the pauses. What she shares with him is an ability to place characters for whom she has both scientific fascination and infinite compassion in a mundane situation that both is and is not a metaphor, and then let them simply struggle to live. The clinic is real, and Infinite Life is a play about pain and illness — about the messed-up guilt and meaning we ascribe to these uncontrollable things, and the crises of identity and faith that they cause, and the way in which they so often go ignored, dismissed, under-researched, and preyed upon, especially in women.
Joey Sims, Theatrely: The play’s greatest joy is simply spending time with these characters as they shoot the shit. Under James MacDonald’s meticulous direction, an ensemble of seasoned vets digs pleasingly deep into Baker’s rich dialogue and aching pauses. Brenda Pressley and Kristine Nielsen channel decades of lived experience with the slightest shared glance. Any concern that chronic illness can’t yield comedy is quickly dispelled by the perfectly deployed Mia Katigbak, who delivers a seemingly endless, truly hysterical monologue detailing every ailment she has ever suffered.
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