Review Roundup: THE FLICK Returns Off-Broadway

Annie Baker's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, The Flick, returns to Off-Broadway, directed once again by Sam Gold and featuring Alex Hanna, Louisa Krause, Matthew Maher, and Aaron Clifton Moten, reprising their acclaimed performances. Opening night is tonight, May 18, at the Barrow Street Theatre (27 Barrow Street, corner of Seventh Avenue).

The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013 and, in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, won its author a 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting.

In a run-down movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees mop the floors and attend to one of the last 35-millimeter film projectors in the state. Their tiny battles and not-so-tiny heartbreaks play out in the empty aisles, becoming more gripping than the lackluster, second-run movies on screen.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Charles Isherwood, The New York Times: It's less Ms. Baker's matter than her manner that makes "The Flick" get under people's skin, in ways both good and bad. There's nothing radical about the language or the story, nor anything visibly avant-garde to shock the sensibility. No surrealism. No obscurity. No stylized acting. No puppets...More than most playwrights working today, Ms. Baker really does have an interest in holding the proverbial Shakespearean mirror up to nature to illuminate the way we treat each other and the way we communicate...The acting matches the fine-grained writing to perfection...Mr. Maher's Sam, with his surface affability barely masking a soul in quiet torment, has grown much richer and more detailed. Ms. Krause's Rose exudes a casually snarky vibe that's amusing, but she also locates the character's complicated humanity with clean precision. And Mr. Moten's bespectacled (of course) Avery remains hilarious in his textbook geekiness - he's hyper-articulate and speaks and even moves with a robotic awkwardness - but also reveals himself to be the most sensitive and morally mature character...

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: Helmer Sam Gold recreates his hyper-naturalistic take on the material...in a brilliantly engineered production that features the original, dead-perfect cast of four. Sam, the 35-year-old head usher played with unflinching honesty by Matthew Maher, is quietly, desperately in love with the unattainable projectionist, Rose, a green-haired vixen played with deadpan sex appeal by Louisa Krause...she humiliates Sam by making a beeline for the new usher, 20-year-old Avery, a rich college kid reduced to a quivering bundle of neuroses in Aaron Clifton Moten's lacerating performance...Baker's signature style draws its dark humor from the unnerving candor of her closely observed characters and the authenticity of their dialogue...The labored tempo that works in the first act becomes strained in the second. We've adjusted to the work pace and are caught up in the characters. But the digital world is pounding at the door, and to keep putting off the day of reckoning is just cruel.

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: ...it all works, thanks to the incisive characterizations, sensitive direction and fully lived-in performances by the ensemble...Under the expert direction of that playwright's regular collaborator, Sam Gold, the ensemble...is pitch-perfect, bringing subtle layers of depth to what might have been stereotypical characters...There are times when The Flick feels undeniably and willfully self-indulgent, most notably in an anguished phone monologue by Avery delivered in near darkness, which seems to go on forever. The play could probably have made the same points at far less length. But then we would have been deprived of the opportunity of spending so much time with these characters, who by the evening's end have thoroughly burrowed under our skin.

Robert Kahn, NBC New York: Annie Baker's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is filled with pauses; sometimes, audiences are asked to watch an actor mop the floors and pick up trash. Also, very little happens...Sold? Nah? Well, hold on...It also feels like a remarkably genuine depiction of what we often hear tossed around as "the human condition"...All the characters are self-serving, with Rose the worst of the trio. Each is eventually let down by the others. You can smell the funk of hopelessness on all of them ... it doesn't hurt that much of the dialogue is scatological in nature, or involves vomit, or in one case a single, smelly old shoe a patron leaves behind after a screening. Maher, in particular, gives a beguilingly layered performance -- on the surface, his Sam could be a 30-something-year-old loser who still lives in his parents' attic, but what claws through is an unabiding peace he seems to have made with his lot in life.

Jeremy Gerard, Deadline: Another kind of torture also is at play, in the collaboration between Baker and director Sam Gold, who in the service of naturalism, I suppose, have worried a smart, funny, poignant work into Chekhov strained through molasses. There are more pauses than in a Pinter anthology, filled not with Pinterian menace but with chin-stroking Russian-style ennui which, let's be honest, only gets you so far in life...And the thing of it is, on second viewing, I found myself completely drawn into the private worlds and fumbled intersections of these three ordinary lives (exquisitely played by these actors). Somewhere in the long spaces between words fitfully spoken are acutely and empathically observed people whose problems by the end I really got in to. And I concluded that sometimes, you just can't trust artists to know what they're about.

Matt Windman, AM New York: It begins with Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), an introverted college student and movie aficionado, learning the ropes from longtime, 30-something employee Sam (Matthew Maher), who can suddenly become very defensive and touchy. They are joined by Rose (Louisa Krause), a projectionist with a punk look and unpredictable nature. Their casual conversations and awkward encounters, through seemingly trivial, are quietly revealing, especially thanks to the nuanced, sensitive acting. These loner characters evolve to at least some extent, and the movie theater does too when a new owner comes in and installs a digital projector, much to Avery's distress. There's no denying that "The Flick" requires a good deal of patience from its audience. But by the end, after three hours and fifteen minutes, I was so hooked that I could have lingered even longer.

Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer: How does Annie Baker's The Flick mesmerize us when nothing seems to be happening, and rivet our attention when nobody seems to be saying anything particularly important?...she illuminates the lives of three unhappy, dreary people played by the same fine actors reassembled for this Barrow Street Theatre production...The emphasis is on visual image, not dialogue; film, as Edward Albee has said, hates words, and theatre loves them. The pauses here are of astonishing length -- Pinter, in his wildest dreams, never risked this...Like most good ensemble shows, each actor gets a chance to shine: Rose's dance is jaw-dropping, Sam's declaration of love to Rose is excruciating, and Avery's one-sided conversation with, I assume, his psychiatrist is a masterpiece of the understated. I am enchanted and mystified by this long, long, fine, fine play that refuses to pander to either our need for sentimental reassurances or our impatience. 3¼ hours seems just right.

Check back for updates!

Photo Credit: Philip Rinaldi Publicity