American playwright Annie Baker, a Pulitzer prize winner and awardee of the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”, wrote her first play in 2008. Since then, her works have been performed in Australia lovingly but sparingly across a mix of independent and main stages.
In Sydney, Baker’s attention to the minutia of human communication, psychology and behaviour – manifested by characters stumbling over their sentences, breaking off mid-syllable and lapsing into pauses that can stretch on for minutes – has been most keenly observed by indie company Outhouse Theatre Co, working in tiny black box theatres. Baker’s plays have thrived in these intimate spaces, where it feels like their sense of time becomes yours: you fall into Baker’s pauses, breathing with the actors as their chests rise and fall.
Now Sydney Theatre Company is finally tackling Baker’s work, with a new production of her 2009 play Circle Mirror Transformation, directed by Dean Bryant (Dear Evan Hansen, Hubris and Humiliation), using STC’s flexible Wharf 1 space to scale up intimacy for a larger audience.
Circle Mirror Transformation follows a group of people at their most vulnerable but also their most expansive: in an amateur drama class at the local community centre. This is Baker’s second play and it’s one of her gentlest and most accessible; there are fewer of those stretches of silence designed to provoke and then transcend discomfort.
The class is facilitated by Marty, played by Gold Logie winner Rebecca Gibney (Wanted, Packed to the Rafters) with her signature warmth and openness. Marty leads her class in drama games, using subtle signalling to bring a character in or change the game’s pacing – a gentle and generous steward of these self-conscious humans. As she puts them more at ease, it seems to extend to the audience: if you glance into the giant mirror-backed rehearsal room set (by Jeremy Allen), you can see your fellow theatregoers settle and shift into the play in real time, lulled into close, comfortable attention.
This is Marty’s inaugural six-week class, and her husband, James, (Cameron Daddo, in a pleasantly understated performance) helps her pad out the numbers. Their relationship crackles and changes over the course of the play, one of a growing chorus of complexities that emerges as we watch the group try out new selves alongside the monologues, memory games and exercises designed to hone their ability to listen, be present and connect.
They’re joined by Schultz (a charmingly hangdog Nicholas Brown), a recently divorced carpenter; Theresa (Jessie Lawrence, bright and bold), an actor who has left New York in search of a new and better life; and Lauren (Ahunim Abebe, in an astounding company debut), a closed-off teenager who unfurls, almost despite herself, over the course of the play. As the characters get to know each other, there are ripples of romance, glimpses of catharsis, long-held memories released and secrets divulged.
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The play is a lovely one, full of the jewels of connection and burdens of sorrow that happen every day. Bryant, who works across plays and musicals, finds a rhythm in these scenes that flows like melody, pairing Baker’s trademark silences with joyful rushes of conversation and carefully timed moments of action. Abebe is the soul of the work, both the funniest and most poignant character, her reticence a natural counter to Gibney’s heart and deliberate openness.
Bryant is also a director who loves and honours his characters and the communities they establish together, which leads to a heart-first production that saws off some of Baker’s sharper edges, letting harsher words and jokes land more softly and sweetly.
In his director’s note, Bryant describes Baker’s desire to break from plot-heavy dramas to instead capture the small moments that cumulatively make and shape a life. Bryant is asking for our close attention to the people on stage as they develop their own muscles for paying attention. The production feels like an offer – gently facilitated, like inviting us into the circle for an improv game. What if, it says, we bring this same attention and sense of being present to our own lives? How much more might we care for a stranger if we remembered they contain a universe of memory and experience and feeling, just as we do?
