About this item
Highlights
- A funny and profound meditation on the complexity of chronic illness and the ache of desire.At a clinic in Northern California, five women recline on patio lounge chairs.
- About the Author: Annie Baker's plays include The Antipodes, The Flick (Pulitzer Prize), John, The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.
- 120 Pages
- Drama, Women Authors
Description
Book Synopsis
A funny and profound meditation on the complexity of chronic illness and the ache of desire.
At a clinic in Northern California, five women recline on patio lounge chairs. They are fasting, drinking only water or juice in the hope that the deprivation will help their bodies begin to heal from a litany of afflictions--cancers and autoimmune disorders and thyroid conditions and mysterious infections. To distract themselves from the near-constant pain they are in, they philosophize and swap book recommendations, confide intimate family stories and share hopes for their future recoveries. Over the course of several days, the clinic becomes a purgatorial space, where prolonged hunger and suffering seem to warp time itself. The women's meandering discussions slowly accumulate a powerful emotional resonance, leading to deep and troubling questions: is there any meaning to be found in pain, or is it merely something to be endured? Can physical intimacy be an antidote to suffering, or is it only a brief distraction? An engrossing and compassionate play that resists easy answers to the problem of what it means to reside in a body that fails you.
Review Quotes
"Enthralling, strange, mordant, witty, jolting, mysterious." --The Daily Beast
"Despite the peachy terra-cotta-and-breeze-block patio that keeps Infinite Life's characters fenced in ... Baker's play feels capacious--ever widening its arms to hold more humanity, more searching spirit and more troubled flesh." --Vulture
"[Infinite Life] peeps at the greatest mysteries of life--in this case principally pain and desire, and what they have in common--through the tiny, seemingly inconsequential windows of banal human behavior." --New York Times
"[Baker] communicates the incommunicable not by making us feel physical anguish, obviously, but by loaning us the eerie suspension her characters experience as extreme hunger detaches them from their bodies. The Baker affect lets us drift with them, temporally; we sense time slipping away in unpredictable chunks. She makes us feel their tense stoicism, which is just one sensation removed from feeling their agony." --The New Yorker
" A lucid fever dream, a trippy vision of profound truth, an exploration of how desire and pain influence and are influenced by the feeble bags of meat our consciousness are bound to. It is another extraordinary play from a writer seemingly capable of nothing else." --Time Out London
About the Author
Annie Baker's plays include The Antipodes, The Flick (Pulitzer Prize), John, The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Her plays have been produced at more than two hundred theaters throughout the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwright Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.