Baker captures the mundanity and magnitude of women's chronic illness.
Illness - the obstacle that our hero must overcome to find a greater moral. Prescribing meaning to pain helps us find solace in it, a biblical belief that there may be a greater purpose behind suffering. However, Annie Baker’s newest slow burn, Infinite Life, centres on the mundane kind of pain and Sophie’s growth as a character comes from accepting that there is no lesson to be learned, nor is there anything here to transcend.
Sofie is so desperate to alleviate her chronic pain that she’s travelled all the way to Northern California to a holistic health centre run by a mysterious doctor whose job seems to be nothing more than prescribing individual timelines for lengthy water or juice fasts. There she meets clinic veteran, Eileen (Marylouise Burke), and over time (and they have a lot of it), she begins to connect with the rest of the women, all of whom are there for the same reason: A last hope that starving the illness might alleviate their constant pain.
The fasting recedes pain for some, but only after intensifying it; The only way to see if it’s a miracle cure is to wait it out. And so we watch these women spend their days in comfy clothes with water bottles in hand, on patio chairs in the melting heat as they trade seemingly mundane stories about past relationships, assorted illnesses, and the practical logistics of doing voice-over for porn.
The longer they fast, the more they enter a sort of nonsensical hallucinatory headspace that exhausts any lingering filters and brings out a dry, raunchy humour. The conversations are endlessly dark, and yet they never feel overly heavy. Maybe these women have accepted the pain they carry, or maybe it’s just the starvation getting to them.
The awkward silence and deliberate slowness we see with Eileen and Sofie meeting in the first scene sets the tone for the entire show. The silence here is dense, and just like the Derrida book Sofie is reading, it takes a second to feel completely immersed in it. Time inches along so slowly and gradually, until suddenly, and often in the middle of scenes, Sofie will break the fourth wall, springing us forward in time. Time here moves as pain does: sustained, persistent and erratic.
Sofie is on a break with her husband after chronic pain brought out “the monster” in her and so the thickest moment of tension is her moment alone with Nelson (Pete Simpson), the shirtless fintech guy in an open relationship (he just needs to call his wife first). There is a clear pull between the two, but their flirting becomes grossly unsexy as Sofie talks about her troubles climaxing and Nelson shows her pictures of his colon. Sofie thinks this mutual understanding means he could be her saviour; Her chronic pain must be punishment for her sins and she is desperate for redemption.
By creating a show where each character is coping with a boring, uneventful illness, Baker strips all meaning away from pain. Instead, it becomes a faded backdrop, the constant sound of fireflies in the background, a story about one’s bladder removal told for the millionth time.
Infinite Life captures the sustained and enduring, randomly intensifying, but never fully realising, nature of pain. However, there is no defeat here, underneath these women remains a persistent spirit, a slow determination, a fire that continues to endure.
Infinite Life By Annie Baker
Wed 22 Nov 2023 – Sat 13 Jan 2024
Dorfman Theatre
תגובות