Circle Mirror Transformation
By (Author) Annie Baker
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
1st January 2014
18th July 2013
Main
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
812.6
Paperback
104
Width 125mm, Height 200mm, Spine 10mm
130g
'Thanks, you guys. I think this was a really, really great start.'
Five lost people come together at a community centre class to try and find some meaning in their lives. Counting to ten can be harder than you think. Over six tangled weeks their lives become knotted together in this tender and funny play.
Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play. It was voted one of the top ten plays of 2009 by the New York Times, Time Out and the New Yorker. It premiered in the UK as part of the Royal Court's Theatre Local strand of site specific productions across London.
The way that a complete picture of each of the characters is built up is stunningly accurate. A little room sucks in the whole world -- Aleks Sierz The Arts Desk A disarming surprise... remarkably open-minded in its supple, low-key way, shifting from the preposterous to the poignant, the tender to the silly, with a sharply observant but uncensorious spirit. -- Paul Taylor Independent Baker's writing is compassionate, cinematic (in an understated sort of way) and wonderfully, wonderfully droll. -- Andrzej Lukowski Time Out Baker is a perceptive observer of human frailty. -- Henry Hitchings Evening Standard A quirky, entertaining and quietly poignant piece... Scenes as apparently aimless as a group count-up to 10 or a dialogue improvised using nonsense words acquire a sudden powerful intensity as latent emotions bubble to the surface. -- Dominic Cavendish Daily Telegraph
Annie Baker grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her full-length plays include Body Awareness (Atlantic Theater Company, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play/Playwright), Circle Mirror Transformation (Playwrights Horizons, OBIE Award for Best New American Play, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Aliens (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Obie Award for Best New American Play; Bush Theatre, London), The End of the Middle Ages (commission for Soho Rep) and Nocturama. Her work has also been developed and produced at New York Theatre Workshop, MCC, Soho Rep, the Orchard Project, the Ontological-Hysteric, Ars Nova, the Huntington, South Coast Rep, the Magic Theater, the Cape Cod Theatre Project, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in Utah and Ucross, Wyoming. Recent honors include a New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citation, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nomination, a Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and commissions from Center Theatre Group and Playwrights Horizons.