World’s End Theater presents free reading of Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker’s comedy-drama
As the May entry in their once-a-month free play reading series, World’s End Theater (WET) presents Annie Baker’s comedy-drama Circle, Mirror, Transformation, which The New York Times, in a 2009 review, called “absorbing, unblinking and sharply funny.”
Just last week Baker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for another of her plays, The Flick. The reading will take place at 8 p.m. on May 3, at the Philipstown.info/The Paper space at 69 Main St., Cold Spring.
Set in a small town (perhaps a bit like this one), in Vermont, in a community center drama class, the play, with scenes transpiring over the course of six successive weeks, examines the interplay between five characters, through the seemingly silly theater games they play which eventually draw out some very real truth-telling.
In a Washington Post review Peter Marks said, “The games people play to open themselves up in acting class can sure look idiotic. Practicing greeting rituals, chanting nonsense words, embodying inanimate objects, the participants often seem engaged in delusional navel-gazing … Ah, but this is where the imaginative intervention of a cunning dramatist can work wonders, as with the eminently satisfying outcome in Circle Mirror Transformation, Annie Baker’s comically insightful merging of brittle epiphanies and adult education.”
The reading promises to be, according to director Alison Rooney, “conversational, truthful and smile-inducing, all in non hammered-home’ ways.” The cast consists of Tom Carrigan, Malachy Cleary, Alison Duncan, Cat Guthrie and Christine Wright.
Tickets for WET readings are free, and space is on a first-come, first-served basis. Visit worldsendtheater.org for more information.
