Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker

Annie Baker
● American playwright and teacher
● Graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School of the
Arts & earned her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College
● Won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick
● Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017
● The New Yorker said Baker "wants life onstage to be so vivid, natural, and
emotionally precise that it bleeds into the audience’s visceral experience of time
and space. Drawing on the immediacy of overheard conversation, she has
pioneered a style of theatre made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while
using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention...."
● Fun fact: One of her early jobs was as a guest-wrangler helping to oversee
contestants on The Bachelor
● Fun fact #2: Baker is Noah Baumbach’s sister-in-law!

Circle Mirror Transformation

● One of four Baker plays set in the ficitonal town of Shirley, Vermont
● Developed at the Sundance Institute in 2008
● Premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009
● Received its European premiere in a Royal Court Theatre production
● Received Obie Awards for Best New American Play, Performance, Ensemble
and Directing
● Baker said that she "wanted the audience to learn about the characters through
formal theater exercises. I knew I wanted there to be excruciating silences. I
knew I wanted a doomed class romance that left one character embarrassed and
the other heartbroken. I knew I wanted the characters to deliver monologues as
each other....Eventually I realized that the fun of the play is the fact that it's
confined to this dull, windowless little space."
● Baker explained that, "like many of her works, Circle Mirror grew out of research,
contemplation and 'fragments of ideas.' She wanted to watch amateurs learn to
act. In a windowless room in a community center."
● The New York Times called the play "absorbing, unblinking and sharply funny"
and wrote: "The artificiality of the acting games just emphasizes the naturalness
of the characters’ real lives and feelings. Group members pose as trees, beds
and baseball gloves. They perform emotional scenes using only the words
goulash and ak-mak. They pretend to be one another, telling their life stories.
They write deep, dark secrets (anonymously) on scraps of paper and listen,
sitting in a circle on the floor, as the confessions are read aloud.