About the Play:

The Flick has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.

The Flick is a full-length dramatic comedy by Annie Baker. This internationally celebrated masterpiece follows three young employees of a dilapidated movie theatre that still uses a 35mm projector. A hilarious and heart-rending cry for authenticity in a fast-changing world, The Flick magically exposes the souls of lonely people in danger of being left behind in the new digital age.

The Flick takes place in 2012, in a run-down, single-screen movie theater in central Massachusetts. Three underpaid employees sweep up popcorn, scrape gum off the seats, and attend to one of the last 35-millimeter film projectors in the state. Though their lives are seemingly mundane and ordinary – their struggles and aspirations are anything but. Their tiny battles and not-so-tiny heartbreaks play out in the empty aisles, becoming more gripping than the lackluster, second-run movies on screen. In the dingy aisles of the theater, underneath the amusing, idle workplace banter, these characters are fighting for the noblest of pursuits: authentic connection in a world that is passing them by. With keen insight and a finely-tuned comic eye, The Flick pays tribute to the power of movies and paints a heartbreaking portrait of three characters and their working lives that will give your audience a front row seat to a hilarious, yet heart-rending immersive theatre experience they won't soon forget. The Pulitzer Prize committee called the play a "thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theatre, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage."

The Flick premiered in 2013 by Playwrights Horizons at the Mainstage Theater Off-Broadway in New York City. A critical hit, Annie Baker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Obie Award for Playwriting, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It premiered in the UK in 2016 at the National Theatre in London. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, fringe festival, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Funny, heartbreaking, sly and unblinking… The Flick may be the best argument anyone has yet made for the continued necessity and profound uniqueness of theater." — New York Magazine

"Hilarious and ineffably touching… Ms. Baker's peerless aptitude for exploring how people grope their way toward a sense of equanimity, even as they learn to accept disappointment, is among the things that make her such a gifted writer… This lovingly observed play will sink deep into your consciousness." — The New York Times

"This hypnotic, heartbreaking micro-epic about movies and moving on is irreducibly theatrical." — TimeOut NY

About the Playwright:

Annie Baker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright and teacher. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide.