The Vermont Plays: Four Plays

"(Baker's) heartbreaking works of staggering focus have actually rescued realism from the aesthetic scrap heap" -- Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

"Baker has as natural an ear for how people talk--and shut up--as any American playwright of recent years... She is the aural equivalent of a good photo-realist painter, someone who makes us see the quotidian in such heightened detail that it looks almost shockingly new." --Ben Brantley, New York Times

"Baker is a writer whose plays have a quiet, hypnotic charm, a grace and humor. She's able to take ordinary, low-key situations--a small-town acting class, guys wasting time in an alley behind a cafe--and fill them with gentle comedy, generosity of spirit and an eye (and ear) for the foibles that make us all so hopelessly human." --Village Voice

With her quartet of plays set in small-town Vermont, twenty-nine-year-old Annie Baker is making a big impact on the American theater. Circle Mirror Transformation, which takes place in a summer acting class and alternates between theater exercises and moments between classmates, shares the 2010 OBIE Award for Best Play with The Aliens, Baker's "gentle and extraordinarily beautiful new play" (The New York Times) that explores weighty topics of love and death through the easy banter of the slackers behind the local coffee shop. Also included in The Vermont Plays is Body Awareness, set during Body Awareness Week at the local college, and Nocturama, in which a twenty-six-year-old Brooklynite returns to live with his mom and video game obsessed stepfather.

Annie Baker's plays include Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, The End of the Middle Ages, and Nocturama. Her honors include a New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citation, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nomination, and a Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship.