The demand for the show was so great last year that Red Stitch is remounting it at their home theatre. The cast is the same, and includes Red Stitch ensemble actor Ben Prendergast playing Sam (the other two Red Stitchers are Ngaire Dawn Fair and Dion Mills, along with guest actor Kevin Hofbauer). Prendergast says the team feels really good to be staging the play at Red Stitch. “It’s a beautiful feeling.” The play tells the story of three young people facing loneliness and heartbreak. “They are three diametrically opposed characters. Avery (Hofbauer) has his own issues; he’s young and black, and privileged, in comparison to Rose and Sam. His dad’s a professor.” Prendergast’s character, Sam, he says, is a victim of circumstance and at the same time, so much more. “He’s the oldest of the three, at 35, he still lives with his parents, he never really went to college, and he’s paralysed by his class and his station. And he has a massive crush on Rosie,” Prendergast adds. “ Rose (Fair) reminds me of every great ’90s female heroine. The sort of character Janeane Garofalo would play. She’s brash, she doesn’t give a fuck. She torments the other two cos they’re working for her. What she says, goes. That’s on the surface of it, but there’s a whole another layer of insecurity in her. It’s never told. The text never supports the subtext. This sort of writing requires good directing. It’s a new US classic.”
So back to Tass. Challenges for both actors and director lie within the language of the text, she says. “The quick pace and comic timing are different from the conventional. There’s a different rhythm. The Flick is funny and wrenching and funny and wrenching and funny and wrenching. It’s so clearly the lives of three people who work in a small cinema. One is full of dreams, one filled with ambition, and the third is incredibly cynical. It really shows where the young people are in their lives. It focusses on things that make human beings. They’re not the sort of people who go to the theatre. That’s not who we’re talking about. The play shows how young people struggle and it’s about where they put their own humour into that struggle. Annie Baker is completely clear about what this demographic is going through. And what they want. You know it’s about them. The play is richly nuanced in its life force, it’s very real and naturalistic, it highlights misery, the drudgery of people in the poorer pockets of society everywhere.”
Melbourne productions of Annie Baker’s work include The Alien, staged by Red Stitch in 2011, and the MTC production of Circle Mirror Transformation the same year. “She’s the ‘it’ girl of theatre right now,” says Prendergast. “I’ll admit to having a crush on her!” What does the actor like best about his character? “He’s absolutely all about truth and justice, but not anything else. He’s in denial about everything else, his life is in stasis. The play does seem to be about class issues,” he adds. Tass elaborates on the play’s theme of the poverty trap: “That gap is mammoth. I travel the world constantly with my work and I see it everywhere. The play does inadvertently deal with that, with the dispossessed; it’s reflected on the stage. Rose is earning $8.50 an hour. Often people writing plays are living in comfortable homes, and they’re are not faced with those problems most of the time. People who create theatre are often not of that world. Annie Baker is 33. She can relate to that new generation and she can really write theatre. The key thing about this production is that really is about all those people – people who don’t usually go to the theatre. Young people who see the play walk away overwhelmed, it reflects their lives – the constant disappointment they experience in their daily lives. This world is heartbreaking, their lives are mundane and heartbreaking and The Flick is a micro-epic about that, and it’s about movies. It’s confronting and pleasing and satisfying. Kind of funny. And heartbreaking. So real. This is what people walk away with.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
