The Flick NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Love, friendship and the daily grind all take on a distinctly sticky quality in “The Flick,” a moving, beautifully acted and challengingly long new play...Without question 'The Flick' requires your patience, but it rewards that patience too, bountifully."
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"We would tire of these flawed souls—each retarded, in the strictest sense of the word—were Baker not so sympathetic or the actors so perfectly cast and a joy to watch...Best of all: This hypnotic, heartbreaking micro-epic about movies and moving on is irreducibly theatrical; it could never be adapted for the big screen."
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"No one does anything generally regarded as theatrical. So what does happen in The Flick? The tenderest drama — funny, heartbreaking, sly, and unblinking — now playing at a theater near you...It’s uncanny; rarely has so much feeling been mined from so little content. Something’s lost in the process, of course: brevity. Baker’s technique requires lots of time, not much of it devoted to speech...But for me, the silence, like a halo, makes everything it surrounds more beautiful."
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"Annie Baker’s up-close portraits of ordinary people have earned her the label of master miniaturist. She remains true to form when it comes to the intimacy in her acutely observed and affecting new character study. But at three hours, the play is anything but mini...The pace is deliberately slow; the tone relentlessly mellow. 'The Flick' demands patience for a payoff. And it reaps satisfying dividends thanks to fine-tuned writing, acting and direction."
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"This never-dull and consistently surprising scribe observes the aimless lives of three movie theater ushers with sharp insight and grave tenderness...It’s the dramatic intention of this savvy scribe to convey, in something like real time, the stultifying, stupefying, brain-eating boredom of the no-exit lives these alienated young people are trapped in. But it doesn't take three hours to accomplish this, and after the first two hours, it feels like self-indulgence."
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"It’s good, sometimes very good, but it’s not even close to great...Baker renders the tedium of petty jobs and the filling of hours with deadpan accuracy, and she doesn’t shy from the painful impact of betrayal. But you also wish she’d get out of her comfort zone and test herself against greatness. A failure may be more powerful than her current success."
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"One thing that was apparent was the preponderance of young people, almost all of whom appeared rapt in their recognition of the precisely distilled interaction between the play's characters. What was remarkable to witness was the willingness of a generation engaged in speedy if not instant visual and communicative gratification to plunge into Baker's signature world of people who articulate in halting, half-sentences and through the subtlest indications of body language. "
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"The cast is exceptional, and the play is quietly breathtaking...They want to capture the rhythms of daily life, the real way that people speak; this takes time. At the same time, Baker is also bursting with things she wants to tell us about the three central characters – about their life stories, about their interaction, about their relationship over time – and also about the evolution of the American movie theater. The result of these two impulses is a play that takes on too much."
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