THE Flick’s namesake is a run-down, single-screen theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts. The Friday night shift every week is manned by the same three people.
Film-obsessed Avery takes a job at The Flick for one reason: it’s an analog oasis in the middle of a digital revolution — one of the last cinemas in the state with a 35mm projector. Sam (Ben Prendergast) shows Avery (Kevin Hofbauer) the ropes, sweeping up popcorn and offering nuggets of wisdom about how best to clean the soda machine. As they make their way from row to row in the empty cinema, Avery turns to Sam: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks. “I am grown up”, comes the reply. Sam’s 35, and they’re called dead-end jobs for a reason. Rose (Ngaire Dawn Fair), the green-haired projectionist, flits between sleepy-eyed indifference and unfiltered deadpan.These are the kind of characters that belong in the background, but playwright Annie Baker puts these slackers front and centre. They sweep, they mop, they mope. The trio chatter their way through shifts with banter about films — Avery insists there hasn’t been a great American film since Pulp Fiction, though Sam insists Avatar holds that mantle — the alleged evils of switching to digital projection, and the splitting of the “dinner money”, a skim-a-little-off-the-top scam that employees of The Flick have been running for generations. Everything comes to a head when the invisible owner, Steve, decides to sell.
Baker graduated from the school of show-don’t-tell with honours — and maybe a parade thrown in her honour — so the dialogue is spare. There are no here’s-how-I-feel speeches, no expository speechifying.
At just over three hours long, you could, in fact, speed things up a tad and easily shear an hour off the running time without cutting anything. Thankfully, director Nadia Tass never even flirts with the notion, faithfully adhering to Baker’s intentions. We get to watch what people do when nobody’s looking, when the doors are locked and all the signage turned off. There’s an almost Chekhovian weight to the minutiae on display here, and the constantly shifting triangle is infinitely gripping.
Baker’s text is a masterpiece — it won the Pulitzer this year — and Tass’s take on it is strikingly perfect, expertly traversing its frequent changes of pace and tone. You feel every minute of the three hours acutely, but you know you’re in the right hands.
This is streets ahead of Red Stitch’s standard fare and the cast is revelatory. Prendergast resists the very easy temptation to make Sam a creepy loser, instead conjuring a man shackled to his own existence, searching for an out. Fair is remarkable as Rose, finding the woman underneath the manic pixie dream girl. Hofbauer is the breakout star, though. His take on Avery is bold, restrained and delicately balanced, treading an incredible, sure-footed arc from curtain to curtain.
Shaun Gurton’s set is less than remarkable. There’s only one way to stage this play and while the rows of cinema seating and projection box are functional, the whole thing looks like it cost about $12. Gurton’s a brilliant designer, but this one feels phoned-in. David Parker’s lighting is perfectly serviceable, but it doesn’t do as much as it might. Russell Goldsmith and Daniel Nixon’s sound design is brilliant when it’s called for, but the tinkly Lifetime movie piano scene transitions are oddly cheesy.
This is Red Stitch’s finest work in recent memory and, as three-hour stints in movie theatres go, this one’s totally worth it.
