In “The Antipodes,” Annie Baker’s deadpan satire from 2017, the play wright, having spent some time writing for television, showed us her version of Hell. It looks a lot like a Los Angeles writers’ room, where a table of seven men and one frequently interrupted woman generate plot ideas by relaying intimate anecdotes from their own lives. The entertainment industry’s appetite for narrative is bottomless, and, as the writers keep offering up private stories to feed it, the auto-cannibalizing starts to go wrong. A Biblical storm rises outside, and reality cracks open, as it sometimes does in a Baker play, to let the uncanny come through.
Baker’s latest comic drama, the much anticipated and pandemic-delayed “Infinite Life,” at the Atlantic, is “Antipodes”’s exact opposite: arid where the 2017 play is flooded; featuring mostly women, with a single, token man. It’s also a surprisingly sincere, even passionate answer to her earlier horror-satire’s question about affliction in art. At a clinic north of San Francisco, patients are fasting to arrest the diseases—cancer, chronic Lyme—that are consuming them. As they starve, their metabolisms slow, and, for some, their symptoms recede. “The Antipodes” and “Infinite Life” are both waypoints in Baker’s thinking about suffering, but, for all its references to pain-as-hellfire, “Infinite Life” isn’t infernal. Where nothing is fed, nothing can grow, so nothing can die. Mortality is on hold. The clinic is a Purgatory for its patients—but it’s also a kind of bizarre Eden.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 25, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 25, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
ANTIHERO
“The Boys,” on Prime Video.
HOW THE WEST WAS LONG
“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1.”
WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Taffy Brodesser-Akner weighs the cost of generational wealth.
TWICE-TOLD TALES
The seditious writers who unravel their own stories.
CASTING A LINE
The hard-bitten genius of Norman Maclean.
TEARDROPS ON MY GUITAR
Four years ago, when Ivan Cornejo was a junior in high school, he had a meeting with his family to announce that he was dropping out. His parents were alarmed, of course, but his older sister, Pamela, had a more sympathetic reaction, because she also happened to be his manager, and she knew that he wasn’t bluffing when he said that he had to focus on his career.
THE HADAL ZONE
Arwen Rasmont waits hours at Keflavík International for his flight; they call it as he leaves the men’s room. He walks past the mirrored wall and is assaulted, as usual, by his dead father’s handsome image: high-arched nose, yellow hair.
OPENING THEORY
Ivan is standing on his own in the corner while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around.
THE LAST RAVE
Remembering a summer of estrangement.
КАНО
I’ve dated all kinds of women in my life,” the man said, “but I have to say I’ve never seen one as ugly as you.”