STORY STUDY - MEDIUM: PLAY - “The Flick”
Whether it’s The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or a variety of other workplace shows, the point always seems to show the same message: life sucks. Sure, they’re all comedies, but they go through a sucky life with co-workers whose behaviors range from decent to unbearable. The only way to get through it is learning about each other, and getting it through together.
And that tradition continues to this week’s story: the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Flick.
Written by Annie Baker and premiered in 2013 in New York City, The Flick is about the three employees who work at The Flick, an old movie theater in Worcester County, MA, one of the last to project 35 millimeter film.
The play tells the lives of veteran employees Sam and Rose, and newcomer Avery. There is a fourth actor who plays two characters, but he essentially plays extras.
Original Cast Members (from left to right):
Louisa Krause, Matthew Maher, Aaron Clifton Moten, Alex Hanna
Avery is a film aficionado who only thinks film is only film if it is shot on film, which is why he wanted to work at The Flick. Sam has worked at The Flick for a long time. His life is not going anywhere, so the job is all he has. The same goes for Rose, the only one of the employees who can work the projector.
Sam teaches Avery how the process works, which is how they connect. They even play a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon type game, where Sam mentions two actors, and Avery fills in the blanks by mentioning the films they have been in so there is a connection between the two.
The set itself is located inside the theater itself where they project the movie.
Some of the problems they encounter in this theater include food leftover in the aisles of the theater and cleaning up MAJOR bathroom problems that movie audiences leave behind.
Even though it’s bad enough they have to clean after people, that’s not why “life sucks” for these people, not even close.
What hits the message home (for the characters and the audience) is what Avery says at the end of the play. Without giving much context, he says “… I think the truth is you can’t trust anybody.” This leads him to say, “Don’t expect things to turn out well in the end,” and that it’s “every man for himself, you know?”
This is the mindset of someone who started off optimistic (a bit cynical, but optimistic), and now his mentality dramatically changes, all because life sucks.
While it’s not a message that I stand by as a way to fuel my life, I can definitely understand and even relate to what he went through. I think everyone can.
Once again, I picked up The Flick because any story involving movies, I’ll gladly pick up. In this case, the play revolves around a movie theater as opposed to movie making.
If you ever get the chance, pick up a copy, then sit back and relax, and give it a read.
