The Brooklyn Rail

In 2010, Betsy Aidem played Marty, the acting teacher, in Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. Over six weeks in a dance studio in a small Vermont town, Marty led four students—her husband, a transplant, a loner, and a high schooler—through performance exercises: they tried counting to ten without interrupting one another, they became trees, they learned each other’s stories before reciting them. None of this added up to much “acting.” Weeks passed; tensions bubbled. Then, in the final week, Marty entered and turned on the studio’s lights. Sparks showered down—a bulb above her had burst.

Aidem must have been alarmed but only looked up at the broken light: You too? her tired face seemed to ask.

I was eighteen, and the play’s naturalism was so assured I thought this was intentional.

Circle Mirror Transformation’s spell continues to hold. Perhaps no contemporary play has had as long a tail as Baker’s hit. Premiering at Playwrights Horizons’s intimate Peter Jay Sharp Theater in 2009, it featured unremarkable characters, phatic dialogue, and (per Baker) “excruciating silences.” Such unsexy ingredients had a pull on audiences and critics—the show extended, and kept extending—but, most visibly, they recalibrated playwrights: Circle Mirror Transformation remains the blueprint for how to build a character-forward, ensemble-cast, one-act play. Its model is not only artistically rich but also financially practical; the play premiered right after the 2008 financial crisis, and its descendents, too, feature smaller companies and unit sets.

Circle Mirror Transformation’s sequential structure became one element for playwrights to customize. The passing weeks within the play invite the audience to better know the characters as they, over time, come to better know each other. Bess Wohl emulated this framework in Small Mouth Sounds (2015), which also features lost souls and time broken up by equal increments—days, in her play’s case, over which strangers on a four-day-long silent retreat practice reflection exercises together.

Beyond its imitable skeleton, Circle Mirror Transformation also highlighted a successful use of reserved theatricality. A shimmering gesture in the final moments of the play lifted it beyond its established naturalism, taking audiences—and contemporary playwrights—somewhere new.

“Five years?” Schultz, the loner, asks.

“Ten years,” Marty responds in the last week, and scene, of the play.

Schultz and the high schooler, Lauren, are asked to imagine running into one another a decade down the road. It is just another role play exercise, but as the lighting dims on the remaining classmates, we’ve actually arrived in the future. (At Huntington, Marie Polizzano, as Lauren, only had to straighten her spaghetti strap to suddenly, magically become an adult.)

In the sixteen years since Circle Mirror Transformation’s debut, many playwrights have, consciously or not, borrowed Baker’s formula: lean hard into realism to, in a final coup, break it.

In The Children (2016), Lucy Kirkwood sets up a kitchen sink drama about a nuclear physicist couple who recently retired, only for them to suit up again, and dance to songs from their youth, as the world around them actively crumbles. In The Minutes (2017), Tracy Letts’s city council meeting unfolds in real time before morphing into horror as members become the racist mouthpieces their roles’ decorum would not let them embody. And in Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain (2022), a climactic presentation about Arthur Miller’s play explodes into a riotous dance that imagines a world where men don’t dictate schoolgirls’ readings, or perceptions of self.

In each of these plays, as in Circle Mirror Transformation, preset rules orienting time and design are inverted to reveal the work’s subliminal intention.

These conclusions also offer a new vocabulary—physical or verbal—to acknowledge the play’s shift. With honest “um”s and “yeah”s from its characters, Circle Mirror Transformation was off-Broadway’s evocation of mumblecore, the indie film genre that took off alongside Baker’s anointing. But listen to how, in the play’s conclusion, Schultz sheds those filler words to confidently name his worth, and future wife, when Lauren asks if he’s happy: “I am. I am. I’m very happy. Susan is just… she changed my life around. And business is going really well.”

Sanaz Toossi’s Karaj-set English (2022) also flipped language in its final gesture. After struggling to speak English throughout the entire play, the tense Elham finally relaxes when speaking Farsi, and the audience witnesses a new person.

Like Baker’s play, Toossi’s also features a naturalistic tone, scenes separated by weeks, a teacher with four students, and games played in a circle. Baker’s building blocks are omnipresent, and I myself am not immune. Last year, my hypernaturalistic play The Voices in Your Head (co-created with Grier Mathiot) had actors seated in a support group circle, beside audience members, with characters moving through a leader’s storytelling exercises. A play with nothing but words ended with their opposite: zumba dancing.

I cannot say I was thinking of Baker in writing the play, but I cannot deny that the success of hers gave me permission to make something similar.

These many comparisons are listed not to discredit playwrights but to instead celebrate how far they have run with Baker’s schema: it’s worked for plays set in Vermont, Iran, and, now, New York City.

In one of Circle Mirror Transformation’s acting exercises, Schultz shares the story of Theresa, the transplant: “There was a competitiveness and a claustrophobia that was very difficult for me in New York… also this sense that people didn’t really care about each other.”

That’s a fair assessment of the characters in Nazareth Hassan’s Practice. The play is another Circle Mirror Transformation scion—a buzzy world premiere at Playwrights Horizons—only bigger (so on the Judith O. Rubin stage) and meaner (the Venom to Circle Mirror Transformation’s Spider-Man).

If acting exercises are used as a vehicle to manifest self-esteem and connection in Baker’s play, they are wielded as tools for manipulation and exploitation in Hassan’s. (Their script includes A Chorus Line as a reference; Circle Mirror Transformation is not listed, but Practice’s staging at Playwrights Horizons already conjures it.) In Practice, director Asa Leon (Ronald Peet) assembles seven twenty-something actors to live and work in an abandoned Brooklyn church to create a new play under the MacArthur “Genius.” (“Not that I would label myself as a genius,” Asa says. “That is a word meant for other people to justify their own insecurities. Hahaha.”) Juxtaposing Marty’s Vermont warmth, Asa is a New York narcissist, but Baker and Hassan’s plays share more than a coach.

Practice also has a circle.

Asa’s actors stand in a circle at the start of each session, grounding themselves as they try to jump in sync. Also like Circle Mirror Transformation, Practice is punctuated by weeks, made visible by a chart never far from the actors: each week, they can tick off when their peer does not live up to the group’s ideals. And they do, because if there’s any role an actor wants to play, it’s casting director.

Practice is a pessimistic play and barbed commentary on how low actors will sink when the bar—in a competitive and unfunded landscape—is already Gehenna.

As with Marty, Asa has the actors share their stories so that peers may echo them. The company also lives together, annihilating any separation between work and privacy. That story you let slip over dinner about when you were date raped? That’ll star in tomorrow’s workshop. And even if you don’t think others are listening, the ubiquitous mics are.

Like a mosquito to skin, Asa punctures and sucks out stories and then watches his actors itch at their bite. The exposed narratives—ready-to-sell products—are not only for Asa’s own artistic generation but let him reduce his actors to their most fearful, and pliable, selves. It is far from doubtful that a pusillanimous creative would be given MacArthur status, but in a year when Heather Christian—singer of the feminine divine—actually wins that same prize, Practice then holds its audience at some remove.

Still, Practice remains self-aware in its caustic humor. Circle Mirror Transformation also features a sort of aspiring actors, but placing that genus in New York automatically ups the stakes. The twenty-somethings in Practice have the pluck to audition for Asa, and he plucks the least suspecting. The monotone, unfeeling Rinni (Susannah Perkins), in particular, is a god-awful actor. What role can she play besides cog in Asa’s machine? Can these actors see what they are becoming?

Practice also has a mirror.

Once everyone’s stories are extracted, they can be refracted in Asa’s vision. Cut to Berlin! The troop is now in an international festival presenting Asa’s play, and what Hassan hilariously understands is how American creatives perceive German theater: beautiful gowns. Stunning, minimalist designs atop imbecile, pretentious writing. A box of double-sided mirrors trap the actors within so the audience can see them, but they can only look at themselves.

Finally, Practice also has transformation: as the actors slip farther from their selves and closer to crude oil, Asa also takes on his calling—almighty cult leader.

If Circle Mirror Transformation arrived at the dawning of the Obama administration, a moment of mainstream political “Hope,” Practice debuts at its antithesis. In the decade and a half since Baker’s premiere, there have been more forest fires and financial fears and fascist fucks. In the laughable entertainment landscape, reboots reign, and subscription services have dominated with artists getting a fraction of a fraction of a cent per stream. Tilly Norwood has arrived.

Do we really—really—think acting exercises can save us? Even if aspiring performers do them, what’s the point if the only person who will be cast is a TikTok influencer or Academy Award winner?

There is promise: that very Academy Award winner may need to step away due to “unforeseen circumstances.” And then, Paul Sparks, or you, can take his place. And the play can still be liked, standing on its own artistic merit, and then extend, even without a New York Times’ Critic’s Pick.

Just look at the real-life actors in Practice: wildly talented but not famous. And ten of them! Twice the size of Circle Mirror Transformation’s cast. Ambition, at all scales, still has a pulse. Unlike Baker’s play, Practice has two acts—and more than a unit set. Every play is its own homage, begetting new ones.