Silence is Golden

A scene from "The Aliens"

“Saying nothing…sometimes says the most.” That is a quote by Emily Dickinson that reminded me very much of the plays that I read about today in the theater section of the NY Times. There are three plays being performed at the Boston Center for the Arts called “Circle Mirror Transformation”, “Body Awareness” and “The Aliens” by Annie Baker. Just as Alyssa wrote about how Rowling makes the world of Hogwarts come alive through her literature and screenplays, Baker apparently makes the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont real for audiences with it’s specificity and tangibility for audiences. It’s defining characteristic is how quiet it is, with emphasis on miscommunications between people that is an everyday problem for people everywhere.

A major point in these plays, which it is applauded for doing so well, is that even when words are exchanged between people there is always a gap that is “separat[ing] them, filled with frustrated thoughts and hopes of connection.” I would like to see how this is done because I would imagine that it would be hard to consciously portray this. One third of the play “The Aliens” is actually performed in silence. Living in NYC, I wonder after thinking about this: do we fill too many of the silences in our everyday lives with useless words? Another of the plays by Baker, “Body Awareness” even goes so far as to suggest that people involved in the most intimate relationships, who think they know one another, could be virtual strangers because of the way that words are often misused and misconstrued.

The theater, especially Baker’s works, has the capacity to make us really think and I believe that this is what leads people to respond and create more artistic things. Are these plays as interesting to you as they are to me? Find out more about them in the article here.