Body Awareness

Description
Sexuality’s endless capacity to make us miserable is the keynote of Annie Baker’s gentle satire, which spins an astonishingly complex web of emotions and ideas. The characters include a feminist college professor (Mary McCann), her partner (a touchingly vulnerable JoBeth Williams) and a coolly assured photographer (Peter Friedman) who takes nude shots of women. This is a modest work about ordinary, flawed people, but none of it feels small, thanks to Baker’s sharp ear for the deeply painful—and funny—longings squirming under her characters’ dialogue. What a beautiful start to a young playwright’s theatrical body of work.—David Cote