“To watch Baker’s work is to be drawn into a world that feels as unplotted as real life that breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence” wrote Nathan Heller from The New Yorker about Annie Baker’s Pulitzer award-winning play The Flick.

It’s this rawness in Baker’s work that intrigued Nadia Tass some years ago and led the renowned Greek Australian director/producer to bring Baker’s play The Aliens to the Melbourne theatre scene. The relationship that started in 2011 between the two creative minds went on with another of Baker’s plays, Out of the Water, in 2014.

“When I first read The Flick I realised that I loved the play,” Tass tells Neos Kosmos.

“There were not too many who really saw what I saw in this. But I had already directed another play by Annie Baker, met with her in New York and spent time together. I was drawn into The Flick.” Just a week after her close encounter with the talented playwright, The Flick won the Pulitzer drama award.

For those who know Nadia Tass, it was very easy to predict that her affection for The Flick was not going to be left at just that.

In 2014 Nadia brought Annie Baker’s drama on the stage of The Red Stitch Actors Theatre. After a sell-out season back then, the critically-acclaimed production is back as of yesterday and until May 23.

“It’s a play about the people who work in an independent cinema and one of the characters knows and loves 35mm film a great deal, and so there is this discussion about which movies are good, which movies are not that good and the transition from 35mm projection into digital projection, which is what’s happened, let’s say the last two years,” says Tass about the story of the play.

“While the characters talk about this, we the audience examine their lives.”

As an astute analyst of characters and life experiences, Tass manages through her direction to convey and enhance the unplotted reality that Baker constructs through her play to an unprecedented level of perfection. She sees into the movie theatre, she sees the everyday labour of her three characters, she listens to their small talk, she sees them as they pick up the lolly wrappers and the spilled popcorn from the aisles but this tedious, monotonous and unremarkable routine of theirs is not uneventful for Tass.

“It is the tragedy of the mundane, that unfolds in this play. A microcosm of our world is constructed on the stage. It is the mundanity of everyday work that people need to do within a given space, within a given environment. These people need to do the cleaning so the place is ready for the next session. And that is the physical environment in which the characters are positioned.

“But what happens with the characters, the talk and the development of relationships between them is where the interest is. It is where the audience will become enlightened in what is actually happening with issues in our world,” says Tass, and this is the point, that her masterful direction kills the futility and establishes hope.

“The hope comes from the fact that we, as the audience, can identify what the issues are and we have a choice as human beings to work through them in a positive way and get to the other side, or for some it never happens – they get bogged in the mundane.

“But in this case we see the characters encounter those challenges. Yes, in a difficult way. It is not even reluctant. They work though because they have to. It is the necessity of moving through the obstacles. And that is hope,” says Tass.

Her words about what this play is all about, or more importantly about what this play is for her and what she wants to convey to her audiences, are born in slow motion and a touch of excitement is colouring them. She finds refuge in the play and avoids blowing her own trumpet.

“It is a brilliant play. It is a play that is worth seeing because normally you go to some of the, let’s say more conventional theatres, and what you do is experience theatre in that way of ‘we are going to the THEATRE’ in the sense that it is something very important. This does not have that sort of pretence it goes straight to the truth, straight to the truth of living and the challenge of living and the obstacles of everyday life,” she concludes.

Dates: Fri 1-Sat 23 May
Times: Wed-Saturday 8.00 pm, Sun 6.30 pm
Matinees: Saturdays 3.00 pm
Bookings: (03) 9533 8083 or www.redstitch.net
Tickets: $20-$39
Venue: Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel St, St Kilda