‘The Flick’ Prompts an Explanation From Playwrights Horizons

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From left, Louisa Krause, Matthew Maher and Aaron Clifton Moten in “The Flick.”

The artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, a leading Off Broadway company that produces new American plays, took the unusual step on Saturday of e-mailing 3,000 of the theater’s subscribers to explain his decision to produce Annie Baker’s new play “The Flick,” whose three-hour length and periods of long silence have infuriated some audience members.

The letter, posted below, is the first of its kind for the artistic director, Tim Sanford, he said in a telephone interview on Monday. He said it was “not an apology,” but rather an attempt at “community engagement” over a play that has been embraced by critics - and recently won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize - but has prompted threats of subscription cancellations by some people walking out at intermission. Mr. Sanford said about 10 percent of the audience were bolting the play at the interval during the first week of performances in February, but those numbers have diminished since.

While Mr. Sanford said he did not care if people canceled subscriptions over “The Flick” - “it’s a great play and our theater is not for everyone” - he added that his e-mail was only prudent as Playwright Horizons prepares for its next subscription renewal campaign for the 2013-14 season.

“I wanted to explain my thinking to our subscribers and also explain our mission as a writer’s theater, in hopes of making this a teachable moment,” Mr. Sanford said. “I had no idea it would be a polarizing show, and I tried to be careful in the e-mail not to rehash why I loved the play. I didn’t want to get into an argument. It’s more about saying, ‘I respect your right to dislike the play, and I hope you understand why we chose to produce it, and respect our right to stand by it.”

Asked if he considered letting the play speak for itself, Mr. Sanford said his e-mail was not meant to be a full-throated defense, but rather a means of sharing his thinking with subscribers. The e-mail notes, for instance, that he did not think the play would run three hours when he decided to produce it, and it disclosed that he, Ms. Baker (the Obie Award-winning author of “Circle Mirror Transformation” and other plays), and the play’s director, Sam Gold, considered making trims and dropping entire scenes. Ultimately they sided with other feedback urging them, in Mr. Sanford’s words, “not to cut a second.”

His e-mail was sent to subscribers who had already seen the show; Playwrights Horizons has approximately 5,200 subscribers. He said he has only received positive feedback since sending it, and did not know if any subscriptions have actually been canceled. Below is Mr. Sanford’s full e-mail:

Dear Friend,

The Flick has stirred up so many emotions, both positive and negative, in audiences that I thought I would reach out to all of you and share my thoughts about it. I have to admit I was not totally prepared for it to be such a polarizing show. I love Annie’s work and thought this was just the play to introduce her to a wider audience. Here are three characters rarely portrayed on the stage these days and Annie imbues them with such humanity and integrity. Here is how she describes them in our artist interview:

“A female projectionist, on whom the men in the play projected their fears and fantasies…this like “unattainable” girl up there in the shadows who was dying for someone to get to know her “for real”… a 35-year-old Red Sox fan who was worried he’d be working there for life… and a young film buff who came from both a different race and class background than the other characters in the play. They all started emerging from the movie theater set in my mind. Also, the main characters in the play are a black guy, a woman, and a Jew (although I no longer make Sam’s Jewishness obvious). And that was important to me when I started writing the play. Three of the great “Others” of American cinema, all of them victim to extreme stereotypes. And yet what are Hollywood movies without blacks, Jews, and women I wanted these people to be quietly (maybe even unconsciously) fighting against their respective pigeonholes. And I also grew up knowing lower-middle-class Jews, hyper-educated black people, ad women who wear baggy clothes and no makeup, and yet it is so rare to encounter any of those people in plays and movies. It feels like those people are like forced to wander outside of and on the periphery of plays and movies. So I literalized that â€" they’re like cleaning up everyone else’s crap AFTER the movie is over.”

I hoped that Annie’s palpable love and compassion for her characters and the play’s fairly straightforward plot about a developing ethical workplace quandary would win you all over.

Of course I had some trepidation about its length. Theatergoers rarely encounter three-hour plays these days even though most classic scripts from earlier ages routinely clock in well above that length. When performances began and some of you walked out at intermission, emphatically expressing your displeasure to our House Manager, we had lengthy discussions about what to do. Could we make internal cuts within the scenes or could whole scenes go Were there places to pick up the pace Each scene seemed to have important reasons for being there. And what about those long silences between lines Here are Annie’s thoughts on this subject:

“I’m just trying to accurately portray the people who live in the movie theater inside my head, and I guess there’s a lot of moments of not-talking in that movie theater inside my head. All the walking and sweeping and mopping and dustpan-banging â€" there’s a whole symphony happening that Sam and the actors orchestrated… But I wouldn’t call that silence. I think there’s actually very little ACTUAL silence in this play. But yeah, my favorite moments in all of my plays are usually moments when people aren’t talking.”

Did we know we had programmed a three-hour play when we chose it No. I don’t think Sam Gold, the director, did either. But after our initial concern about walkouts, we began to pay attention to the other voices, the voices that urged Annie and Sam not to cut a second, the voices imbued with rapture for a theater experience unlike any they had experienced and for a production that stayed with them for days, even weeks afterwards. And it became clear to me that every moment of the play and production was steeped in purpose. Annie had a vision and this production beautifully executes that vision. And at the end of the day, we are a writer’s theater and my first responsibility is to that writer.

My goal is not to dissuade any of you who disliked the play. I would rather evince passionate dislike than a dispassionate shrug. I imagine that most of you have read the many good reviews about the play and then most recently the fact that the play won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. If you read these stories and continue to say to yourself, “I still don’t know what they see in it,” I applaud your independence of mind. Hopefully that free-thinking will swing to our favor in your response to other productions of ours.

Our hope is to cultivate an audience that trusts the underlying integrity of our decision-making process. We are the only theater in New York (and practically the country) devoted solely to the premiere of new American plays and musicals. We use our Subscriber Bulletin to share with you what excites us about an upcoming play and to convey the passion that went into its selection.

The business of putting on new plays is not empirical. We follow some rules and rely on experience, but we’re also following our hearts. And we appreciate that you are taking a risk and putting your faith in us when you sign up with us. We are dependent upon your willingness to take that ride with us. We need you.

So thank you for caring enough to complain or to praise. Perhaps we can all agree that whatever values we look for in the theater, we all stand on the common ground that it is a vital and important art form that we look to to illuminate the human experience with complexity and integrity.

Warm Regards,

Tim Sanford
Artistic Director