Louisa Krause and Mathew Maher/ Photo: Joan Marcus via

What's the theater version of mumblecore?

That indie film subgenre, characterized by hyper-naturalistic dialogue and low budgets, could easily be identified as the wellspring of The Flick, the intimate and intensely observational play about a suburban single-screen theater and the painfully ordinary employees that work there. Though the term usually is delivered with a smirk, the very best of this category (Kicking and Screaming, Cyrus) are earnest examinations of the minute that sketch larger themes about who we are, really, deep down.

Sam Gold, fresh off a Tony win for directing the musical Fun Home, lends his careful touch to this play as well. The Flick is no stranger to prizes: in its Off-Broadway run last year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

We open on Sam (Matthew Maher), a down-on-his-luck junior manager of the theater, who’s imparting his years of wisdom to new recruit Avery (Aaron Clifton Mosen). This involves some fairly detailed cleaning methods, quite a few warnings, and an enraptured description of the aloof projectionist Rose (Louisa Krause). Yes, that’s “projectionist”—between that and the 1970s color scheme in the theater, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a period piece. It’s contemporary, as least as far as that goes: any work that discusses other contemporary works at the time it’s written is going to feel dated even a few years later. The conversation Sam and Avery have later about films of the 21st century ends at Avatar (2009), which feels positively quaint at this point.

In our up-to-the-minute society, a play that deals at length with the last gasp of celluloid in a digital world could be as outmoded as that reference. There’s no longer a debate about which form is better in any circles except the auteurs’; theaters and patrons have overwhelmingly embraced the digital revolution. For Avery, this is a transition to be mourned—“You can’t really even call it film anymore,” he laments. There is something ironic and more than a little funny about watching a play about the dying of American film.

Avery, a cross between Urkel and Rain Man, has a certain skill: he’s aces at “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Some of the most pleasurable moments of the play result from Sam throwing out two names and watching Mr. Mosen perform a kind of brilliantly calculated silence before he recites the answer, not without satisfaction. When it comes to all things film-related, Avery has strong feelings. (At times, the reliance on film comparisons takes away from the emotion of the work itself; the climax of the play rests on a speech from Pulp Fiction, which feels pastiche.) It becomes apparent that the movie theater is Avery’s safe place from the trials he’s facing in his everyday life; a one-sided phone call with his therapist heartbreakingly reveals a history of depression and a botched suicide attempt. He’s on a break from college, whereas Sam and Rose very much need their jobs as a semblance of a livelihood. Sam and Rose have their own issues; Sam has harbored a painful crush on Rose for years and Maher delivers a perfect performance of this type of passive-aggressive would-be suitor. These subtleties of the characters’ situations hang quietly over the conversations in, and during repeated cleanings of, the empty theater, until they land, as they must, in the second act.

Character development in the play is a zealously guarded affair, and details are laid down judiciously over the course of three hours, an unusual length for works of this sort. This is a side effect of Ms. Baker’s naturalistic approach to dialogue: you wouldn’t hear a stranger’s life story within a few minutes of meeting him, so here things are held back, revealed accidentally through a stray opinion about a film (tough girl Rose’s favorite is Million Dollar Baby) or an aside. Larger things, too, come to light through the mundanities of minimum-wage jobs; when Rose and Sam attempt to nonchalantly draw Avery into their weekly profit-skimming, he’s forced to point out that in their small town, in a theater owned by an “angry white guy with a truck,” he’s likely to be blamed if they get caught. The utterly blank confusion on the others’ faces could be called that difficult word “privilege,” or simply obliviousness.

This slow pace is not a friend to all theater-goers; the production has been dogged by walkouts and complaints about its length that the artistic director felt compelled to respond to. But the show’s minimalism and mild affect is charming, befitting the themes it espouses about valuing authenticity in a mad world. Possibly the audience was looking for Avatar and not expecting Ghost World, a spiky film about misfits that’s interested in these same slow and inevitable consequences of human interaction. It may try your patience, but The Flick is thoughtful, searching, and uneasy to rush to judgment, which is valuable. It belongs to a rare class of art that can still take its time. Perhaps that, like the celluloid in question earlier, is also on its way to extinction.

The Flick can be seen at the Barrow Street Theater in New York through January 10, 2016.

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