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The Antipodes
A group of people sit around a table theorising, categorising and telling stories. Their real purpose is never quite clear, but they continue on, searching for the monstrous.
Part satire, part sacred rite, Annie Baker's play The Antipodes asks what value stories have for a world in crisis. First seen at Signature Theatre, New York, in 2017, the play had its UK premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2019.
'The most original and significant American dramatist since August Wilson' Mark Lawson, The Guardian
Part satire, part sacred rite, Annie Baker's play The Antipodes asks what value stories have for a world in crisis. First seen at Signature Theatre, New York, in 2017, the play had its UK premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2019.
'The most original and significant American dramatist since August Wilson' Mark Lawson, The Guardian
88 pages, Paperback
Published October 24, 2019
10 people are currently reading
928 people want to read
About the author
Annie Baker
25 books266 followersBaker grew up in Amherst, Mass., and graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College.
Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with Circle Mirror Transformation.
Baker's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya premiered at the Soho Repertory Theatre in June 2012 and was called a "funky, fresh new production" by a New York Times reviewer. Her play The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013. A New York Times reviewer wrote, "Ms. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight." The play received the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013.
Baker teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was one of seven playwrights selected to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. In 2011 she was named a Fellow of United States Artists.
Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with Circle Mirror Transformation.
Baker's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya premiered at the Soho Repertory Theatre in June 2012 and was called a "funky, fresh new production" by a New York Times reviewer. Her play The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013. A New York Times reviewer wrote, "Ms. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight." The play received the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013.
Baker teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was one of seven playwrights selected to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. In 2011 she was named a Fellow of United States Artists.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
January 6, 2019
Wow. Review to follow.
September 21, 2021
Update: 9/21/21: Nothing much to add to my initial feelings/thoughts - still quite a disturbing and provocative play.
4.5, rounded up.
Baker is the most idiosyncratic of modern playwrights - her plays are always interesting and no two are alike, which is probably her greatest strength. I wasn't a huge fan of her last play, the neo-Gothic John, but this one hearkens back to her breakthrough Circle Mirror Transformation, with a group of disparate people all trying - and for the most part, failing - to communicate.
It's a somewhat bizarre set-up - a motley crew are assembled around a conference table to tell stories for some never determined purpose (although it appears to be for a new television series) - and these are largely fascinating, if sometimes a bit disturbing. There are more questions than answers, starting with the title (since this has nothing to do with Australia/NZ, nor really about 'direct opposites'; I think many people will mistakenly think this is a Greek tragedy!) Baker's stage directions also seem weird - she insists the scenes not be delineated by blackouts or sound effects, and I can't really determine why. She also specifies that alpha male Sandy wear a baseball cap throughout, except for the final scene, and I haven't a clue why that is either. Regardless of these quibbles, I found the characters and dialogue intriguing, and would love to see this performed - and would love a crack at directing it if I weree still actively doing so. .
4.5, rounded up.
Baker is the most idiosyncratic of modern playwrights - her plays are always interesting and no two are alike, which is probably her greatest strength. I wasn't a huge fan of her last play, the neo-Gothic John, but this one hearkens back to her breakthrough Circle Mirror Transformation, with a group of disparate people all trying - and for the most part, failing - to communicate.
It's a somewhat bizarre set-up - a motley crew are assembled around a conference table to tell stories for some never determined purpose (although it appears to be for a new television series) - and these are largely fascinating, if sometimes a bit disturbing. There are more questions than answers, starting with the title (since this has nothing to do with Australia/NZ, nor really about 'direct opposites'; I think many people will mistakenly think this is a Greek tragedy!) Baker's stage directions also seem weird - she insists the scenes not be delineated by blackouts or sound effects, and I can't really determine why. She also specifies that alpha male Sandy wear a baseball cap throughout, except for the final scene, and I haven't a clue why that is either. Regardless of these quibbles, I found the characters and dialogue intriguing, and would love to see this performed - and would love a crack at directing it if I weree still actively doing so. .
January 1, 2019
There is a question Annie Baker seems to circle in The Antipodes, and it may sound something like this: What is the point of the stories we tell? The answers to this question vary, but each answer shares a commonality: the stories we tell are failures. This is not an aesthetic judgment but a philosophical one. The stories we tell signify a failure to communicate. Adam, one of the youngest and newest members of this group of storytellers, articulates the frustrations of this failure by suggesting a solution that sounds not unlike the sort of Frankenstein's Monster that Silicon Valley might concoct. He says:
You know what I think would be cool?
If we could—I mean science must be able to—there’s got to be a way to just like attach electrodes to people’s brains and stimulate the parts of the brain that respond to story and like specific story elements.
So you could make people feel all the things they would feel during a romance or an adventure or a happy ending and there would still be an art to it because you’d be figuring out which synapses to stimulate when and for exactly how long.
But the whole thing where we have to make up some fictional world or some fictional series of events or narrative concepts would be over.
And if you wanted to do something new it would just be coming up with a new um algorithm. A new sequence.
Which is really what it is anyway.
We all pretend there’s something magic about it but actually it’s just algorithms. (78)
Here Adam castigates the group for thinking that what they do is unique, yet Baker’s word choice is suggestive of both the tone she attempts to strike and point she attempts to make, at times, throughout The Antipodes. The Antipodes is a topical play, and the satirical allusion to a tech-narrative, one that uses algorithmic solutions to successfully deliver the ultimate narrative experience, gestures toward the limits of data and algorithms as the method of correcting the messiness of humanity. Furthermore, notice how simple Adam’s solution sounds. Let us dispense with world-building, and in its place deliver the feelings and responses that narrative trajectory, causality, and thoughtful character development offer. It sounds elegant in its simplicity, right? This, of course, is Baker’s point. It all sounds too simple. It all sounds too elegant to be true. What Adam describes is the commodification of a story and not a story itself. If stories were this simple, would anyone enjoy them? Is it possible that part of what makes stories interesting is the messiness, the miscommunication, and the mistakes, and is it possible that The Antipodes attempts to dramatize those essential elements to narrative and storytelling?
But Baker is not cynical in her critique. Later in the play, Adam is the only member of this group who produces a story that transcends both the limits of language and the fallibility of humanity. He does this not by calculating a precise mathematical equation but by talking and developing a story spontaneously, or as he suggests “just bullshitting” (101). Regrettably, it’s not perfect; it’s not without some messiness. Eleanor, another newly-added member to the group, interrupts him when she realizes that no one transcribed Adam’s story. Within the universe of the play, Adam’s story is lost. The best story is the one that no one can reproduce or commodify, nor can a group of coders develop an algorithm that stimulates “the parts of the brain that respond to story and like specific story elements.” Furthermore, Adam’s story is without an ending because it was interrupted. In its incomplete messiness, it embodies a central theme of Annie Baker’s stunning new play.
You know what I think would be cool?
If we could—I mean science must be able to—there’s got to be a way to just like attach electrodes to people’s brains and stimulate the parts of the brain that respond to story and like specific story elements.
So you could make people feel all the things they would feel during a romance or an adventure or a happy ending and there would still be an art to it because you’d be figuring out which synapses to stimulate when and for exactly how long.
But the whole thing where we have to make up some fictional world or some fictional series of events or narrative concepts would be over.
And if you wanted to do something new it would just be coming up with a new um algorithm. A new sequence.
Which is really what it is anyway.
We all pretend there’s something magic about it but actually it’s just algorithms. (78)
Here Adam castigates the group for thinking that what they do is unique, yet Baker’s word choice is suggestive of both the tone she attempts to strike and point she attempts to make, at times, throughout The Antipodes. The Antipodes is a topical play, and the satirical allusion to a tech-narrative, one that uses algorithmic solutions to successfully deliver the ultimate narrative experience, gestures toward the limits of data and algorithms as the method of correcting the messiness of humanity. Furthermore, notice how simple Adam’s solution sounds. Let us dispense with world-building, and in its place deliver the feelings and responses that narrative trajectory, causality, and thoughtful character development offer. It sounds elegant in its simplicity, right? This, of course, is Baker’s point. It all sounds too simple. It all sounds too elegant to be true. What Adam describes is the commodification of a story and not a story itself. If stories were this simple, would anyone enjoy them? Is it possible that part of what makes stories interesting is the messiness, the miscommunication, and the mistakes, and is it possible that The Antipodes attempts to dramatize those essential elements to narrative and storytelling?
But Baker is not cynical in her critique. Later in the play, Adam is the only member of this group who produces a story that transcends both the limits of language and the fallibility of humanity. He does this not by calculating a precise mathematical equation but by talking and developing a story spontaneously, or as he suggests “just bullshitting” (101). Regrettably, it’s not perfect; it’s not without some messiness. Eleanor, another newly-added member to the group, interrupts him when she realizes that no one transcribed Adam’s story. Within the universe of the play, Adam’s story is lost. The best story is the one that no one can reproduce or commodify, nor can a group of coders develop an algorithm that stimulates “the parts of the brain that respond to story and like specific story elements.” Furthermore, Adam’s story is without an ending because it was interrupted. In its incomplete messiness, it embodies a central theme of Annie Baker’s stunning new play.
January 7, 2026
perfect and weird book my friend stephanie gave me
November 23, 2019
This play is so so so good and so so so weird so obviously I like it a lot.
August 9, 2024
i fear it would take me an entire meg nelson class period to form a thought or opinion on what’s going on here
i didn’t love reading it but i would pay serious money to see this performed
i didn’t love reading it but i would pay serious money to see this performed
November 20, 2024
I’m so Annie baker pilled rn, life is beautiful and has meaning
November 2, 2025
A team of writers is struggling to find their story. One day they are naming monsters. The next day they are sharing their first sexual experiences. Sandy, the head writer, believes that it is important that each writer be able to share "whatever weird shit comes into our minds"; creativity will only come from totally unfiltered and uncensored outpouring of regrets, humiliations, wild fancies, and bizarre confessions. He believes that the writers' room is a sanctum for human creativity, a kind of heterotopia where rules and taboos no longer apply, and he wants his writers to generate and cross-pollinate, because storytelling is the heart of humanity: "The world might be going to tell but stories are better than ever. And we've been given the opportunity to create something unprecedented." That's the ideal, at least. In reality, they rarely tell any stories at all. Each day is a new round of exercises to try to help find their premise.
As Annie Baker's play brilliantly shows, creativity is actually hard-won and often more solitary rather than collaborative. When Danny (or "Danny M2" as he is called, to distinguish him from the other Danny) shares that his biggest regret was when he left chickens unattended on a farm, the rest of the room is silent. Were the chickens attacked? No. Did he get in trouble? Also, no. Then how is that his biggest regret? Danny struggles to explain. Everyone is visibly disappointed and, when pushed to explain himself, Danny defensively says that he doesn't understand why writing stories has to start with so much personal material. Minutes later he is called into Sandy's office and never reappears. What Sandy wants is clear: titillating revelations and deeply personal secrets. It's obviously an HR disaster zone (and one former writer had already filed complaints, before disappearing off the grid). The most original story comes when one of the writers, Dave, starts riffing off the story of Genesis (imagining an anxious God making the world)—it's not really original, more a weird pastiche of Genesis and Hesiod's Theogony, and no one is taking notes.
Unsurprisingly, the writers soon lose their passion for writing. Adam wonders if maybe in the future it will be possible to stimulate specific neurons and simply recreate the experience of a story—if human brains are just bio-mechanical algorithms, there will be no need for "fiction or narrative concepts" anymore, just fine-tuned electrodes. The creative energy has dissipated and months into the job, they are all just spitballing into the void, waiting for their paychecks. Sandy himself starts to disappear feigning one excuse after another, and when he finally returns to the office months later, he declares somberly, "I think maybe it's the end of an era... like maybe this is the worst period in human history to be telling stories." Sandy says it's time to write his memoir. It's a despondent conclusion to a witty play by one of America's top dramatists.
Annie Baker's play is a ribald parody of team-writing. Society exalts human genius but ignores the messiness of the creative process and the strained relationships that come with it. Sandy thinks that ideas will come when their minds are unfettered from social inhibitions—but this seems more like broad permission for a male boss to act badly (and not very creatively at all). The play is maybe a vindication of Virginia Woolf's dictum: what a writer needs is a room of one's own.
As Annie Baker's play brilliantly shows, creativity is actually hard-won and often more solitary rather than collaborative. When Danny (or "Danny M2" as he is called, to distinguish him from the other Danny) shares that his biggest regret was when he left chickens unattended on a farm, the rest of the room is silent. Were the chickens attacked? No. Did he get in trouble? Also, no. Then how is that his biggest regret? Danny struggles to explain. Everyone is visibly disappointed and, when pushed to explain himself, Danny defensively says that he doesn't understand why writing stories has to start with so much personal material. Minutes later he is called into Sandy's office and never reappears. What Sandy wants is clear: titillating revelations and deeply personal secrets. It's obviously an HR disaster zone (and one former writer had already filed complaints, before disappearing off the grid). The most original story comes when one of the writers, Dave, starts riffing off the story of Genesis (imagining an anxious God making the world)—it's not really original, more a weird pastiche of Genesis and Hesiod's Theogony, and no one is taking notes.
Unsurprisingly, the writers soon lose their passion for writing. Adam wonders if maybe in the future it will be possible to stimulate specific neurons and simply recreate the experience of a story—if human brains are just bio-mechanical algorithms, there will be no need for "fiction or narrative concepts" anymore, just fine-tuned electrodes. The creative energy has dissipated and months into the job, they are all just spitballing into the void, waiting for their paychecks. Sandy himself starts to disappear feigning one excuse after another, and when he finally returns to the office months later, he declares somberly, "I think maybe it's the end of an era... like maybe this is the worst period in human history to be telling stories." Sandy says it's time to write his memoir. It's a despondent conclusion to a witty play by one of America's top dramatists.
Annie Baker's play is a ribald parody of team-writing. Society exalts human genius but ignores the messiness of the creative process and the strained relationships that come with it. Sandy thinks that ideas will come when their minds are unfettered from social inhibitions—but this seems more like broad permission for a male boss to act badly (and not very creatively at all). The play is maybe a vindication of Virginia Woolf's dictum: what a writer needs is a room of one's own.
June 4, 2024
Insane and cryptic and hilarious and creepy. Starts off a little odd but very naturalistic, a roundtable of people in a windowless writers room telling/documenting gross and silly and sad personal stories, then the stories gradually get longer and stranger and the details of the outside world start getting more ominous and it becomes steadily more apparent that we don’t know why they’re telling these stories. Brings up big questions like why does anyone tell stories? And what is the value of storytelling in a dying world?! And most important question of all, Annie Baker… Will you marry me???
March 7, 2019
3.5 a very strange play but I was kinda into it?
September 24, 2018
If you told me the plot before I started reading (people sitting around a conference room "spitballing" ideas for an artistic project and telling random stories) I would have never picked it up. But it is mesmerizing and I couldn't put it down.
April 18, 2022
Men behaving badly.
August 22, 2021
Very good and fun! A nice combination of concrete satire with some curious/mystical elements that serve a kind of unknown purpose. Wasn’t sure about the ending but I’ll keep thinking about it. Liking Annie Baker feels cliche at this point but I like her and this play reminded me of that, after the last thing I read of hers was Circle Mirror Transformation, which I was meh on
December 26, 2024
wowowow i read this at a good time for me
Read
August 13, 2024Like if Beckett's Endgame were written about a dying television studio. Weird, powerful stuff
May 19, 2020
I feel like I'm going to reread this many times. It's so bang on it's painful. And I love the crazy, fantastical but totally believable place it ends up. What this would be like for people who haven't been in story rooms, I don't know. But the power dynamics, hope, despair and futility of lots of work situations feels highly relatable.
Read
March 17, 2025a play about how and why we tell stories as told by one of our greatest storytellers ohhhhhhhhh fuck annie baker i love you
July 14, 2020
I didn't really like this. I didn't "get" it, as much as I might try to. But I think that's the point. Storytelling has no end, no exact science. It's difficult to distill.
A bunch of people are sitting around a table, working on some project for their caricature of a leader Sandy. Two character share the same name and last initial, Danny M. Eleanor, the woman of the group, is sort of an outsider. Adam has some wild ideas. Sarah just wants to be a part of the main event. Brian's taking notes--but only when he thinks what is being said is noteworthy; he also has this really creepy, cult-like moment in the middle of the action. Weird guy. Dave is... determined? And Josh, for some reason, can't seem to get an ID card.
Everything is just kind of off-the-cuff. Time zips by, stories go in and out, and it feels like nothing is happening.
A great line from Danny M2, who mysteriously disappears:
Honestly, I don't know why I'm giving it five stars. It really messed with my mind.
A bunch of people are sitting around a table, working on some project for their caricature of a leader Sandy. Two character share the same name and last initial, Danny M. Eleanor, the woman of the group, is sort of an outsider. Adam has some wild ideas. Sarah just wants to be a part of the main event. Brian's taking notes--but only when he thinks what is being said is noteworthy; he also has this really creepy, cult-like moment in the middle of the action. Weird guy. Dave is... determined? And Josh, for some reason, can't seem to get an ID card.
Everything is just kind of off-the-cuff. Time zips by, stories go in and out, and it feels like nothing is happening.
A great line from Danny M2, who mysteriously disappears:
Afterwards I feel like I made something up. Even though I didn't.
There's not enough context or--
I'm telling a story because I think you want me to tell a story
And then I'm trying to figure out how you all see me in relation to the story.
And I can tell the way you're seeing me is not the way I am
Honestly, I don't know why I'm giving it five stars. It really messed with my mind.
Read
January 8, 2019A real hoot. God damn God damn
July 1, 2019
Baker does it again. Writes a play I’ll be thinking about and reflecting on until I actually direct it. In this she tackles the idea of storytelling as both salve and distraction from the realities of the world as we know it. It’s breathtaking, engaging and poetic in a way I haven’t read since Neil Gaiman epic run of Sandman graphic novels.
June 14, 2020
This is wild and I do not presently have the foggiest goddamn clue what to make of it.
April 12, 2024
Almost biblical, certainly otherworldly. A tiny but rich text. You will gobble this up. Interesting take on the nature of storytelling.
June 15, 2021
I was feeling anxious last night and couldn't sleep, so I picked up this copy of The Antipodes that I checked out from the library back in March after reading Annie Baker's
The Vermont Plays
for a book club. It was fitting. I was feeling claustrophobic and frustrated, and so are these characters. True, it's a play where nothing happens -- even less than the nothing that happens in Circle Mirror Transformation, (my favorite of the The Vermont Plays) and The Aliens -- but Baker is a master of saying something BETWEEN everything the actors actually say. The silences, the interruptions, the rambling monologues that don't really go anywhere -- there's humanity in all of that. The lack of a story is the story here (in more ways than one).
What I'm trying to say is that one of my new life goals is to see an Annie Baker play performed in person.
And, uh, what's up with Brian? 👀👀👀
What I'm trying to say is that one of my new life goals is to see an Annie Baker play performed in person.
And, uh, what's up with Brian? 👀👀👀
November 24, 2022
Hmmm. Pretty much all of Baker's plays have been home runs for me. This one, while I liked it, left me wanting more. I think it's the conceptual story telling here (I mean that is the literal focus too) vs the focus on relationships where the other plays dwell. Some plays work on the page, read beautifully, so perhaps this one needs to be seen to be appreciated fully. All plays need to be seen but...I would love to see this one.
My attitude towards Baker has not changed. Our greatest contemporary playwright. Funny that practically no one knows who she is besides the theater niche and even there she is regarded as an under 499 seat author.
My attitude towards Baker has not changed. Our greatest contemporary playwright. Funny that practically no one knows who she is besides the theater niche and even there she is regarded as an under 499 seat author.
August 18, 2024
There were parts of this I enjoyed but overall I just thought that this seems to be a vehicle for a bunch of interesting monologues with a bare bones plot to tie them all together.
The individual pieces were more than the whole thing put together.
The individual pieces were more than the whole thing put together.
May 7, 2021
Beautiful and bizarre and sometimes gross and sometimes horrifying?? Would highly suggest. I will be chewing on this for some time.
February 1, 2022
The most I’ve laughed about anything in AGES. Annie Baker a genius methinks 😌
June 20, 2024
maybe my fav of hers?
October 23, 2024
4.5 stars
June 16, 2025
attempting to read some different playwrights, Anne Baker the first. very funny, very modern, and it's pointlessness I guess is the point. not sure it'll stay in the memory though
Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews