Residency #142
JUNE 27 - JULY 17
(Application Deadline: March 25, 2011)

ANNIE BAKER, playwright

Annie Baker is an OBIE-award-winning playwright and teacher. Her full-length plays include CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION (Playwrights Horizons, OBIE Award for Best New American Play, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), THE ALIENS (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, OBIE Award for Best New American Play), BODY AWARENESS (Atlantic Theater Company, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play/Playwright), THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES (commission for Soho Rep) and NOCTURAMA. Her work has also been developed and produced at New York Theatre Workshop, MCC, Soho Rep, the Orchard Project, the Ontological-Hysteric, Ars Nova, the Huntington, South Coast Rep, the Magic Theater, the Cape Cod Theatre Project, the Bush Theatre in London, and the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in Utah and Ucross, Wyoming. Annie is a member of New Dramatists, MCC’s Playwrights Coalition and the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Recent honors include a New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citation, a Lilly Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nomination, a Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and commissions from Center Theatre Group and Playwrights Horizons. Annie’s plays have been published by Samuel French, Dramatists Play Service, and Faber and Faber. A published anthology of her work is forthcoming from TCG in 2011. Annie is also writing an original half-hour comedy pilot for HBO.

Residency Statement

I’d like to work with playwrights who have written at least one full-length play and who are interested in working on at least one full-length project during their residency (whether that project is a revision, the completion of a first draft, or the beginning of a first draft).

Associates will have all morning and early afternoon to write, and we will meet as a group in the late afternoon or evening.  We will create, in effect, a playwrights’ salon at ACA—we will read plays, essays, and manifestos together, and we will have friendly arguments while drinking tea and eating cookies. We will also bring in our own work—each playwright will have one night to present whatever they like—and we will truly engage with one another around the work, supportively and honestly. We will also do low-pressure writing exercises that will help us break out of dull established patterns and modes of writing (what Mac Wellman calls “the horrible swamp of the already known”).

Those who are looking to learn conventional Robert McKee-inspired hard-and-fast rules about craft need not apply; those who are interested in intellectually engaging with others, surprising themselves, and creating work that’s nothing like what they’ve ever seen or written before are very, very welcome.

Be prepared to read a lot.

Application Requirements

Applicants should submit between 10 to 25 pages of a script—it can be a one-act or an excerpt from a longer piece. Please also write a short essay on what you’re looking to get out of your residency and then name a few of your favorite plays and then tell me why you love them so much (there are no right answers to this question).