Minutes of Infinity

Annie Baker continues with the calmest to ruffle feathers of breezes.

- SARA HOLDREN

I HAVE A VISCERAL memory of sobbing on the couch in my mother's arms at 5 or 6 years old, saying over and over again, "I don't want to die." Nothing had happened. I had simply reached the understanding that one day, I would no longer exist. I also have a memory-I'm less certain about the year-of reading Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting and realizing, somewhere quiet at the back of my mind, how nightmarish the idea of living forever actually is. How incommensurate with our small, breakable animal bodies-this awful, awesome notion, the infinite.

From the name onward, nothing in Annie Baker's fearless new production, Infinite Life, is laboriously explained; everything is prismlike and expansive. The play unfolds gently, gradually, through implication and deceptively casual conversation. Baker and her director, the superb and unshowy James Macdonald, share a grasp of tempo and dynamic so assured and patient that your heartbeat at the end of Infinite Life's intermissionless hour and three-quarters may well belie the fact that no one onstage has once raised their voice. The play shines light through the facets of its title in at least two directions, neither of them easy to face. Look at it one way and see how comically absurd we are: "Listen, listen," insists one of Baker's characters, "no energy can be destroyed. Energy just continues ... The energy from the Big Bang has been radiating throughout the universe for millions of years. And then it, uh ... it turned into microwaves or some kind of wave and that thing, that static on the old televisions, that fuzz-that's the remnants of the Big Bang making itself known through your screen."