Know Theatre Presents Baker’s Trio: Three Tragicomic One-Acts Bring Working-Class Providence to Life
(Photo by Kat D'Andrea)
Over three weekends in April, Binghamton’s Know Theatre will present Provocative, Pointed, and Purely Funny: An Evening with Edward Allen Baker, a collection of three of the playwright’s most acclaimed and notable one-act plays, combining humor with serious social questions before a background of working-class Providence, Rhode Island, in the playwright’s distinctive style.
For Baker, who lives in Brooklyn and after teaching playwriting for twelve years at Sarah Lawrence College, and who is now chair of the playwriting component at The Actors Studio Drama School MFA Program at Pace University, this Binghamton production may not physically be a homecoming, but it is one in spirit - reuniting him with longtime friend Tim Gleason. Gleason, who is the head of Know Theatre and performs in the production, selected the plays for the evening.
“I like to write about people with working-class background. In fact, that’s how Tim and I got together,” Baker recalls. “We met in Massachusetts when I was on a panel for a college theatre festival. We immediately bonded, and I think it was partly due to the fact that we recognized our working-class beginnings.”
The playwright elaborates, “He’s very funny. And we would trade stories about our tough, blue-collar fathers. Of course, whenever they handed us tools, we would drop them. And I would say one thing, and Tim would identify with it. He’d stop my story and start another one that he was reminded of.”
Baker reflects on his relationship with Gleason, and their work together: “We immediately bonded as friends, and I did Know Theatre the year after that. I love the opportunity of getting to work with Tim. We’ve been emailing back and forth for a couple of years and wanting to do this. He made it happen, and I’m really looking forward to it. Even in New York, it’s hard to run a theatre. When you get outside of New York it’s often even harder, or they want only the more traditional stuff. But I think Tim balances that nicely.”
The class context of Baker’s plays resonates with Binghamton’s post-industrial nature, and that resonance emerges in Gleason’s attitude to the production. Baker observes, “Tim uses the locals, too, which is wonderful. That’s how I got into theatre - being an usher in Providence. And I got the bug. But at the same time, it stayed with me that the plays I was seeing over and over again weren’t about the people in my neighborhood - and that the people in my neighborhood weren’t going to the theatre. There was an intimidation factor there. But Tim and I are on the same emotional plane. So when he offered to do these three plays, I said, ‘Oh my God. He picked the three plays!’”
Most famed among the plays is “Dolores,” a 1986 piece exploring the problem of domestic violence by presenting the situation of two sisters, after one has sought refuge with the other from her abusive husband. The play featured Tony-winning actor Joan Allen in its original cast, and has been translated into five languages and performed around the world. As Baker remarked, “‘Dolores’ could easily be called my signature play. I wrote it thirty years ago, and it’s always a good sign when a play transcends generations. Unfortunately, domestic violence is an issue in every era.”
“Mafia on Prozac” has a more clearly comic premise (which is easily divined after an examination of the title), but still features Baker’s signature seriocomic blending of themes. Of it, Baker recalls, “With that play, the title came to me before the play did. With the popularity of Prozac in the late eighties, people were talking about, ‘Well, what if we put convicts on Prozac?’ et cetera. And I had asked, ‘Well, what about the mafia? That would be funny.’ And then I wrote a play!”
He expounds: “It’s about two hitmen in Providence taking their time killing a man who is in a potato sack at their feet. They are on Prozac, but they don’t know it. So they’re having their midlife crisis and discussing their personal feelings.”
The third play of the festival is called “Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Beauty, and Truth,” and features a down-at-heels uncle, a drug-addicted mother, two teenaged daughters who want to help them, and many twists and turns. “Tim Gleason is playing that uncle,” Baker notes, “and I remember thinking years ago when I first met him, ‘Tim would make a perfect Uncle Danny.’”
Of the three plays together, Baker observes, “They’re typical of my stuff. Some people in the theatre will call pieces like that ‘dramedies,’ or in the more scholarly context, ‘black comedies.’ But you have to make people laugh. Otherwise they’re not going to be able to get through it. Life’s tough enough! My top job is that I just want to make an audience feel what I feel. And of course, theatre is still entertainment - so that’s what we expect.”
Baker, who is now working on his thirty-seventh play, will attend the performance on Saturday, 8th April to do a talkback afterwards, and he will stay in town to conduct a playwright's workshop on April 9th from 11am to 1pm, for any who are interested. “I like to encourage people - especially young people - to get into it,” he says. “Writing plays is not an easy thing to do. Making life in ninety minutes - a character’s whole lifetime - is a very, very difficult thing to do, without it turning into television. I call it ‘writing from the neck up.’ I tell people, if I don’t laugh and cry while I’m writing the play, nobody reads it!”
In sum, Baker says, “The people I write about don’t really have a voice otherwise. They don’t go to therapy. They don’t read self-help books. So there’s no way to articulate what they’re going through except through anger and bitterness. So my plays usually start off with people trying to break out of that cycle, and knowing that if they lose their last strand of dignity, then they truly become a nobody. They become a victim. So I like to write characters that are fighting what I like to call their last fight. “
Provocative, Pointed, and Purely Funny: An Evening with Edward Allen Baker will be performed at the Know Theater at 64 Carroll Street in Binghamton, April 7th-9th, 13th-16th, and 21st-13th. Friday and Saturday shows are at 8pm, and Sunday shows are at 3pm. Tickets are $20 for general admission, $18 for seniors, and $15 for students. Thursday, April 13th is Pay-What-You-Can Night at 8pm. Tickets can be bought at knowtheatre.org or by calling (607) 724-4341.
