Brenda Bazinet, Kyra Harper, and Jean Yoon in Infinite Life.Elana Emer/Supplied
- Title: Infinite Life
- Written by: Annie Baker
- Director: Jackie Maxwell
- Actors: Christine Horne, Nancy Palk, Brenda Bazinet, Jean Yoon, Kyra Harper and Ari Cohen
- Company: Coal Mine Theatre
- City: Toronto, Ont.
- Year: To September 29, 2024
Infinite Life, opening the small but mighty Coal Mine Theatre’s 10th season in Toronto, is the latest of American playwright Annie Baker’s uncanny comedies set in a subculture of outsiders searching for some sort of spiritual breakthrough.
Having previously written shows taking place in a community drama class (Circle Mirror Transformation) or a male-dominated TV writers’ room (The Antipodes), Baker now turns to a healing retreat in northern California.
The patients at this suburban clinic – they are almost all women – spend most of the day lined up on lounge chairs facing a bakery parking lot as they endure water or juice fasts that have been prescribed to them by an unseen guru doctor. They all have chronic pain or cancer or a combination of unclear auto-immune somethings that have stymied, or been waved off by, the mainstream medical establishment.
Sofi (Christine Horne) is the outlier among the misfits receiving this questionable treatment – only 47 years old and experiencing unrelenting pain in her bladder and clitoris. A year of torture has driven her to dangerous distractions and now the desperation of alternative medicine.
The rest of the female patients are older by a decade or more – and played by the veteran actresses Brenda Bazinet, Kyra Harper, Nancy Palk and Jean Yoon. They each have their own physical issues and personalities but also function as a kind of chorus, a collective reminder of how, in our society, it is almost expected for women of a certain age to suffer in some way or another without relief.
The women come and go, talking of fatigue and lumbago. They can be very funny, in conversations or monologues that cover topics from pornography to the Big Bang, but Baker never makes fun of them.
There is a man on site, too, played with a gorgeous goofiness by Ari Cohen, to upset the all-female atmosphere from time to time and showcase the more limited and competitive male linguistics of pain.
Infinite Life itself is a dramatic addition to the tradition, from Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill to Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor onwards, of female writers smartly dissecting the disorienting ways sickness interacts with language and identity and time.
Christine Horne and Ari Cohen in Infinite Life.Elana Emer/Supplied
It moves from scene to scene by Sofi breaking through the fourth wall and telling the audience how far forward the play is jumping: “20 minutes later,” “eight hours later,” “two days later.” Steve Lucas’s and Olivia Wheeler’s lighting and sound design subtly signal these shifts as well in director Jackie Maxwell’s production.
Baker has, brilliantly, come up with a realistic situation that is at once extremely low-stakes (people lying around and chatting) and extreme (people starving themselves, in excruciating pain).
Among the cast, Horne does incredible work at creating a complex central character cut in twain by her pain – one side somehow believing that she is going to use her time fasting to get through the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; the other constantly sucked into her phone and its darker temptations. She wrestles with herself – with her doubts and her guilt and the physical agony that she has to constantly resist turning into a metaphor – in a way that even tops her Hamlet of a few years ago.
In the close confines of the Coal Mine, breaths away from the performers, the minor variations in acting approach of the rest of the cast are visible. Harper, to me, nailed the style best as a woman who gives an incredible monologue about the various ways her body began to betray herself after she gave birth. Though maybe that was actually Palk, as a former Christian Scientist who once believed pain was a lie and seems closest to achieving some sort of transcendence on her fast.
Infinite Life is big on atmosphere, on fleeting flashes of insight, on human comedy. It’s not a play that hypochondriacs or worriers (I am both) will be able to fully enjoy; you never forget your own aches or cares and fully fall in.
But at this point in Baker’s career, I’m simply on board to follow her on each of her journeys to once again find what is otherworldly in the ordinary. I’m grateful Coal Mine has so quickly produced this latest of hers in Toronto, following its New York and London debuts.