The writer has made the leap into film with Janet Planet, about a mother and daughter drifting apart on a hippy commune. She talks about how it echoes her own upbringing – and why her younger self would be horrified
In the back of Annie Baker’s office at home in New York, a spectral presence is just visible in silhouette against the window. It turns out there is not just one, but two cats hidden among the desks and shelves. Baker swivels around a spare chair to reveal Carla, then gestures behind. “This is Bobik,” she says of the one basking in the feline window hammock. “It’s the name of an offstage character in a Chekhov play.”
Baker is a master of the unspoken and unseen. A Chekhov nut, she is one of her generation’s most lauded playwrights, telling eerily intimate stories that alight on overlooked corners of humanity. She won the Pulitzer prize for 2013’s The Flick, set during a cleanup at a cinema. John, from 2015, put a young couple into an eerie B&B in Gettysburg run by a doll-obsessed proprietor. The Antipodes, from 2017, explored the glib exploitation of emotion in writers’ rooms; her latest play, last year’s Infinite Life, observed a group of women discussing their suffering at a pain treatment clinic in California. She also adapted Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 2012.
