Barebones’ “Infinite Life” Offers a Night of Revelatory Drama

Between the actor and the viewer exists a crucial component of the theatrical experience: the character of the space between them. Size of stage, type of stage, and distance between the audience and the stage are rarely cited as qualities that engender the success of a play, but I would argue, after experiencing Barebones Productions’ presentation of “Infinite Life,” Annie Baker’s 2023 work, that the setting is what makes this show sing.

I realized this watching the astonished reaction of someone I took to this performance who had never been to a black box theater before, where the strong acting and direction was intensified by the focused nature of this environment. What I take for granted, and should point out more often, is that the black box – more than any other stage form – is a crucible. It reveals most clearly — whether good or bad — what drama can be, as it takes away not only the extraneous literal space, but the psychic distance of a performance, too. And thus it offers a kind of revelatory perception not easy to achieve in other, larger-venue modes.

Director Patrick Jordan is a master of this form, typically choosing plays that flourish in such a concentrated and immersive world. This production, comprising six characters of a certain age (40s to 70s), steeped in dialogue with even less action than a Beckett piece, had a riveting impact on its audience, which probably would have been diluted in a standard, proscenium theater.

We live in the age of intense, sub-two-hour, intermission-less plays, which subsume viewers into a kind of cinematic trance, and this one is no exception. (I often wonder if, since the pandemic, producers are afraid they’ll lose an audience – literally or figuratively — during intermissions). And as films engage audiences on a deeper level by making characters larger than life, so do black box spaces, but via propinquity. When Norma Desmond in the film “Sunset Boulevard” sneered that “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” she was really pointing out how the power of acting, magnified by projection, was the key element in her artistry. She wasn’t just big because of technology, but because what she did could be seen so clearly on a huge screen. And black box dramas enlarge performers in a similar way. It’s like watching life through a microscope. You see everything, and sometimes, even more than is projected.

As I indicated, this can either be good or detrimental, depending on your script and talent. In the case Barebones’ “Infinite Life” it’s very good, as the cast can deliver their roles without the histrionics usually associated with voluminous spaces.

The story involves five women and one man, who come to a cleansing spa in northern California to try to eradicate (or at least ameliorate) various ailments, such as auto-immune disease, chronic pain, and cancer. These are souls in search of salvation, the kind of salvation one seeks in the last half of one’s life, not the trippy, philosophical salvation of young people trying to figure out how to find meaning in their lives. These are sick folks who just want to heal, and as they come together in this cheap clinic that was once a cheap hotel, they engage in a communal sense of empathy that only age can foster.

Sofi (Tami Dixon) is the youngest and newest of the clinic’s patients. She’s in the middle of a failing marriage, and a feckless affair. Nothing is going right in her life, so the idea of fasting, and purging the bile – both literally and metaphorically — from her body and soul is an attractive alternative to facing her problems. Ms. Dixon imbues Sofi with a kind of hardened vulnerability, which is plumbed by her interactions with the other women who are all more emotionally acquiescent than she is, and mostly wiser.

Tony Ferrieri’s minimalist set is suffused with a post-nuclear, salmon glow; the only other colors come from the patients’ clothing. This monochromatic palette is an ingenious choice by lighting designer Andrew David Ostrowski, evoking a sense of illness and moldering hope, like someone trying to brighten their house by spraying it with a can of pink paint mixed with dirt. The subjects sit on chase lounges, enduring their treatments, surrounded by walls made of chintzy breeze blocks. In most stage forms, the audience would see all of this as something they are looking into, like a vitrine, but in a black box setting, they are enveloped in this world, with the characters. This promotes a strong sense of communal feeling not usually achieved in a performative experience.

Playwright Baker’s dialogue exudes a relaxed trenchancy which, if you’ve spent time with people experiencing prolonged pain, is authentic. It has the intensity of Pinter, without the inexplicable irrationality. These are people who have known pain for so long that it’s become a part of their being. Rather than fight to push it away any more, they now simply try to make it tolerable, like an annoying relative who won’t leave them alone. As Sofi says in an epiphanic moment, “If pain doesn’t mean anything then it’s so fucking boring.”

Guiding Sofi on her journey inward are several older patients including Yvette (Shelia McKenna), whose litany of ailments and medications sounds like the catechism for a malevolent religion: “They take my bladder out and I get a body wide fungal infection from all the antibiotics I’ve been on and the fungus gets into my lungs and it’s resistant to all the normal antifungals, it’s resistant to clotrimazole and econazole and fluconazole and ketoconazole and itraconazole and voriconazole and they have to give me a life-threatening last resort antifungal that’s not a zole and I’m in the hospital hooked up to an IV drip for two weeks.” And this is just a one-line excerpt from a much longer speech that is delivered so lyrically she could segue right into Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and no one would notice. Also impressive are Cary Anne Spear as Eileen, Helen Ruoti as Ginnie, Karla Payne as Elaine, and Michael Tisdale as Nelson, the token guy, who walks around with no shirt on, titillating the ladies.

If this were a film, things would get maudlin, there’d be a lot of gratuitous sex, and the ending would present us with some sort of Hollywood moral dénouement. But thankfully it’s not. (In fact, there’s a lot of humor to keep things sane and balanced.) Instead, after 100 minutes of very intriguing discussion by six interesting people, we are left with no answers, just the moment-by-moment playing out of multiple lived realities converging on the patio of a clinic where people go to get away from their chronic pain, but end up finding a new kind, which is the sense of how to carry on when there are no easy solutions to what life inevitably hands us.

INFINITE LIFE continues through March 22nd at the Barebones Black Box Theatre, 1211 Braddock Ave., Braddock: www.barebonesproductions.com