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by Annie Baker, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

September 10-October 6, 2024

Sofi: “But … I guess if it means anything at all, I don’t know if I can bear it”

Coal Mine Theatre starts off Toronto’s 2024/25 on the highest of high notes. Annie Baker’s latest play, Infinite Life (2023), is one of her greatest works and Coal Mine gives it an ideal production. Director Jackie Maxwell is well-attuned to Baker’s penchant for long pauses, and the entire cast give outstanding, subtle performances. As is the case with other plays by Baker seen in Toronto – The Aliens in 2017, John in 2017, The Flick in 2019 and The Antipodes in 2022 – Infinite Life seems to be composed of nothing but inconsequential remarks that gradually gain coherence. By the end of the play you are astonished by the insight into the human condition Baker has shown us simply by looking closely at a group of ordinary people.

Infinite Life is set as Baker states, in “The courtyard of a medical clinic two hours north of San Francisco” in May 2019. Designer Joyce Padua has had the courtyard extend the entire length of the Coal Mine Theatre’s performing space, the audience in ranks on the left side of the space, with an entrance stage right leading to the (unseen) building where the clients of the clinic live. The courtyard holds six identical patio chaises longues.

When the lights go up, One of the chaises is occupied by Eileen, who, as we learn, is a long-time resident in her 70s. The first one to enter the stage is Sofi, who at age 47 is the youngest person at the clinic. She is also the only one of those we meet who has never been here before. Eventually we meet four more women, all in their sixties, who are all familiar with each other and the conditions that have brought them here. We hear that the clinic is not exclusively for women, but when a man, Nelson, enters about halfway through the action, barefoot and shirtless, it causes a stir for all the women in residence. Since Nelson is close to Sofi’s age, all the women assume that they are having an affair even though both are married. Like the others, Nelson is a returnee and is suffering from chronic pain.

From a superficial point of view, one could say that Infinite Life is a play about how women use humour to cope bravely with pain, since the play, despite its subject is very funny. Yet, it seems that Baker has included Nelson deliberately to make such a generalization impossible.

The question, then, is what it is that unites all the characters besides their living with chronic pain. The answer is that they all believe that staying at the spa will somehow be beneficial to their recovery. This is rather strange since the unseen doctor at the spa offers only one cure for the wide range of diseases, including cancer, that his patients present with. For all, he prescribes fasting – sometimes with water, sometimes with juice – and determines with apparently arbitrariness how long each patient should fast.

The doctor is catering to the popular notion that people’s ills are somehow the product of retaining toxins in their body and that fasting is the only way to detoxify oneself. Since many in the audience may also believe this idea, I am obliged to point out that it is a complete falsehood. Just in July of this year The Guardian published an article by Adrienne Matei titled “Detoxification is a popular claim in wellness. But it’s just another lie”. In 2008, Harvard Health, issued by the Harvard Medical School, stated, “If you experience fatigue, pallor, unexplained weight gain or loss, changes in bowel function, or breathing difficulties that persist for days or weeks, visit your doctor instead of a detox spa”. Nevertheless, at the present moment, as Matei notes, “we may be talking about, believing in, and spending more money on detoxing than ever”.

The key word in Matei’s article is “believing”. What unites all the characters is their belief that the doctor’s method of one-cure-for-all diseases actually works. The patients may benefit from the placebo effect, but that seems to wear off since, except for Sofi, all the others are at the clinic on a repeat visit. Thus, the play’s imagery may be about pain, but its real subject is belief, and this puts the play in line with Baker’s previous plays.

Eileen at one point exclaims that being at the spa is like being in hell. More accurately, it is like being in purgatory. The penitents in Dante’s Purgatorio have been placed at various levels on the spiral mountain to purge themselves of sin. The clients have chosen to be at the spa because they believe that they can purge themselves of the toxins making them ill. In the case of Sofi, the character we come to know best, her visit to the spa is a way of escaping the situation she has at home of her husband believing she is having an affair with a co-worker. Her disease seems to have arrived at the same time as she began her phone sex with the co-worker and when her husband’s suspicions were aroused. Both Sofi and Nelson wonder in separate scenes whether their illness is a metaphor for some kind of sin and their pain is the punishment. As we know, the placement of all the characters in Dante’s Commedia are a metaphor related to the extent of their vice or virtue.

If Baker presents the doctor’s cure for pain as dubious, she goes even farther. Just as in The Antipodes baker questioned the nature of storytelling, here she questions the nature of pain itself. Eileen, we discover is a Christian Scientist. She tells Sofi about Paul’s statements in Romans 8:7-9 about the “carnal mind”: “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you” (NIV). The idea, as Eileen explains, is that “pain is a lie”. The spirit is untouched by physical pain because physical pain is not real.

It should be no surprise in a play by Baker that what appears simple on the surface is in fact extraordinarily complex underneath. Instead, of seeing people in seeking a cure for their chronic pain, Baker presents us, on reflection, with people believing in a fictitious cure for a sensation which may feel real but may only be an illusion.

If Baker’s questioning of reality in general, including pain and suffering, reminds us of Buddhism that is because that is where Baker finds the most concise expression of the idea. Most of the conversations in Infinite Life flow from other conversations, but one stands out as an anomaly. Ginnie, a woman in her sixties from California, enters and announces that the book she is reading presents a “conundrum”, as she calls it. She is reading “Please call me by my true names”, the most famous poem by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022). In Nhất Hạnh’s preface to the poem he notes that horrific things happened to the Vietnamese boat people. In one case, a pirate raped a 12-year-old girl and she drowned herself in the sea. Nhất Hạnh notes that if we had been raised exactly as the pirate had, we might well have acted as the pirate did.

To this point the women raise all sorts of objections – so many that Ginnie never gets to the second part of Nhất Hạnh’s point. Ginnie has to shout, “It’s about compassion”, but from what we’ve heard, we and the women can’t see how that can be true. In the part of the preface that Ginnie does not read, Nhất Hạnh states, “Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other?” He concludes the poem thus: “Please call me by my true names, / so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, / so I can see that my joy and pain are one. / … / and so the door of my heart can be left open, / the door of compassion”.

This scene is a mise en abyme of the entire play. The women are so outraged that they could ever be pirates that they prevent Ginnie from finishing the poem and thus gaining a greater understanding of themselves or learning to look at pain in a different way. All of the characters, including Nelson, claim that their pain is worse than anyone else’s pain. Such a claim means that each of characters is focussed more on themselves than on the others. They may sympathize with the discomfort others feel in fasting, but no one uses their own experience in an attempt to understand another character.

This is true until the very end of the play when one character does use her past experience to help another character understand herself. In return, the second character helps ease the pain of the first in a way that any of the other characters could have done if they had shifted their focus away from themselves and had bothered to ask. It is a beautiful moment that demonstrates that compassion, seeing ourselves in others as Nhất Hạnh puts it, is possible and, more than that, has the effect of healing.

Baker’s play has no conventional action and no plot. Instead, it weaves together diverse remarks and attitudes until we begin to see a pattern emerge. At the same time that Baker reflects so accurately how real people speak and interact, she also makes sure that we are made constantly aware that we are watching a play. Sofi, like the audience, is a newcomer to the situation presented by the regulars at the spa. Therefore, it is fitting that Baker makes Sofi the link between the play and the audience. Baker has Sofi announce how much time has passed between scenes, a time that be as few as 18 minutes or more than 24 hours. Sofi’s announcements to the audience intentionally pull us away from the action to make us see the play as artifice – a perfect image in a play that proposes the notion that the physical world is an illusion.

What is needed to bring off this deeply philosophical play is insightful, detailed direction, and that is exactly what it receives from Jackie Maxwell, who directed Baker’s adaption of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for the Shaw Festival in 2016. Maxwell is known for her gift of uniting a group of actors into a tightly-knit ensemble of which her work in Infinite Life is another shing example. During the action how characters react to what a character says is as important as what is said. Much humour derives from the looks characters give one another after particularly odd remarks or the knowing nods they give when they approve of a statement.

Christine Horne plays Sofi as a troubled young woman whose pain may be the least of her worries. Being younger than the other women, she knows she doesn’t fit in, and, unlike the others, she never feels the benefits of fasting, tormented as she is by the smells from the bakery nearby. Sofi is the only one we hear communicate with the outside world, even though this consists only of her ever sterner phone messages to her husband and her playful phone sex ramblings with her co-worker. For both, Horne employs a very different tone than she uses with the women at the spa – harsh for her husband, soft and gentle with her co-worker. Sofi begins the play unwell and disoriented, and Horne’s great virtue is in showing how Sofi’s physical and mental condition gradually disimproves as time passes. Baker’s clue to Sofi ‘s nature is that Sofi can’t get past page 152 of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda (1876). This means that Sofi symbolically has not got past Book I of this novel of education, entitled “The Spoiled Child”.

Sofi’s apparent opposite is Eileen, a woman in her 70s from Kansas. She has been at the clinic longer than anyone else and one senses that she has come to know the others so well she no longer feels she needs to put up any false show of friendship. Palk has always had the gift of wryly delivering her lines, but here she does not only that but produces wry facial expressions that communicate much more than spoken words could do. Eileen’s pain comes and goes. When it is present Palk reveals it through her halting manner of walking and her awkwardness in moving about on the chaise longue. Palk’s account of a nightmare Eileen has had is the most frightening moment of the play, since the person we counted on as the steadiest is shown also to be prey to delusions. At the play’s end, though, Palk has Eileen speak with such grace and warmth that we feel some beauty can be born from such a sterile place as this spa.

Baker does not spend as much time on the other four characters. Kyla Harper plays Yvette, a woman in her 60s from Michigan. Harper delivers an hilarious account of Yvette’s epic tale of her medical history which includes more diseases than you can count with an even longer list of her medications. Harper shows that Yvette is one of those people whose illnesses have become her chief occupation in life and whose recital of her travails is meant to silence anyone who claims to have suffered more.

Brenda Bazinet plays Elaine, a prissy woman in her 60s from New Hampshire, whose theory is that the pesticides used in food production have caused her illness. Her emblem is a “calming" adult coloring book where she definitely colours within the lines, since she blanks out all off-colour language or stories of deviant behaviour. Jean Yoon plays Ginnie, a vital woman in her 60s from northern California, prone to enthusiasm for seemingly wacky ideas. In one scene, Yoon has Ginnie comically wax eloquent about the fact the static on television sets is actually a remnant of the Big Bang. (Crazy as it sounds, this is true according to an article in Scientific American from 2009.) Ginnie’s penchant for the unusual unfortunately leads the women to ignore her enthusiasm for the poem by Thích Nhất Hạnh from which they could all learn much.

As the sole male actor, Ari Cohen who plays Nelson, is already an anomaly. All the female characters regard him with looks of mixed admiration and suspicion. Cohen shows us that Nelson is a man who tries to take an aggressive approach to his fasting as if such a thing were possible. The older women assume, like a pack of old biddies, that there is something going on between Nelson and Sofi. The joke, however, is on us since there actually is something going on, even if it is not physical. Cohen and Horne successfully generate tension between the two characters – at first antagonistic, later sexual – that really makes us worry about how confused Sofi’s state of mind has become. The idea that Nelson is choosing fasting as a way of combating colon cancer seems disastrous, and Cohen intimates that despite Nelson’s bravado, Nelson knows this must be true.

Infinite Life at Coal Mine is a great production of a great play. The seemingly mundane surface of the work leads to depth after depth in later contemplation. This is a theatre-lovers dream. 

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Brenda Bazinet as Elaine, Kyra Harper as Yvette and Jean Yoon as Ginnie; Christine Horne as Sofi and Ari Cohen as Nelson; Jean Yoon as Ginnie; Nancy Palk as Eileen and Christine Horne as Sofi. © 2024 Elana Emer.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.