Annie Baker Is Championing a New Generation of Playwrights

4 min read

For a new playwright, staging an Off-Broadway show is nearly impossible. Even getting anyone to read your work can be a huge challenge. But not for Annie Baker, who staged nine plays before she turned 44, making her one of Off-Broadway’s biggest talents. Now she wants to help other playwrights find an audience, too. “Part of the oddness of being an unproduced playwright is that you’re not encountering your work in its medium,” Baker says. “If I finish a new play, I just gather a few writer friends and have them read it out loud.” That’s often not an option for young playwrights.

In December, New York’s legendary Cherry Lane Theater, the oldest Off-Broadway theater, announced the Cherry Lane Playwrights Collective, a nine-month developmental program for emerging playwrights, which will be overseen by Baker. The six selected writers will meet together with Baker for 10 sessions between September and June to share and develop their work. The program’s finale will be a public reading series, with each of the writers’ plays staged with professional actors and directors, giving them the kind of audience that Baker feels is necessary in the early stages of a career. Baker is working with A24, the film studio that bought Cherry Lane in 2023, to determine what the program will look like. “Cherry Lane has this amazing legacy of mentoring playwrights, going back to Edward Albee,” Baker says. “There were conversations about how to continue that.”

Baker grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts. After graduating from NYU, she was living in New York City and had a full-time job writing and doing research for ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (She also had a job on The Bachelor.) She was writing plays but found limited, if any, chances to stage her work. She remembers racing through Times Square to deliver a script by hand after she missed the deadline for one program. “The opportunities just for open submissions without an agent, without any personal connections, were few and far between,” she explains.

Her career started moving forward when she was accepted into Youngblood, a collective of early-career playwrights run by the Ensemble Theater Company in New York. The program created a community through which she met close friends and future collaborators, like celebrated writer Amy Herzog, whose play Mary Jane was staged on Broadway in 2024. Programs like this helped correct an inherent issue in playwriting—if you can’t stage your play, you aren’t actually experiencing your art in its medium. “In my 20s, [hearing my work read aloud] was the most transformative thing that happened to me,” she says. “I think the more opportunities there are just for people to gather and read pages out loud, the better the work we’ll get.”

Baker’s early plays Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation were met with acclaim and awards. In 2013, Baker debuted her transformational play The Flick, about three ushers working in a past-its-prime movie theater. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, dramatically widening her profile and expanding the opportunities that were open to her.

In 2023, Janet Planet, which was the story of a single mother and her 11-year-old daughter and Baker’s first film, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. Now, she’s working on her second, Ancient History. (Baker refuses to divulge any details about the movie other than that it stars actress Sophia Lillis.)

Baker never thought that it was inevitable that, as a playwright, she could easily create a film. The skills and talents are very different, she believes. “More than ever, [film and theater] feel like two totally different mediums, almost in opposition to each other, and both just sort of coincidentally happened to involve dialogue sometimes, not always. That to me is where the similarities end.” Editing, something that isn’t part of theater, is her favorite part of the movie process. “I wonder if people directing their 20th movie [still] feel that there’s something about editing a movie where you just can never get ahead of it. It’s always showing you that you didn’t know exactly what you were doing, even if you thought you did,” she says. “A director I know was saying, ‘Oh, I write screenplays to be on set because that’s where my greatest joy is.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I write and direct so I can edit.’”

The Cherry Lane program received 1,800 applications for six slots. While many of those submitting are young, Baker is clear that she wants to include anyone who is new to playwriting, regardless of what stage of their career they’re in. She worked with A24 to create an intentionally simple application. “Something really simple and easy that if you are working a 60-hour weekday job, you can submit during your lunch break,” she says. Making the program open and easy to apply to showed just how much of a need for it there is. “The number of applications we’ve gotten when you’re saying you have to be an unproduced playwright. It’s like, oh my God, there are so many unproduced playwrights,” Baker says.

Baker and the A24 team don’t have a drawn-out vision for the sorts of scripts they’re looking for, but there’s a spirit and intention that Baker’s drawn to. “We want plays that blow themselves up. After teaching for so many years and talking to students about their work, one of the most powerful things with any piece of writing is to feel like you’re having access to the way someone else’s mind works in a really genuine, free, associative way,” she says. “So many playwrights, including myself, get bogged down by just ideas of what a play is. I’m always looking for work that’s blowing up that question.”

The work that will come out of the Collective, Baker believes, is desperately needed, for audiences as much as the playwrights themselves. “It’s a really weird time to be a young artist,” she says. “I think we need really weird explosive art right now.”