Your email address will not be published. In the play, Lauren is a shy high schooler and the youngest of the group. She is originally from New Jersey, never had children, is interested in nontraditional healing and would like one day to move to the Southwest. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on 13 October 2009 and closed on 31 January 2010. The breaks from the action with the exercises are welcome and genius. The play might not change your life, but like the acting class Marty wants so much to offer, it does offer insights into what our lives are and might be about, and demonstrates that the artistic impulse to see something about the human condition really can be felt, even in those tired, empty, all purpose rooms. The versatile Reed Birney (whose raw performance in Blasted at Soho Rep was one of last season’s best) is excellent here as the wounded Schultz, who quickly falls in love with Theresa and is just as quickly and violently devastated when their brief affair doesn’t last. “Circle Mirror Transformation,” written by Annie Baker and directed by Scott Cox was a play shown this past weekend. Each of the characters becomes likable in their own slightly askew way, as Baker gradually reveals their humor, their pain, and their sorrow. The play’s humor keeps it entertaining and holds at bay what could be more maudlin moments. Dramatists Play Service, one of the premier play-licensing and theatrical publishing agencies in the world, was formed in 1936 to foster national opportunities for playwrights by publishing affordable editions of their plays and handling the performance rights to these works. The point is that Circle Mirror Transformation is the ideal show for those of you who are fans not just of psychological drama, but theater that plumbs the inner lives of the characters we see interacting on stage. But it becomes clear over the course of the play that their happiness is frayed, the romance fading. It wouldn’t be surprising if any person who has taken an acting class has played at least one of the games presented in the play. Annie Baker’s absorbing, unblinking and sharply funny “Circle Mirror Transformation… Within a year of its New York premiere, Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation was the second-most-produced play in the US. 3. Since it’s impossible for them to perform one another without the barest hint of editorializing, we come to know the characters through how they describe and observe one another’s flaws and discrepancies during their interviews. For there, where we spend all of "Circle Mirror Transformation," Annie Baker's splendidly sensitive new play, everyone feels everything. Chimo can raise an eyebrow, widen her eyes, clench her fists, or raise her shoulders and communicate an entire paragraph of response to the absurdities of what she sees.When in the penultimate scene Marty asks her students to write down, distribute anonymously, and then read out loud something about themselves that they’ve never told another soul, it’s obviously Lauren’s slip of paper that says she secretly believes she’s smarter than everybody else in the world. Lastly, the woman in the poem sees herself transforming from a young girl to an old woman. The characters consist of a teacher and her four students: a teenage girl, a former actress brushing up on her craft, the teacher's husband, and a recently divorced carpenter. The shared secrets—meant to open the students emotionally and bind them psychologically—also reveal (if the characters are telling the truth) that Schultz has a secret addiction to internet porn; that James is in love with Theresa; and that Marty thinks she was molested by her father. That each of the students simply follows her lead, rarely questioning her motives or their acting education, rings too true.