The focus of Annie Baker’s plays is the passage of time. Known for their highly detailed stage directions, they call attention to duration: “Theater is an opportunity to experience time at the same rate as the actors in the story you’re watching,” as Baker once said in an interview. Reviewing Baker’s first feature film, Janet Planet, for Books & the Arts, Nora Caplan-Bricker notes that it, too, tells a story of time. A coming-of-age film set in western Massachusetts, Janet Planet travels back to 1991 and the town where Baker herself was raised. As we follow a young girl named Lacy and her mother, Janet, across a languorous summer, time moves both at a fast clip and not at all. The result is a movie that is startling and beautiful in its ability to arrest a moment soon lost to history—one that the chaos of our own age has washed over. In Janet Planet, Caplan-Bricker writes, Baker demonstrates her “devotion to a place and time usually deemed beneath notice: the outskirts of the Northeast Corridor at the end of history.” Read “Time, Space, and Annie Baker”