Intimations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Faltering Voices of the Precariat in Annie Baker’s The Flick

Abstract

While much critical attention as been devoted to the representation of precarity on the European stages, and in British theatre in particular, dramatic texts produced in the United States that concern, depict and represent the lives of members of the so-called precariat have barely been the object of critical scrutiny. This article traces the emergence of a growing concern with economic hardship in the second decade of the twenty-first century in American drama and presents a case study of Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013). Baker’s play is illustrative of an aesthetics of precarity that refrains from victimizing the members of the precariat and that plays out the paradoxes of scenarios of precarity as being at once troubling and enabling transformation and visions of possibility.