Juan Carlos Martel brings to life American playwright Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. Awarded the 2010 Obie for Best New American Play, it was dubbed one of the ten best pieces of 2009 by the New York Times, Time Out and the New Yorker. Get ready for a modern, absorbing, affectionate and entertaining ride.

Five lost souls enroll in acting classes at a community center, looking for meaning in life. Will six weeks of theatre change them?

How could such a young playwright have swept the United States away with a work based on something as simple as an acting class? Baker’s work is about just that: acting classes at a small community center with people who – for some reason or another – need to break free of their everyday tropes, leaving behind the routine they’ve somehow stumbled into. A comedy which indirectly uses theatre as therapy.
Juan Carlos Martel Bayod

I wanted to depict the beauty and nobility that arise when people dive into something naturally, even something therapeutic. I think the fact that I hate ninety per cent of what comes out of my mouth is a large part of why I am a playwright. The way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me – we never sound the way we want to sound. We’re always stopping ourselves in mid-sentence because we are terrified of saying the wrong thing. Speaking is a kind of misery. And I guess I comfort myself by finding the rhythms and accidental poetry in everyone’s inadequate attempts to articulate their thoughts. We’re all sort of suffering as we go about our days, trying and failing to communicate with other people.
Annie Baker