Set at a clinic in Northern California, Infinite Life follows five women seeking relief from chronic illness as they endure a punishing wellness regimen that blurs the boundaries between healing, suffering, hope, and despair. 

 

How far would you go to heal? For the women gathered at the clinic, deprivation seems to be the only path forward as they navigate cancers, autoimmune disorders, thyroid conditions, mysterious infections, and unrelenting pain. Over the course of several days, they pass the time by philosophizing, swapping book recommendations, sharing intimate family stories, and imagining futures beyond their illnesses. As hunger and exhaustion begin to distort their sense of time, the clinic transforms into a purgatorial space where the body becomes both prison and mystery.

 

Funny, compassionate, and quietly unsettling, Infinite Life resists easy answers while offering a profound meditation on pain, longing, and what it means to inhabit a body that fails you.

 

“Annie Baker has created a startlingly intimate portrait of people searching for meaning and relief inside systems that promise healing but cannot fully deliver it,” said Alisha Tonsic, Co-Executive Director of National Operations and Business Development at TCG. “Infinite Life is deeply humane, sharply funny, and unafraid to sit with the complicated realities of living in a body.”

 

 

“Despite the peachy terra-cotta-and-breeze-block patio that keeps Infinite Life’s characters fenced in, Baker’s play feels capacious—ever widening its arms to hold more humanity, more searching spirit and more troubled flesh.” —Vulture

 

“A lucid fever dream, a trippy vision of profound truth, an exploration of how desire and pain influence and are influenced by the feeble bags of meat our consciousnesses are bound to. It is another extraordinary play from a writer seemingly capable of nothing else.” —Time Out London

 

“[Infinite Life] peeps at the greatest mysteries of life—in this case principally pain and desire, and what they have in common—through the tiny, seemingly inconsequential windows of banal human behavior.” —The New York Times

 

“[Baker] communicates the incommunicable not by making us feel physical anguish, obviously, but by loaning us the eerie suspension her characters experience as extreme hunger detaches them from their bodies.” —The New Yorker

 

“Enthralling, strange, mordant, witty, jolting, mysterious.” —The Daily Beast

 

Since its founding in 1984, TCG Books has grown to become North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 22 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama on its book list. The book program commits to the life-long career of its playwrights, keeping all of their plays in print. TCG Books events are supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

 

Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, leads for a just and thriving theatre ecology. Since its founding in 1961, TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 750 organizations (including member theatres, affiliates, universities) and over 3,000 individual members. Through its programs and services, TCG reaches over one million students, audience members, and theatre professionals each year. TCG offers networking and knowledge-building opportunities through research, communications, and events, including the biennial TCG National Conference, one of the largest nationwide gatherings of theatre people; awards grants and scholarships to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 21 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. TCG believes its vision of “a better world for theatre, and a better world because of theatre” can be achieved through individual and collective action, adaptive and responsive leadership, and equitable representation in all areas of practice. TCG is led by Emilya Cachapero, LaTeshia Ellerson and Alisha Tonsic. www.tcg.org.

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