Story/Teller Arts: Annie Baker on Infinite Life with Hannah Zeavin

Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT May 20, 2026

The Center for Fiction

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Join us for an evening with Annie Baker as she discusses Infinite Life, a funny, tender, and profound meditation on chronic illness, desire, and the human body’s limits. Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Flick and acclaimed writer-director of Janet Planet, brings her signature insight, empathy, and subtle humor to a work that examines what it means to inhabit a body that refuses to cooperate.

Infinite Life follows five women at a Northern California clinic, each seeking to heal from cancer, autoimmune disorders, thyroid conditions, and mysterious infections. Over the course of several days, the clinic becomes a purgatorial space where prolonged hunger and suffering warp time, and the women wrestle with pain, hope, and intimacy. Philosophizing, confiding family secrets, and sharing literary recommendations, they navigate the complex intersections of physical fragility and emotional desire in a story both devastating and darkly funny.

Baker will be joined in conversation by author, professor, and editor Hannah Zeavin (The Distance Cure).

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs. Please note that tickets do not include books; we encourage you to order in advance online or purchase copies at the event.

Presented in partnership with Theatre Communications Group.

Featuring

Annie Baker

Annie Baker

Annie Baker’s plays include Infinite Life (Atlantic Theatre Company, National Theatre, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Antipodes (Signature Theatre, National Theatre), John (Signature Theatre, National Theatre, Obie Award), The Flick (Playwrights Horizons, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Obie Award for Playwriting, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), Circle Mirror Transformation (Playwrights Horizons, Obie Award for Best New American Play, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Aliens (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Obie Award for Best New American Play), Body Awareness (Atlantic Theater Company, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play/Emerging Playwright), and an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (Soho Rep, Drama Desk nomination for Best Revival), for which she also designed the costumes. Other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwriting Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Photo Credit: Ella Pennington
Hannah Zeavin

Hannah Zeavin

Hannah Zeavin is an Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley and the author of The Distance Cure (2021), Mother Media (2025), and at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children. She is the founding editor of Parapraxis magazine.

Featured Book

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Infinite Life

By Annie Baker

Published by Theatre Communications Group

PURCHASE

How far would you go to heal? For five women at a clinic in Northern California, deprivation seems to be the only answer to heal their bodies from a litany of afflictions—cancers and autoimmune disorders and thyroid conditions and mysterious infections. To distract themselves from the near-constant pain they are in, they philosophize and swap book recommendations, confide intimate family stories, and share hopes for their future recoveries. Over the course of several days, the clinic becomes a purgatorial space, where prolonged hunger and suffering seem to warp time itself. Infinite Life is an engrossing and compassionate play that resists easy answers to the problem of what it means to reside in a body that fails you.