Of the three works that are part of the Shirley, VT Plays Festival devoted to Baker’s work, “Body Awareness’’ is the one that evokes academic life within the fictional college town that gives the festival its name. Anyone who has spent time in Amherst, Mass., where Baker grew up, or in the counterculture quadrants of Vermont, is likely to smile at the sidelong glimpses we get of this Birkenstock bohemia.
However, Baker is after more than laughs, and her characters are not cartoons. What makes “Body Awareness’’ work is that she takes their dilemmas seriously.
Plum plays Joyce, a high school teacher involved in a long-term relationship with Phyllis (Krstansky), a professor at Shirley State. Scenes of their home life alternate with Phyllis’s earnest, awkward introductions of performers at the university’s “Body Awareness Week.’’ Phyllis has a weakness for pedantic questions like: “How do we observe ourselves, and other people, without participating in the legacy of image-ownership?’’
Or maybe they’re not so pedantic after all, because the question of self-image — of how we see ourselves and, thus, define ourselves — is playing out in the house Phyllis and Joyce share.
The women are anxious about the increasingly strange behavior of Joyce’s 21-year-old son Jared, who walks around sucking on an electric toothbrush, when he isn’t poring over the Oxford English Dictionary. Phyllis is convinced — and the worried Joyce is half-convinced — that Jared has Asperger syndrome. He furiously rejects their diagnosis, contending the women are trying to label him a “retard.’’
There is another source of tension between the women: Frank (Snee), a photographer known for his nude female portraits who has come to stay in their home as guest artist. Frank has a relaxed, worldly confidence, and no qualms whatsoever about his work.
