The Flick, Annie Baker’s new, Pulitzer Prize–winning play about three employees at a run-down movie theater, owes a lot to October of 1994—a watershed moment in the history of American workplace conversation. That month, the movies Pulp Fiction and Clerks opened within five days of each other and became fast classics. Though one made $213.9 million and the other only $3.2 million, they stylized the way people talk to each other when they’re on the clock—humorous, roundabout, banal—with a force that still influences what coworkers sound like in scripts and screenplays today. The Flick extends this lineage, plunging us directly into its butter-scented workplace: a theater with spilled popcorn all over the floor where three coworkers’ relationships collide and corrode during intervals between film screenings…
