Swell New York Times review by Ben Brantley of  Massachusetts native Annie Baker’s The Shirley, Vt., Plays currently at  the Boston Center for the Arts.

Lede:

BOSTON — What you notice most about Shirley, Vt., is how quiet it can get. This is not the silence classically associated with small-town America, a noiselessness that probably doesn’t exist anymore anyway. There are, after all, cellphones in Shirley.

No, the quiet that pulses everywhere in this fictional town, the creation of the seriously gifted young playwright Annie Baker, is the kind that descends among people when words feel inadequate. In Ms. Baker’s small, vast and meticulously detailed universe, words are by their very nature inadequate. So even when people are talking up a storm, you’re conscious of the void that separates them, filled with frustrated thoughts and hopes of connection.

Ms. Baker’s distinctively bittersweet sounds of silence are echoing throughout the Boston Center for the Arts, where three of her works are being performed, with considerable skill and affection, by three different troupes: “Circle Mirror Transformation” (by the Huntington Theater Company), “Body Awareness” (by the SpeakEasy Stage Company) and “The Aliens” (by Company One).

Shirley this sounds like a theater production we should see.