One of the most revolutionary points of Annie Baker’s The Flick is the way it insists that everyday actions, occurrences, and feelings matter. In fact, they do not just matter in a passing, superfluous way - they are deeply significant and meaningful. Art often takes on the role of importance-giving in our society, showing us which aspects of our lives and the world around us are important enough to be recreated and talked about. Annie Baker answers the all important question of what here deserves to be illuminated in a relatively uncommon way. She chooses an atypical topic, three employees of a small town, small time movie theater and chooses to spend the next three hours with them. The Flick, by virtue of its very existence, says that these people, and their experiences matter. This is a radical statement in a world that denies the importance of billions of people’s common, everyday experiences, and audiences have noted that resonance. In this essay I will explore exactly how Baker achieves this effect, and explore various audience reactions to the lifting up of “ordinary” activities through a phenomenological analysis of reception. To do this, I will consider a wide range of reviews of The Flick, with an eye turned towards reactions to the unassuming content and how audiences may have recontextualized their own lives and experiences within the new hierarchy of importance offered by this play. It is my belief that this is a monumental question to consider because art and other forms of representation have an undeniable impact on how people understand themselves and their relation to the world, often in terms of importance. If making powerful, insightful plays about ordinary people can impact our own relationships to ourselves, that has the potential to offer a guiding light for theater in the 21st century.