Flux Theatre Ensemble

EAGLES RETURN

And so do we, to our weekly workshop Flux Sundays. And the first FS of the new year featured the return of playwrights Erin Browne and David Ian Lee, both of whom had been too long absent. These returns were all more welcome than the eagle's hungry return to Prometheus haunting Aaron Michael Zook's We Are Burning, nor the other homecomings featured in many of this Sunday's scenes.

WHEN THE MYTH MOVES IN
Aaron's scene tore even further the wall previously separating the mythic from the mundane in his play of love, Greeks and fire, We Are Burning. Our misbegotten lovers Will and Lucy continued their dance around each other as Prometheus and Io drew ever closer to their everyday world.

HOME COMINGS
Birds of a different sort came to roost with the first scene of David Ian Lee's Long Sought, More Perfect. Nora Hummel played the fiery and haughty activist daughter come back to claim a mighty inheritance, only to be attacked from all sides by Richard Watson's bourbon laced developer B.J., David Crommett's cool as ice lawyer Buchanan, Ken Glickfeld's warmly evasive estate steward Rodney, and Corey Ann Haydu's hilariously indifferent daughter Heather. David's themes of power and ownership of identity, so well explored in Sleeper, return here in a more stately (so far) key, though the white gloves did begin to come off near the end.

WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN
A very different home coming was portrayed in Erin Browne's latest scene, where old friends who may have been lovers linked by a violent past try to negotiate a visit full of old regret and desire. Christina Shipp's Antonia and Rebecca McHugh's Julie found the human longing in the slipstream of Erin's stream of consciousness monologues, and awkwardly self-conscious scenes.

In different happily keys, we read a rewritten scene from Rob Ackerman's kinetically funny Volleygirls and a new scene from Corey Ann Haydu's darkly comic Wife.

2009, all right.