Flux Theatre Ensemble

On our Flux Sunday March 16th we completed working through Jeremy Basescu's A Wonderful Wife. This was especially exciting because Jeremy (pictured to the left) was writing the play as we went along - one of the original goals of Flux Sunday was to serve as both spur and immediate gratification to plays in progress.

And what a play! A Wonderful Wife is like Pinter writing with a porcelain pen - the pauses and subtext still have menace, but are impeccably clean and groomed. This is the kind of play where you can hear the soup cool and the ice jangling in the martini is unspeakably loud. Carl, the bread winner of our immaculate house hold, surprises his accommodating wife June with a 'visitor'. The visitor is a stunningly attractive younger woman named Angela, who tries to seduce her way to absolute power in the household.

Unexpectedly, however, Angela finds herself more drawn to the unassuming June than her alleged lover Carl. An axis of power forms between the women: in Angela, June has a tutor in how to wield beauty and power overtly and without apology; in June, Angela has an ideal audience. Carl increasingly finds himself on the outside of the relationship that was supposed to offer him the connection his tidy marriage had been missing.

When Carl and June's son Max comes home from college, the subtle hostility and power struggle breaks to the surface as he fights for what he perceives as his mother's humiliation. Unable to see or accept the complexity and complicity of his mother's position, he takes action against the vampiric Angela by seducing her daughter, Christine. When Max sends drawings of Christine naked to his father, the beauty of the pictures sets off a chain reaction of epiphany, reconciliation and ultimately, exile.

The play's primary concern is beauty - who has it and knows it, who thinks they have it and doesn't, who knows how to use it and what are the costs of doing so. For the majority of the play, beauty is seen an as expression of power, of aggression and domination, primarily through the actions of Angela the visitor. The climax of the play reveals beauty to be a subtler agent, and at the end of the play, it is the meek-seeming June who holds the power and owns the beauty. Max and Christine seem to be together, June and Carl are apart but are finding a beauty in distance; and Angela is exiled from all of it.

Great directing work throughout the process was contributed by Jeremy himself and Isaiah Tanenbaum; and actors who left their mark were Candice Holdorf as Angela, Jane Taylor and Anja Braanstorm as June, Brian Pracht and Jake Alexander as Max, and Cotton Wright as Christine. Thanks to all for their great work over many months on this fascinating play. Read the full story

PLAYING WITH POWER
Flux Sundays has been growing steadily, and we have now had to change our invitation structure so that new folks come for three sessions only - giving us a chance to know them, and vice versa - with the potential of future revisits after all on the waiting list have had a chance. However, those invited before this strange set of rules was put in place still have permanent invitations; and that is very happy news in the case of Kate Marks, a director/playwright who did both (and even acted!) in her Flux Sunday debut. (The picture to your left is an image from her production of The Odyssey at LookingGlass - can you spy a different Flux Sunday regular?)

THE DOG SHOW: POWER WITH A VIEW
All our plays this particular Sunday dealt above all with power, and that was especially true with David Ian Lee's post-Sleeper play, The Dog Show. I played Edward (the guy with the power) and Jason Paradine played Frank (the one, allegedly, without it), and Cotton Wright, a powerhouse herself, directed. Having had too many family members who took too much pleasure from the power they held over others, it was an uncomfortable if familiar skin I slipped into, torturing Jason's character by 'helping' him seek revenge on a common enemy. We were all buzzing about what will come next, as David laid just enough mysterious land mines down in this first scene that we're all wondering who will be blown to the moon.

A WONDERFUL WIFE: POWER LOST AND REGAINED
Jeremy Basescu's A Wonderful Wife reached its shattering climax. Angela, the 'visitor' who took broke apart June and Carl's marriage, has found a shared love of beauty and female power with June even as she is (or was) Carl's lover. Her power over them both is pulled out from under her by sketches drawn by June and Carl's son, Max. Max has tracked down Angela's daughter and drawn her nude - drawn her so beautifully that Angela's poisonous hold is broken, and husband and wife enjoy a blissful, if brief, reunion. Candice Holdorf's stunned reaction to being dethroned was one of the finest performances of a stage direction I've ever seen at a Flux Sunday. Both Rob Ackermen and Anja Braanstorm captured the beauty and fear of having their blinders finally ripped painfully off. And Isaiah Tanenbaum continued his excellent direction of Jeremy's work.

BIRD HOUSE: POWER AS A GAME
The first scene of Kate Mark's play Bird House was a zany yang to the gin yin of David's Dog Show. The birds in question are Lousiy and Syl, two roommates and friends bound to each other to fill the boredom of their days with silly songs and kukcoo bird watching. Almost like a Godot staged by Jim Henson, the characters try to entertain themselves in a darkly whimsical world where murmurs of war and death darken their play. Though fun was had by all, particularly capturing the earnest craziness of the play was Nancy Franklin's Louisy.

TEXAS TOAST: SEXY POWER
Kate directed this lovely set of scenes from Katherine Burger's play that I am currently obsessed with, and in these scenes, sex and power have a messy hook up. Andrew, our East Coast liberal mild mannered expert on Asia, falls under the spell of his boss, the Texas-sized social Darwinist, Bo. On their trip to Thailand, Bo slips a teenage prostitute into Andrew's room; and while Andrew at first attempts to get the girl out, the scene deepens as the complexity of both their needs are revealed. Claire, Andrew's wife, is obsessed with having a child; and Andrew cannot seem to give it to her; and as a result, their sex has become clinical. Feeling lonely and powerless, Andrew makes a mistake he cannot soon forget. In contrast to that difficult marriage, Bo and his ferociously Christian former cheer-leader of a wife Sally, attract with the vitality of their love even as the cruelty of their opinions repel.

In sum, a powerful Sunday. Read the full story

(This is not a picture of playwright Erin Browne, which alas I could not find. This is a picture of Elise Link, who so memorably played Belle Walker in Trying.)

This last Sunday we finished reading through Erin Browne's beautiful and sad play Trying, and due to my own chaotic running of the day, we did not have time to discuss it. And it is a play people should be talking about!

The plot is straightforward and simple: two sisters, Lena (19) and Chels (21) are left by their parents after something horrible happens. Fending for themselves is made more difficult by their poverty, and Chels' pregnancy. This hardship draws them together, even as Lena the younger struggles to find her own identity independent of her family.

After a fight of sorts, Lena goes to buy a book, her current means of escape. But the nature of the book she purchases prompts the clerk, Belle Walker, to ask Lena out on a date. Flustered and flattered, Lean eventually accepts.

And eventually tells her sister, who at first views her sister's relationship with a woman with confusion, then hopeful amusement. As Walker and Lena's relationship deepens into something more than a fling, however; Chels recognizes that her sister may be leaving her just when she needs her most. The conflicting pulls of love and family, desire and duty, play subtly out at Lena tries to have them both, and realizing she can't, decides between the two.

The first play of Erin's Flux worked through on our Sunday's was Narrator 1, a fascinating, theatrical exploration of how the inner life of characters in novels was mirrored in real life by that of their novelists. In that play, Erin mined great comic and ironic power from the theatricalization (word?) of that subtext.

In Trying, however, that subtext is buried more traditionally beneath the words, causing the ironic power to become heartbreakingly sincere. Each of the scenes is so simple: a girl buys a book and gets out asked on a date; a dinner to meet the family is thrown; lovers talk about their scars and are accepted in spite or because of them; people knit and nervously eat fast food and try to ignore each other while reading; but through it all, a simple question begins to grow, until it becomes almost unbearable - can Lena be there for her sister and for her new love? And then that question becomes something even more difficult - is it even possible for Lena to have a different kind of life than the one she grew up with? And if so, does it mean leaving that good parts of the life she grew up with behind? These questions of identity become so powerful because they are so deeply rooted in incompatible relationships of love.

And the process of working through this play was particularly exciting because it featured the strengths of the Flux Sunday structure: we were able to see different directors and different actors takes on the roles while simultaneously seeing certain artists return to the play every week. Elise Link's Walker, Anja Braanstorm's Chels, Hannah Rose Peck's Lena and Cotton Wright's work in both roles and as a director brought a growing understanding to their work on the play every week; and that work culminated in the final two beautiful scenes last Sunday (and I must also mention Gretchen Polous' work as a lovely first time Lena!)

We're still figuring out how to make these Sundays run better; and I regret we didn't have a chance to talk about the play as a company; but I encourage all who read this blog and loved the play to leave a comment or start a discussion about something I missed in this lovely work. And it is my hope to continue to use this blog as a shared memory of our three hours of weekly work. Thanks to everyone and to Erin for Trying! Read the full story