Flux Theatre Ensemble

What is the Imagination Compact?

And how can learn more about Flux's Midsummer?

1. What's the best directed play of Shakespeare's you've ever seen?Inspired and brilliantly funny production of The Winter's Tale by a grad student at Trinity Repertory Company about five years ago.

2. What Shakespeare play would you most like to direct? King Lear. But not for about another twenty or thirty years. I need to bea little bit older and a little bit wiser for this one.

3. What's the strangest choice you've seen a director make in a play ofShakespeare's? To have two actors act out the last act of Macbeth with small plastic dolls. It was awkward. And I couldn't sneak out of the theatre without beingnoticed. Bad experimental theatre in Spain.

4. Favorite Line of Text: "By the twitching of my thumbs, somethingwicked this way comes." (Macbeth) It's just so perfect! And it inspired a Ray Bradbury novel!

5. Fairies: colorful playmates or dangerous tricksters? Oh, they are dangerous, my friend, very, very dangerous.

6. If we could compact your imagination, what color would it be and why? Emerald green: rich, mysterious, signifying growth and new life (plus, I strive to be ecologically friendly!)

Directing at Flux Sundays can be a dangerous event. Why, if you're not careful, Members like Cotton Wright might bring you to an organic beer and local foods bar in the East Village, tie you down to a chair on a stage, and then give your brains a thorough washing with her drill.

(photo:Marnie Schulenburg, play: Adam Szymkowicz, director: John Hurley, victim: Jake Alexander).

Thankfully, Cotton resisted the ample temptation of my direction, and we all survived another Sunday. The highlights and lowlights follow, as best my unwashed brain can remember them.

THE MEDIUM, or DIABELLI'S THEME
We began the Sunday with a reading of the first 6 pages of a short play the lovely folks of Gideon Productions asked me to write for an upcoming short play festival. Their Diabellic idea is ingenious - give the same plot to different playwrights and see what variations ensue. I won't give away the plot, but will certainly post the details of this event when I have them. All you need to know is I treated myself to casting Jane Taylor, Richard Watson and Candice Holdorf to listen to them wrestle with my verse (because very short plays deserve verse). More anon.

VIVA FIDEL, or POLITICS AS COMEDY
Member and blogger Isaiah Tanenbaum returned with a new scene from his farce about the death of Fidel Castro, Viva Fidel! The hungry jaws of farce demanded props, slamming doors and silly accents, and Isaiah, directing his own work, delivered the goods, with hilarious work from Gregory Waller, Jason "Jefe" Paradine, Gretchen Poulos and Ken Glickfeld, who thought he was showing up late just to watch, only to discover Isaiah had more sinister intentions. I will not soon forget the dictator of Cuba brought back to life by a car battery.

SLEEPER, or POLITICS AS TRAGEDY
David Ian Lee's passionate political play about The Good American kidnapped by fundamentalists in Afghanistan crept one scene away from its conclusion. Now that I know this play may soon see the light of stage, I will try to avoid spoiling, but this scene brought us more of the delightful doubling Candice Holdorf as religious fundamentalist Kadir/left wing radical Teri; Brian Pracht's subtle and human Mahid; and Jane Taylor's continued fiery portrayal of right wing talk show host Rachel. More posts will describe this potent play in full.

THE MARRIAGE PLAY, or POLITICS AS PERSONAL
Melissa Fendell returned with new pages from her Marriage Play, so memorably last played by Kitty Lindsay's torch song torching the institution. In this scene, Cotton Wright and David Ian Lee deftly navigated a dangerous attraction between friends that finds safe refuge in a comically political plot against the state. Or at least, that's what Melissa was nice enough to let my attempt.

THE BACKLINE
There's no snappy 'or' title for this lovely haiku of a play from Rob Ackerman. Rob has been bringing short plays lately, a form he does exceedingly well, but this was by far my favorite. One one level, the play comically pits two new employees at a 50's style burger joint against their well-intentioned boss, dubious co-workers, and a mad rush of tourists. And then our heroine Dierdre sweetly tells us she'll be dead in two months. Tim, her fellow teen and secret crush, hears her aside even as he is trapped in the past-as-present. He tries to find a way to make the future-as-now better even as he deals with all the silly details of our daily lives. It reminded me very much of one of Thorton Wilder's, that flint of wit sparking over darkness. This was a great turn for Jake Alexander, Ali Skye Bennett and Nancy Franklin. Read the full story

OR, FELICIA IS A CAMERA

Well, not exactly, but at our Flux Sunday on the 20th, she did some acting worth a thousand words. In the staging of the final scene from Rob Ackerman's Icarus of Ohio, Felicia Hudson (picturing here) played Maggie, our protagonist's poetically pushy girlfriend. After a buoyantly happy ending where protagonist Jay outwits the government forces intending to abuse his creation of human-powered flight, Maggie reads the melancholy concluding lines of Ovid's Icarus, and Felicia nailed the sad beauty of the end of this play. Though Icarus died, and Jay lives, something has changed forever from their flight to close to the sun.
One of the sad pleasures of these Flux Sundays is coming to the end of a play we've worked through week after week, and that was especially true for Rob's theatrical tale of flight and the things that keep us grounded. I have two additional regrets: that audition/workshop rescheduling kept Flux from attending Rob's reading at hotInk, and that we didn't have a chance as a community to discuss our work on this beautiful play. As per Felicia's suggestion, we will now offer the opportunity for the community to discuss our work on play's when a full-length has been completed.
Also in this picture is fellow member Joe Mathers, who added a note of hilarity to the scene as a star-struck friend and former foe of Jay's.

FENDELL ON MARRIAGE, OR THE RETURN OF EURO-KITTY
We also read a new scene from Melissa Fendell's as yet untitled play, with a bunch of 20 somethings skewering the institution of marriage, featuring the triumphant return of Flux Sunday veteran Kitty Lindsay from her tour in Germany. And what better way to welcome an actress back than give her a vibrant page long rant against institutionalized monogamy?

NO SLEEP TILL HARTKE
Casting is 90% of directing unless you're casting Katie Hartke and Jane Taylor, in which case it's 190%. In David Ian Lee's pressure cooker political thriller Sleeper, I had the joy of unleashing these two talents on each other in a scene between liberal activist and grieving widow Teri (Katie) and right-wing attack dog Rachel (Jane) who made her name breaking the story of Teri's husband's capture by terrorists. It was thrilling to watch these two actresses try to win a scene with everything at stake. And to make matters even better, Gretchen Poulos played the stunned TV page filming the entire debacle, and her reactions were the perfect comic counterpoint to the serious game being played.

TRYING NOT TO LOVE TOO MUCH
We continued through two scenes of Erin Browne's Trying, her play about two young sisters trying to make it after being abandoned by their parents, and the love affair that threatens to break up their house. That description is far too purple for Erin's subtle play of guilt, love, and duty; and it was given excellent life by Caitlin Kinsella and Cotton Wright as our two Lena's, Anja Brannstorm as Chels, and Elise Link once again as the irresistible Belle Walker.

Very different plays at this Flux: a tale of flight ending, a battle of political wills made personal, a Shaw like attack on marriage, and the simple story of how hard and sweet love can be, all in a mere three hours. Read the full story

"And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer.... I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words, we are the music, we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock".

I read a shorter version of this at the beginning of our Flux Sunday yesterday not only because it seems to have wrestled into my breath, so that whenever I pause a phrase from the paragraph above will suddenly reveal itself to me completely; and the pattern and shock she describes become my own; but also because I wanted to begin our Sundays with some shared centering moment. Our Flux Sundays tend to end well, but they begin with me frantically trying to figure out how all the parts fit together, with unexpected actors arriving and last minutes pages from playwrights and only three hours to squeeze it all in.

So, I thought the idea of this shared centering moment would either work, or be completely pretentious and silly; thereby giving people an opportunity to tell me I'm pretentious and silly, which would itself be a kind of centering moment.

But now to the heart of it: it was another solid Flux in spite of the residual stress from our director vote earlier in the day (more on that anon) and my own scattered self. We began with a read-through of Melissa Fendell's newest play, a brooding mysterious stranger sand-storm a-comin' and Momma wants me to fix the fence kind of tale, with proper teen rebellion from Felicia Hudson and brooding mystery provided by Gregory Waller.

Then, we lightly staged scenes from Rob Ackerman's Icarus of Ohio, Katherine Burger's Ah, Batvia!, and David Ian lee's Sleeper.

I ended up directing Katherine's Batvia, and mostly just got in the way as Candice continued her tour de force as the were-panther Anthea and Zack added the stodgy Lord Roderick as a new quirky/creepy old man to his Flux resume. Joe returned to the Scottish Inspector Cottage as Jake challenged Jason for widest-ranging Eastern European accent ever. Yay, Batvia!

Then we jumped into David's Sleeper, which benefited from the clarity of Melissa Fendell's direction sorting out the various plot twists and industry jargon, as well as the strong gender-blind casting of Cotton Wright, Marnie Schulenburg and Elise Link as three swaggering Masters of the Universe. We're all looking forward to seeing how the separate plot strands will be joined together.

We ended on the 'up note' (sorry) of Angela Astle's direction of Rob's Icarus of Ohio. Our protagonist Jay flies in a wonderfully theatrical sequence that fully captures the shock, terror, joy and humor of not only flying, but also really kissing someone you love. Tom DelPizzo once again nailed Jay's vulnerability and comic energy, and Angela filled the stage with some theatrical flourishes that made Rob' story come to vivid life.

Thanks again to everyone for a great Sunday. We are away for the holiday, but return on the 30th to find again whatever shocks and patterns we can. Read the full story