The Flu Season by Will Eno, Oh Dragon Theatre Company at Grayduck Gallery, November 7 - 16, 2013

by Michael Meigs

 
Oh Dragon Theatre Company's choice of the Grayduck Gallery just off south First Street as the venue to stage Will Eno's The Flu Season is appropriate. The white walls, open space, and angled positioning of the seats for the audience create a stark setting for a stark play. In his odd little fable of anomie, set in a mental clinic, Will Eno tells a story that could squeeze our hearts if only he didn't keep relentlessly undercutting our reactions.

Ky Cleveland, Nicholaus Weindel (photo: Oh Dragon)

This institution is a holding space with the mission of assisting fragile souls to put their pieces back together. Newly admitted 'Man' (Nicholaus Weindel) is interviewed by the Doctor (Ky Cleveland) and newly admitted 'Woman' is brought on board by the Nurse (Victoria Jackson). Each caretaker is garrulous and self-absorbed; each admittee seems stunned. We learn a lot about the staff members, almost all of it irrelevant to the central question suggested by the structure: why are these two here at all?

Rounding out the cast are the Prologue (Kendra Pérez) and the Epilogue (Ben Howell) -- although neither exercises the announced function. They comment throughout the play. Pérez has a reassuringly pert demeanor that's balanced by Howell's arch, cynical responses. Playwright Eno uses 'Epilogue' in a deliberately 'meta' approach. Epilogue's voice seems to be that of the playwright, drawing attention to the conventions of the drama and insistently questioning the value of his own creation.

Kendra Perez (photo: Oh Dragon Theatre)

In a 2009 review of an earlier production of this script by Austin Community College, I acknowledged that I found it 'aggravating,' Southern dialect for 'deliberately provocative,' but I admired the language and the images Eno used in this deliberately mundane setting.

Both in its title and in the cycle of its action, The Flu Season suggests the eternal predictability of human existence. Strangers meet, bond, become intimate, quarrel, separate, die; seen from the outside, those intensely personal stories are reduced to clinical histories. We watch two couples here. The young wounded grasp feebly for feeling and their placid elders bumble about and bond in routine and mediocrity. In fact, there's a third couple: Prologue and Epilogue stand at conventional literary remove from the story, disputing one another's declarations without directly addressing one another, like a couple long married with never a meeting of the minds.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com

2013-2014 season, Oh Dragon Theatre Company

Oh Dragon Theatre Company is excited to announce their 2013 – 2014 season! This season will feature the Austin premieres of two plays. Our main focus was to introduce new directors and plays to the Austin theatre community. We hope you’ll join us for what we think we’ll be an amazing year in live theatre.

The Flu Season

by Will Eno

Directed by Carl Gonzales

A love story goes bad (really bad), a play gets written in painful fits and starts, snow falls, it turns to slush. Maybe spring arrives. This is a play to remind us why sunsets make us sad, how nostalgia is like fog and why we live our lives as though we are in mourning for them.

Thursdays through Saturdays, November 7th – 16th.

grayDuck gallery, 608 Monroe Street Austin, Texas

*Austin Premiere*

DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING– An evening of my plays

by Mark Harvey Levine

Directed by Phil Morin, Michael Floyd, and Jessica Helmke

.

A journey through ten short stories featuring ordinary people in not-so-ordinary situations.

February 2014 (Dates & Location TBA)

*Austin Premiere*

Tango Through The Revolution

by Adam Esquenazi Douglas

Directed by Katherine Wilkinson

In a small city in Cuba, on the night of their honeymoon, newlyweds Violeta and Moises Esquenazi begin their married life at the moment Castro is poised to take over the country. As the revolution shifts from a minor movement to a new, brutal way of life, this once simple couple is forced to reevaluate what morality and decency means in a world compromised by broken promises and fading music.

July/August 2014 (Dates & Location TBA)

For more information about Oh Dragon Theatre Company and our season, please visit our Facebook page www.facebook.com/OhDragonTheatreCompany

Auditions for The Flu Season by Will Eno, Oh Dragon Theatre Company, July 18, 2013

Oh Dragon Theatre Company auditions for Will Eno's The Flu Season, Austin, July 18th, 2013 from 6:30 pm to 10:0 0pm at The Space , 915 Manchaca Road, Austin, TX 78745.

Please send your audition request to ohdragontheatrecompany@gmail.com. *Please prepare a one minute monologue and be prepared to do cold readings from the script.
Characters: Prologue (Male or Female); Epilogue (Male or Female); Man (Male); Woman (Female); Doctor (Male); Nurse (Female)
Oh Dragon Theatre Company is pleased to announce auditions for the first show of their second season, The Flu Season by Will Eno. Directed by Carl Gonzales with assistant director Irene White, the show will debut in October 2013. A full season announcement will be made in August 2013.
Winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for best New York debut by an American playwright. "A love story goes bad (really bad), a play gets written in painful fits and starts, snow falls, it turns to slush. Maybe spring arrives. This is a play to remind us why sunsets make us sad, how nostalgia is like fog and why we live our lives as though we are in mourning for them. THE FLU SEASON is stingingly funny and really rather beautiful. Will Eno is an original, a maverick wordsmith whose weird, wry dramas gurgle with the grim humor and pain of life. Eno specializes in the connections of the unconnected, the apologetic murmurings of the disengaged, those who have suppressed their humanity to survive. It is vicious stuff, written in a language so deceptively innocent, so full of platitudes, that you don't realize it has cut you deep until you feel the warm seep of bloody despair." —Guardian (UK).

(*) THE FLU SEASON by Will Eno, Proxy Theatre, San Antonio, May 16 - June 1, 2013

(Performing at the overtime Theatre Center, 1203 Camden Street, San Antonio, 78215 - click for map)

presents


The Flu Season

by Will Eno
directed by Aaron Aguilar

May 16 - June 1
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.

Special byProxy events are: The Designer Reveal—May 13th, 8pm; Thought/Talk—May 25th, 10:00pm; and the Final Curtain Party—June 1st, 10pm.

Tickets are $10-15 for general admission; cash/check/credit/debit accepted at the door; reservations and tickets available online. Please visit proxytheatre.org or call 210-807-8646 for reservations or questions.

It may be spring in Texas, but it’s winter at Proxy
The Flu Season reminds us of the coldest times of in lives

Proxy Theatre continues its successful second season with The Flu Season, written by award-winning contemporary playwright Will Eno. Although the play will be opening in the Texas heat of May, the inhabitants of a psychiatric rehab are going through the winter of their lives. But love happens no matter the season.

The Flu Season will remind of you of the warmest and coldest times in your life. "The Flu Season takes place in both a hospital and a theater," said Aguilar, "It's a play about the love we feel for the art we create and for another person...and it's about how easy it is to screw up that love. We nurture, we toil, we invest, and yet somehow it still goes up in flames. And so what? We're not perfect. The Flu Season is an exciting new kind of theatre by Will Eno; it's certainly experimental, but like all his work it is still so tenderly, so passionately human."

Written in 2003, The Flu Season is the winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for best New York debut by an American playwright. Focusing on the narratives of a Man and Woman and their Doctor and Nurse, this play is a love story for today-- one that doesn't necessarily end well. Through Prologue and Epilogue the audience is enabled to view the hopeful beginnings and jaded hindsight of the writer, framing the characters in both the present and future.

Runs May 16th-June 1st at 8 pm at The Overtime Theater. Shows are Thursday-Saturday at 8pm. Tickets go on sale May 2nd. All events take place at the Overtime Theater at 1203 Camden St, SATX 78215. Free parking can be found on site.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Auditions in San Antonio for The Flu Season by Will Eno, Proxy Theatre, March 16, 2013

Auditions for The Flu Season, Saturday, March 16, 2013, 12:00pm until 3:00pm
This production is the third of Proxy's second season, The Leper Colony, a season concerning those who society has labeled dangerously contagious or generally unwanted. It will be directed by Artistic Director, Aaron Aguilar, director of Red Light Winter, End Days, and most recently, Mike Greenberg's short play, Max & Maggie, as part of Northwest Vista's Black Boxer Shorts.
Will Eno's The Flu Season is the beautiful tale of two psych ward patients who want to love each other, but struggle to figure out how. Plus the story of their doctor and a nurse who in turn harbor love for each other. Plus two narrators, Prologue and Epilogue, who try their best to objective storytellers. The language of the play is richly poetic, each character is filled with complex emotion and desire, and there are no minor roles.


ABOUT THE AUDITIONS:
-Preliminary auditions will be held Saturday, March 16th from 12pm-3pm.
-Please prepare one or two 90 second (only!) monologues. Contemporary monologues preferred.
-Although we'll accept walk-ins, we highly suggest emailing aaron@proxytheatre.org to make an appoitment!
-Callbacks will be held the following day, Sunday, March 17th from 5pm-8pm
-Even if you can't make it, you can help us spread the word!


CHARACTERS:
Prologue: A narrator, male
Epilogue: A narrator, male
Man: Intelligent, somewhat scrappy, late twenties or so
Woman: Intelligent, somewhat delicate, late twenties or so
Doctor: Male, doctoral, dignified though somewhat distracted, fifties or so
Nurse: Female, maternal, also dignified though somewhat distracted, early fifties or so