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

Eurydice by Sara Ruhl, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 3 - 13

In Sarah Ruhl's world, stones can talk, the dead can send letters to the living, and the devil connives to send a fragile bride to her death so he can court her in the afterlife. On the far side of the river of forgetting, memory fades and the ability to read disappears. Young Orpheus, bereft in this life, telephones a long-distance information operator in an effort to try to locate his dead wife.

Despite the striking mythic beauty of its concepts, Ruhl's Eurydice made me profoundly uneasy last year when Different Stages did it at the City Theatre. Perhaps because the shade of Eurydice's father clings to his memories and continues to dream of her, despite the emptiness and unchanging nature of life after death.

Ruhl has a frank and direct consciousness of the all too transitory nature of this existence. She wraps that message in the reworking of the Greek fable of the musician Orpheus who braved the underworld and came close -- just that close -- to bringing his bride Eurydice back.

Jamie Goodwin as the quietly grieving dead father has depth, dignity and stature, in contrast to the simplicity of Nathan Brockett and Cassidy Schiltz as the eternally naive lovers.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .