Flux Sunday, February 17th

SUNDAYS ARE FOR ENDINGS

Due to the chaos of casting, this particular Sunday was more disorganized than any in recent memory. But in spite of that, it held a particular power, as both Trying and Honey Fist played out their last scenes.

HOW NOT TO BE SEDUCED BY YOUR OWN CHARACTERS
One of the problems I have as a playwright is being so consistently surprised and seduced by what my characters’ say that I let them go on for longer than they should. This was especially clear in the reading of the final scene of Honey Fist, a play of mine we have been working on for many months, off and on again. And because it had been so long since I’d worked on the play, I really let Gretyl (Christina Shipp) and Stu (Greg Waller, pictured here in a very different role as Zynth in Rue) go on longer than they should.
Into this verbal flood I flung Scott Ebersold, a director I’m particularly excited about bringing into the Flux Sunday process. And he did a great job of finding the need coursing through the rivers of language, and giving a shape to the scene.
And a particular highlight was Christina figuring out exactly what Gretyl wants in this strange final scene – all at once the epiphany hit her and she knew more about the character than I did!

ON LOVE AND SPACE ALIENS
Sandwiched between the book ends of endings, three plays about love gave a welcome dose of beginnings. Katherine Burger’s Way Deep continued to cast its spell of young love, and Rob Ackerman’s new short gave Nancy Franklin a tour de force as a woman in equal thrall to her love for her boyfriend and her fear of alien invasion.
And David Ian Lee’s Sleeper gave us a more unusual love scene – two friends, brought together in the Pashtun by the kidnapping of an American, figure out how far is too far in the pursuit of what’s right. While the scene seems on the surface to be about two terrorists plotting evil acts; it really is about how far the love between these two friends can go. This very human exploration of how the love of God, country and brotherhood drives fundamentalism was made especially fascinating by Candice Holdorf’s gender-bending portrayal of the more fiercely devout of the two.

But the day belonged above all to Trying, and I will post separately about that play.