Flux Sunday, September 14th

(Photo: Allison Bolah. Pictured l to r: Autumn Horne, August Schulenburg, Heather Cohn, Jane Taylor)

A VOLLEY OF BURNING 60’S

One of the best parts about Flux Sunday (from a playwrights perspective) is the weekly need for pages. You have to bring them every week, and they damn well better be as strong as the actors and directors you hand them to. And with that need as a spur, it’s amazing how the pages ride.

And so it was this Sunday, with a plethora of new pages from Rob’s Volleygirls, my Ten Black Boxes, and Aaron’s We Are Burning. All three seem to be in that lucky place of surging towards unknown destinations, and there were some damn good directors and actors to hand them to.

BUMP SET SPIKE
We continued reading through Volleygirls, tabling a bunch of pages and throwing some juicy Coach, Xavier and Jess scenes on their feet. Coach’s love for a game he hates continues to vie with Xavier’s precocious passion for my favorite part of this play, and in Zack Calhoon’s 2nd Sunday, he embodied both with the help of Jane Taylor as deadly serious athletic director and 1st timer Carissa Cordes as the disciplined team captain Jess who kisses Xavier in spite of herself. Can Flux keep returning the rapid volleys of Ackerman’s pages? Tune in next Sunday to find out…

AS FLIES TO WANTON BOYS ARE WE TO THE GODS
Prometheus to be exact, who both suffers the indignities of the Olympians and chronicles those of two human lovers, Will and Lucy, both misbegotten with too much feeling in a world literally on fire. Aaron’s play continued apace with great work in David Douglas Smith’s subtle portrayal of Will’s mysteriously assigned therapist, and Ingrid’s delightfully Mom-frazzled Lucy; as well as Richard Watson’s increasingly enigmatic Prometheus.

STONE MOUNTAIN OF GEORGIA
Angela Astle drew the daunting task of staging my latest scene of the 60’s play Ten Black Boxes. In this scene, the characters we follow year by year are taken over by King’s dream speech, and it was scary to turn this sacred text to our own ends. In some places it worked, and in others it jarred; but it worked enough to move forward, thanks in no small part to Jason Paradine’s Bobby, Joe Mather’s Barry, Kelly O’Donnell’s Tegan, Felicia Hudson’s Martha and 1st Timer Anthony Willis Jr’s George.

And the days go on so the work does too.