Top 11 Moments in Flux 2011

2011 was about as good as it gets, and in casting my mind back through the year, it’s hard for me to believe so much happened in such a short time. Here are my favorite 11 moments in Flux during 2011. I hope they’ll not only inspire you to share your own moments in the comments and on Facebook and Twitter, but to make a year-end donation to help keep the Fluxy moments coming in 2012.

1. The New York Innovative Theatre Awards: The IT Awards are always an amazing time, but this year was special, and not just because we were awarded the 2011 Caffé Cino Fellowship Award. Our performance of Do It Yourself met with such a warm and joyous response that my commitment to this extraordinary community we’re a part of was super-charged, and I’m buzzing from it still (not to mention any opportunity to act with Heather Cohn and Will Lowry must be seized).

Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Pictured: Lori E. Parquet, Chris Wight

2. The Jem Monologue in Dog Act:I’ve spoken about my love for this monologue before, but every single night I heard it, I was moved as if for the first time. Zetta’s tale of watching her father-figure Jem smell the sea and leave the troupe when she was child is so achingly written, and was so beautifully performed by Lori E. Parquet, that it echoes in my ears still: “Mam told me it was because he wasn’t a true roadster. She said, one of those things you can’t help. Where you belong got a gravity and it going to pull you hard. But fug-hat, Dog. Why this sea-smell making me think? I followed Jem a ways. But Mam was right. I went back, and we went away back inland. Maybe, though, nothing was the same.”

3. What Happened After Kali/Maori: One of my proudest achievements artistically was something you may not have even noticed. In Ajax in Iraq, after A.J. suffers the sexual assault that snaps her sanity, she invokes Kali with the women soldiers, and that invocation explodes into a Maori War Dance. It was a thrill to stage, and many audience members singled this section out. But it was the moment after that I was especially pleased with: I didn’t want the energy to drop, and yet our playwright Ellen didn’t connect with the various transitional scenes I offered to move from the peak of violence to its valley.

Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Pictured: Anna Rahn, Tiffany Clementi, Christina Shipp, Lori E. Parquet, Sol Crespo

I resisted the release of a blackout, until I realized the energy could be sustained through sound alone. With our amazingly game cast, we created a hissing, pulsing, strange and violent soundscape that kept the energy of the play humming and didn’t let the audience release.

4. Tiffany Clementi’s Retreat: You’ve hopefully heard the sad/happy news that Tiffany moved to Florida, taking with her a big-sized chunk of Flux’s heart. But if you weren’t at our 2011 Annual Retreat, you missed her performance in Erin Browne’s play Projects. It was a highlight of the retreat, with Kelly O’Donnell, Alisha Spielmann, Stephen Conrad Moore and oh, heck, just about everyone turning in some of their best work, but it is Tiffany’s monologue surrounded by darkness standing in a pool of Little Pond light that sticks in my memory. I knew, and I think we all felt, that something precious was changing.

Pictured: Alisha Spielmann, Tiffany Clementi

5. Kristen Palmer Making the New Stories: The revolt of the young (and young at heart) against the broken, oppressive systems of the old was a theme for Kristen in several of her 2011 plays – Bridgeport, The Heart In Your Chest and most notably for Flux, Sacrifice.

Pictured: Alisha Spielmann, Isaiah Tanenbaum.

This last play was developed at Flux Sundays and the Retreat, but it was these words from a scene in our January Have Anotherthat have stuck with me.  Emmie is a young girl plotting a revolution that ends badly, but her words here ring true: “We can try, we can try to re-write some of the moments, make the history different – the story different. Change the story. That’s the only hope cause it’s all rooted in there. All the hate and the power and the lack of care and the blindness – it’s all in the stories that we’re born with and we’re going to make the new stories and that is going to change everything.”

6. That Crazy Flux Sunday: On August 14th, we attempted to essentially do two Flux Sundays in a single three hour span, first staging plays by Larry and myself, then plays by Adam and Kristen. It was one of the craziest Flux Sundays ever, but a total creative rush.

7. Tour de Force, thy name is Kari Swenson Riely: Though Kari turned in many wonderful performances for Flux in 2011, my favorite was her madly impassioned lecturer in Liz Duffy Adams’ Bama-Sama as part of our ForePlay: New World Iliads. This was also, in my mind, the high water mark for ForePlays since Midsummer’s Imagination Compact.

Photo: isaiah Tanenbaum. Pictured: Aja Houston, Matthew Murumba, Brian Pracht, Kari Swenson Riely

8. The SpeakEasy Brainstorm of ’11: With Matt Archambault leading a reinvigorated Friend of Flux and SpeakEasy program, our most recent meeting was already humming when we opened it up to a brainstorm session regarding our 2012 ForePlay of Deinde. In the course of the next half an hour, 50+ brilliant ideas for short plays about the next evolutions of the human senses poured so rapidly out of the group that Jodi Witherell and I were racing to keep pace with our note-taking. I can’t wait to share the fruits of this session with a wider group.

9. Viva Fidel, or Matt Archampuppet: We worked on Isaiah Tanenbaum’s Cuban political-farce at the Retreat and over several Flux Sundays, but it was the team of Kelly O’Donnell, Jessica Zinder, David Crommett and Paco Tolson pulling the strings of Matt Archambault’s dead Castro that still makes me L to the O.L. Not to mention I had a cameo as an assassin…

10. Heaven Isn’t Too Far Away in Spectacular Browne: As an atheist, I was totally taken off-guard by the depth of emotion stirred up by Brian Pracht’s heavenly reunion in Spectacular Browne. This Food:Soul’s dynamite cast featured stunning work from Raushanah Simmons, and introduced mega-talents Mychael Chinn and Corey Allen to Flux. Judging from the rest of our audience, I was not the only one so moved.

Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Pictured: Mike Mihm, Elise Link, Mychael Chinn, Matthew Archambault, Travis York, Antoinette Broderick

11. And from 2010…: While this was from the end of 2010, sometimes you don’t know how important a moment is when it happens. So it was with Nancy Franklin’s moving read as a dreaming lost boy terrorized by Jason Howard’s Crocker Dial in Katherine Burger’s Peter Pan-fantasia, Never Never. I will never, ever forget the haunting power Nancy brought to that scene, and it was very soon after that she moved permanently back to the Boston area. So, I’m willing to bend the rules for someone who was such a big part of the first few years of Flux, and who is very much missed.

Of course, in such an abundant year, narrowing down to 11 is agonizing (what about the song Asa found for the suicide/sand from the boots? Kia’s repeated miracle-working? “The Human Blues?” The rain-soaked Perse and Honey Fist on a hill? Matthew Murumba and I splitting a drag queen? Becky Byers in general? Jason Paradine’s cart? The prehensile-tail of genius that is Jodi Witherell?)

BUT…

That’s where YOU come in. What were your favorite moments in Flux 2011?

And if you haven’t already, please donate now to Flux so we can keep the moments coming in 2012. From all of us in Flux, thank you for an amazing year.