Flux Sunday, 7/15

Phone photo, as is the ancient tradition of our people, by Isaiah Tanenbaum; post by Isaiah too

(What is Flux Sunday?)

Hey, running Flux Sunday is kind of fun! This week, with the rest of Flux busy rocking the Hearts Like Fists auditions, I took over the execution of our weekly development workshop. It was a small but passionate group, and we had a blast. And despite the panoply of pages, my inability to read Gus’s handwriting, and a few scripts-on-iphones, we even finished early.

Playwrights: Johnna Adams (Skinless) , Lauren Ferebee (Somewhere Safer), Larry Kunofsky (Bender), David Ian Lee (Mass)

Directors: Lauren Ferebee, Larry Kunofsky, David Ian Lee

Actors: Sarah Amandes, Becky Byers, Carissa Cordes, Ken Glickfeld, Emily Hartford, Isaiah Tanenbaum, Jane Lincoln Taylor, Shaun B Wilson

Special Guest: Carissa’s mother!

Highlights:

• Shaun gave a startlingly pointed cold read as political wife Jillian in Lauren’s Somewhere Safer, bringing a sharp distrust of Becky Byers’ bubbly intern Renee and her intentions towards superstar politician Anthony (David Ian Lee, ‘natch) into every line she read. I felt the ice from across the room.
• Elsewhere in that play, Jane and Ken had a blast with nearly a page of overlapping dialogue as Jane’s conservative radio host shouted down Ken’s liberal caller. Looking at the page I was afraid it would just be a wall of sound, but Jane and Ken brought great vocal levels and a real sense of comedic timing, so that phrases like “Doing is what creates progress” got to pair up against “a world where things don’t have names, don’t have catchphrases and easy-to-remember slogans“, like fine wine and even finer cheese.
• Speaking of killing it with big blocks of text, Johnna really went to town as Jill in Larry’s play Bender, pictured above. Of course, how can you NOT bring down the house with a monologue with the phrase “Mount SuperFucker Olympus” in it?
• But of course, the bittersweet highlight of the afternoon was Emily Hartford in David Ian Lee’s Mass. This was David’s final Flux Sunday for the foreseeable future, as he’s off to grad school in Illinois. We will miss him, but I can’t think of a better sendoff than Emily gazing at the stars and experiencing a hilarious, varied, and fully committed “series of biological events”. Ahem.

If you were there, what were your highlights? And will you be there next week to see if I’m able to turn power back over to our Flux Sundayer-in-Chief?