Flux Sunday: 12/6/15

Post and pictures by Isaiah Tanenbaum

Actors: Ken Glickfeld, Adriana Jones, Jesse Edward Rosbrow, David Douglas Smith, Adam Swiderski

Playwright: Isaiah Tanenbaum (The Transcendental Etudes)

Owing to the last-minute nature of this particular Flux Sunday, we had a very intimate gathering this week, and instead of our usual fare from a variety of excellent full-time playwrights, we six made do with a sitting read-through of my half-finished play about a pianist, her rocky path to fame, and also the nature of truth itself. So, you know, light stuff. We even had time for wifi difficulties beforehand (boring and not very fun!), and post-play feedback (inspiring and thoughtful!). It’s a heady play in heightened blank verse and it needs work and a LOT of cutting, but hearing all of its 41 as-yet-written pages start-to-finish helped me see its current shape, get reacquainted with the characters, and consider some paths forward. Perhaps I’ll be able to stick to Adam’s proposed schedule of one new scene every two months, thus allowing me to finish a draft of this play in “only” 10 years, and hopefully our next Flux Sunday can return us to our feet for our usual festivities!

Highlights included:

• Jesse’s breathless enthusiasm in a cross-gender casting as Young Joyce
• Adam’s charming wooing of her as Young Bill
• The playful interplay between Ken and Adriana as the much-older versions of Bill and Joyce, especially in a later scene where their banter turns bitter at a memory perhaps best left buried
• David Douglas Smith’s return to Flux Sunday, an absence keenly felt and happily remedied, as he gave a light touch to Allen, a music producer with possibly sinister motives

Adriana, Jesse, and Adam stuck around afterwards and were joined by a game Pete Boisvert and Lori Parquet to help the Flux Creative Partners wrangle our (in)famous stardrop, a leviathan of a curtain that creates a full star field on stage. We discovered it during a 2014 trip to the ever-incredible Materials For The Arts and used it to great effect in Jane the Plain, but it’s been nothing so much as a large and heavy heap of an obstacle in our storage unit ever since. With the help of these FoFs, not only were we able to take it out and photograph it, so that we might earn some income from renting it out, but we folded and tied it down to a much smaller size, hopefully keeping both it and our own sanity in better condition moving forward. A huge thank-you to these five amazing friends!

Jane Allen (Alisha Spielmann) says hello to an old friend, who like so many of us is more impressive when viewed at higher resolution