Announcing Flux’s 10th Anniversary Year

Starting this November, Flux Theatre Ensemble celebrates its 10th Anniversary Year!

Over the past decade, Flux has produced 22 plays for the New York stage. Flux’s audiences have weighed their calling against personal happiness with The Lesser Seductions of History, traveled through the Vaudevillian post-apocalypse with Dog Act, grieved a lost daughter in Sans Merci, and seen a superhero comic brought to life in Hearts Like Fists. The next twelve months of Flux build on that legacy, and expand beyond it.

The anniversary year kicks off with the much-anticipated return of Flux’s Family Feud on November 5th, with a special Robin Hood theme. Ye Olde Flux Family Feud features huge raffle prizes, live music, and two teams of theater all-stars competing to answer questions about Renaissance life, Robbing the Rich, and the Merry Men. Who can guess the answers our community of theatre artists and audiences gave to our survey?

Ye Olde Flux Family Feud will be held at Judson Memorial Church. Tickets are available now.

The Feud builds towards Flux’s world premiere production, in late January, of Adam Szymkowicz’s Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood. In this hilarious new take on the classic tale, Robin Hood is and has always been Maid Marian in disguise. Robin/Marian leads a motley group of Merry Men (many of whom are women) against the greedy Prince John. As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, who will stand for the vulnerable if not Robin? Modern concerns and romantic entanglements clash on the battlefield and on the ramparts of Nottingham Castle. A play about selfishness and selflessness and love deferred and the fight. Always the fight. The fight must go on. Marian is the first play to come out of Flux’s bold FluxForward commission program. The production, directed by Flux Creative Partner Kelly O’Donnell, runs Jan 27- Feb 11 at the New Ohio Theatre.

This Spring, Flux will expand beyond New York City to present World Builders by Johnna Adams in a bicoastal double-premiere. Whitney and Max live deep within their own imagined realities – one expansive and fanciful, the other dark and brutal. To break free of these visions and become functional members of society, they embark upon a clinical drug trial that might erase these worlds forever. But are they truly able to leave their fantasies behind? World Builders will simultaneously premiere in New York and Los Angeles with two casts and one creative team.

Finally, next Fall, Flux brings the second FluxFoward play to life: AM I DEAD? The Untrue Narrative of Anatomical Lewis, the Slave, by Kevin R. Free. In the 1830s, the University of Virginia owned a slave called “Anatomical Lewis” who was tasked with the maintenance of its students’ dissection chamber. Now, four strangers from different times find themselves trapped forever in the purgatory of Lewis’ anatomical theatre — unless they can find a way to reassemble his body. As they put the pieces together, they realize they share a particular kind of damning secret. Using the form of dark comedy, AM I DEAD explores deeply complex questions about race, identity, faith, and our responsibility to change the historical and future narratives for black men in this country. The production will be directed by Flux Creative Partner Heather Cohn in Fall, 2017.

All three productions will continue Flux’s successful Living Ticket production model, where no financial transaction is required to attend. Instead, audiences will be presented with a complete budget for each show, and choose to donate as they wish. The Living Ticket is Flux’s solution to the industry-wide challenges of access, artist pay, and transparency, and has already received national attention. Thanks to the generous support of its audiences, Flux is thrilled to continue to offer this new ticketing model in its 10th Anniversary Season, and for the foreseeable future.

From the forests of Sherwood to the gates of hell, from imagined worlds to a vision for a better world right here, these shows are a fitting culmination to Flux’s decade-long tradition of bold new work and production models, and a glimpse into the future of the company Backstage called a “Young (and Mighty) New York Theater Company” and Indie Theater Now named as one of their “People of the Decade.”

Flux Theatre Ensemble invites you to join them as they celebrate 10 years of making theater, and looks forward to continuing to build a creative home for artists and audiences in the years to come.