The Flu Season & Intermission: 1 (Oberon Modern Plays) - Softcover

Will Eno

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840023708 ISBN 13: 9781840023701

Publisher: Oberon Books, 2003

Synopsis

The Flu Season

No one in the middle of being in love ever sat down to write a love story. It’s only after the belongings are sorted and the shirts returned that the pencils are sharpened and the notebooks opened. So, in a serious way, love stories are never love stories. Love is their inspiration, yes, but the end of love is the reason for their existence. This is a problem. It proposes anti-journeys where we saw only journeys, directs things toward a new negative we hadn’t intended. The Flu Season tries to be a love story, anyway. It has a strategy. The play revels in ambivalence, lives in fits and starts, and derives a flailing energy from its doubts about itself. But these come at a price, which is paid by the characters in the play. A kind of clarity finally comes. In the end, is the end.

Intermission

“Two couples chat with one another at a play’s intermission. From what we have heard, it sounds dreadful, which the cocky Jack points out. But his quibbles give way before Mr. Murray’s torrent of memory and invective. He doesn’t want to hear stylistic complaints, he wants the boy to recognize the play’s attempts at truth. And while Mr. Murray’s curmudgeon sneers at audiences’ yen for weeping at shows, Mr. Eno then makes us – practically by brute force – cry for him. Mr. Eno’s triumph is both canny and deeply touching, a vital look into a theater that actually reminds us what it’s for.” The New York Sun

The Flu Season was the winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for best debut production.

About this title

About the Author

Will Eno lives in Brooklyn. He is the recent recipient of a Residency 5 Fellowship at the Signature Theatre, where his play Title and Deed premiered in May 2012. His play The Realistic Joneses had its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater, in April 2012. His play Middletown was a winner of the Horton Foote Award and was produced at the Vineyard Theater in New York and Steppenwolf in Chicago. His play Thom Pain (based on nothing), played at the Edinburgh Festival, the Soho Theatre in London, the DR2 in New York, and in translation around the world. It was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has been translated into many Romance languages and several Slavic ones. His other plays include Tragedy: a tragedy and The Flu Season. In 2012 Eno was a joint recipient of the PEN award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career. Praise for Will Eno’s writing: “Mr. Eno’s voice is so assuredly his own, simultaneously delicate and audacious in its measurements of poetry, philosophy and Monty Pythonesque silliness” - New York Times; “He strikes me as being the real thing, a real playwright. He takes every chance. And Will keeps the voice his own: he has an awareness of the human condition I wish more people his age had.” - Edward Albee

Edition details

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840023708
• ISBN 13: 9781840023701
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 82