April 25 – May 4, 2025!
Directed by Michael Beatty, and performed by Niall Garvin, Andrea Hutslar, Kyle Hutslar, Bill Svelmoe, Z Taylor, and JanTurney.
Click https://www.actingensemble.com/box-office for tickets
A Tragicomedy
Set in a hospital and in a theatre, THE FLU SEASON is a love story—a reluctant one, a love story in spite of itself.
The Flu Season is an unconventional tale that follows the relationship of a couple known simply as Man and Woman. They are patients in a mental hospital, attended by well-meaning Doctor and Nurse who are just as detached from reality as the patients. Literary devices-turned-characters, Prologue and Epilogue, guide the audience through the story, framing each scene and offering sharp commentary along the way.
Winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award.
“In Will Eno’s latest play, a love story goes bad (really bad), a play gets written in painful fits and starts, snow falls, it turns to slush. Maybe spring arrives. This is a play to remind us why sunsets make us sad, how nostalgia is like fog and why we live our lives as though we are in mourning for them. THE FLU SEASON is stingingly funny and really rather beautiful. Will Eno is an original, a maverick wordsmith whose weird, wry dramas gurgle with the grim humor and pain of life. Eno specializes in the connections of the unconnected, the apologetic murmurings of the disengaged, those who have suppressed their humanity to survive. It is vicious stuff, written in a language so deceptively innocent, so full of platitudes, that you don’t realize it has cut you deep until you feel the warm seep of bloody despair.” —Guardian (UK).
“Eno’s playwriting is of a potent strain—tough to anticipate, difficult to resist.” —Village Voice.
Will Eno is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Fellow, and a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. The Flu Season premiered at The Gate Theatre in London and then opened in New York where it won the Oppenheimer Award (2004) for best debut by an American playwright. His play Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His collection of short plays Oh, The Humanity and other good intentions was produced at the Flea Theater in New York in November 2007. An excerpt of his play Tragedy: a tragedy appeared in the June 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Tragedy: a tragedy had its U.S. premiere at Berkeley Rep Theatre in March of 2008. His plays are published by Oberon Books, in London, and by TCG and Playscripts, in the United States.
