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The Flu Season by Will Eno

Presented by Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company at Midtown Art Center

February 25-March 13, 2010

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Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company presents a Houston premiere, The Flu Season by Will Eno, and directed by Matt Huff.

Winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for best New York debut by an American playwright, The Flu Season is a reluctant love story, in spite of itself. Set in a hospital and a theater, it is a play that revels in ambivalence and derives a flailing energy from its doubts whether a love story is ever really a love story.

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.

Will Eno garnered international attention with Thom Pain (based on nothing), which played to acclaim in London, Edinburgh and New York and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Eno's other plays include Oh, The Humanity and other exclamations; Tragedy: a tragedy; Kid Blanc; King: a problem play; and an adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. In 2007, he was awarded the National Arts Club's Kesselring Honor.

"Will Eno is one of the finest younger playwrights I have come across in a number of years. His work is inventive, disciplined and, at the same time, wild and evocative. His ear is splendid and his mind is agile."-Edward Albee

"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."-Guardian

Will Eno has been called "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation" -The New York Times