Liz Duffy Adams (photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

It’s no secret that as far as Theatre Ensembles go, Flux is one of my very favorites.  Consistently turning out quality work that never fails to leave audiences utterly captivated and amazed, they set the off-off Broadway bar very high – only to sail over it with each successive production.  I’m always expectant when I know a new Flux show is coming around because for me it means  - as a reviewer as well as an audience member – a guaranteed great night of theatre.

Well, I won’t have to wait much longer to get my Flux Fix – because Liz Duffy Adams’ post-apocalyptic dark comedy, Dog Act, will be coming to the Flamboyan Theater (at the Clemente Solo Velez Cultural & Educational Center) on February 4th. Dog Act “follows Zetta Stone, a traveling performer, and her companion Dog (a young man undergoing a voluntary species demotion) as they walk through the wilderness of the former U.S.A. with their vaudeville troupe. They are heading toward a gig in China, if they can find it…and if they can survive to get there.”  Sounds like nothing I’ve ever seen before – and exactly what I’ve come to expect from Flux!

In an interview with Liz Duffy Adams I was able to find out how this extraordinary play found this extraordinary ensemble; how she was able to make vaudeville and post apocalyptic themes mesh, and what undergoing a “voluntary species demotion” actually means . . .

Dog Act featuring Lori E. Parquet and Chris Wight (Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum)

So many questions about Dog Act that I hardly know where to start! But first I’d like to talk a little bit about Flux. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Flux Ensemble and have been watching their progress for the past several years now. Tell me how you first came to collaborate with this group for Dog Act.

LDA: I met Gus [August Schulenburg - current Artistic Director of Flux] in 2002 at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival; he was there with his play RIDING THE BULL and I was there with DOG ACT. We stayed in touch, and when he told me recently that Flux wanted to produce DOG, I thought it would be a great fit.

Kelly O’Donnell is directing the piece – and she’s a very inventive and thoughtful director. How did her staging of the piece affect it? Were there any moments that changed because of her particular vision?

Oh, absolutely, I’m sure there will be many; we’re only half-way through rehearsals, so it’s a little hard to say specifically. I agree about Kelly being inventive and thoughtful; it’s been a joy to work with her. I’d say that her staging will bring out both the danger of the world and the comedy of the piece very vividly.

Dog Act is set in a post-apocalyptic world. I’m personally always curious about the idea of setting something in a post-apocalyptic world – what was your main reason for putting your play in (what I would expect) is the future? Is there any way it could exist now?

I don’t think this story could exist in the present; I think it’s inseparable from the setting. I tend to go to the future or the past for theatrical settings. For one thing, I like obliqueness of approach; talking about the present through the past or future takes it off “the nose.” Also, I love heightened theatrical language – one of the things I had the most pleasure with in writing DOG was the freedom to invent future dialects; how the different tribes of the play talk, and what that tells us about them.

I also love the idea of juxtaposing vaudeville – a very old-fashioned notion - with post apocalypse  . . . a very futuristic idea. What made you join these two together?

One thing I’m always interested in is the cyclical nature of human history (something my last play, OR, addressed pretty directly in a very different way); the way certain historical moments repeat and echo through the ages. The “vaudeville” in this play is an expansive notion inspired by traveling players from ancient Greece to medieval Europe up through American vaudeville troupes of the early-21st-century, to name just three incarnations. And then I love post-apocalyptic stories, I love stories about how people recreate social/political systems and civilization in the midst of catastrophe, and protect human culture through the darkest of times. So having the central characters be performers who are the sole source of art in a very dark future seemed exciting to me, and potentially theatrical.

Dog Act is about Zetta Stone (LOVE that name) and her companion who is ”undergoing a voluntary species demotion”. I’m positive this is the first I’ve ever heard of any play, story, or writing of any kind that deals with a species demotion. What exactly is that?

The character Dog is a young man who has chosen, for reasons that become clear in the play, to live as a dog; specifically a working dog: a life of humble, loyal service. In the world of the play, where real dogs are scarce, this is a thing you can do.

Without giving away too much of the plot – what is your favorite moment of the play?

That’s a hard question! Well, I have a particular fondness for the play-within-the-play in Act 2, which includes a debased variation of the classic Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First?” DOG ACT won the Will Glickman Award when it was first produced in San Francisco, and it turns out that Glickman (who was a playwright and screenwriter) wrote that routine for Abbott and Costello. So that pretty much blew my mind.

Wow!  That’s amazing –  I can’t even imagine what something like that must be like.  Talk about “meant to be”!

Dog Act is a “dark comedy”. Is that because, as you wrote about a dark topic you were able to find the hidden humor in it, or is this a comedy that just happens to be set during a dark time?

Maybe both. I find that humor tends to enter into my work whatever I do, so I usually think about other things and let the humor take care of itself. In this case I wanted to tell a certain kind of story, set in a dark, dangerous, perilous world, and – since it was partly about theater itself – let it be as ridiculously funny as it wanted to be. If that makes sense.

What is the one theme that you hope resonates the most with audiences who come to see Dog Act?

I hope people in the audience will have a fabulous time, get caught up in the story, feel transported in that theatrical way of being on a wild ride together, and maybe find themselves thinking about the burdens of history, forgiveness, and what it means to be human.

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I hope you’re all as excited as I am to see Dog Act!  Check back to see my review in a few weeks.

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How you feel about Before Your Very Eyes (Written and Directed by Edward Elefterion) depends very much upon the person you are, what you believe about the events of 9/11, and whether or not you are a person who trusts what they see and takes it for truth, or if you are a person who needs evidence to support everything before you’ll believe it.

Before Your Very Eyes starts off as a piece about raw emotion – but quickly becomes a piece about something quite different.  For the rest of the play it vacillates between moments of poetic beauty and moments of uncompromising activism.

Bobby Abido, Damon Pooser and Sanam Erfani

The play begins with a scene that brought an event that happened almost a decade ago right back to the present day – two woman: Kate (Elyse Knight) and Evonne (Diana DeLaCruz) waiting in hyper hysteria for word from their husbands, John and Erik.  The disembodied voice of Erik’s cell message (Arthur Aulisi) is ghastly and a little too vivid; Kate is almost burned by what she hears Evonne’s husband Eric yell into the phone.  And hearing the last words of this desperate man only makes her believe more strongly that her own husband, John, will be coming home safely.

When John (Damon Pooser) actually does walk through the door it’s a relief, but a short-lived one.  Now begins the story of how tragedy effects people differently, and how people can abandon each other emotionally when what they’re really trying to do is find one another in the ashes.  The point, and theme, illustrated most poignantly by John and Kate and even Evonne’s story is that the people who were left to deal with the emotional fissure of 9/11 often felt most abandoned not by those who died but rather by those who lived and could no longer connect with each other.

Before Your Very Eyes quickly folds in a second story thread; that of Amir (Bobby Abido) and Lakshmi (Sanam Erfani) who also lost someone during the World Trade Center collapse.  Amir, an inquisitive person by nature, spends that fateful September day snapping photos of what he sees, including people jumping from the buildings.  Confounded by the pieces that don’t add up to him, and wracked with grief over the loss of his brother, Amir begins to amass information he concludes is evidence that the World Trade Center event was an inside job.

At first Lakshmi is terrified by what she perceives as Amir’s crazy ranting.  But soon enough she too becomes convinced that there are a few too many things that don’t make sense to her.  Together they build a website, and eventually a documentary using user-submitted information as evidence to strongly build their case. They address in conversation their need to separate themselves from the “crazies” who are coming up with such ridiculous theories as the event being caused by “Reptilian shape-shifting aliens”.  Amir’s ardent research brings him in contact with both Evonne and John and one by one,  the stories start to go deeper.

If  you are someone who refuses to sit by and be told what to believe, then the Amir character will resonant very strongly with you.  Bobby Abido plays Amir with an anxious energy, he is in constant motion both physically as well as mentally.  As Amir he knows that time has run out and he must do what he can to show people that there is a story that they’re not being told.

Elyse Knight and Damon Pooser

If you are someone who believes the inward journey is more important that the events around you,  then the Kate character will be your strongest guide through this play.  Elyse Knight takes Kate from panicked to grateful to confused to frustrated, and when she delivers a line to her husband that says (paraphrasing) “Last year I couldn’t wait for you to come home.  Now I wish you never had!” you can feel the anguish she’s going through – as if the World Trade Center spit back a husband from its depths that resembled the man she loved but one who acted completely differently and couldn’t connect with her in the same way ever again.

I”m not sure how I feel about these two themes being mixed together.  Do I think they can co-exist within the same conversation?  Yes.  But do I think they can exist equally - plot-wise  – in the same play?  Not as much.  Each topic is weighty, therefore each carries the mark of a main plot.  Two very strong themes seemingly fighting for the spotlight, neither being relegated to the role of sub-plot does not always equal a play that finds that sweet spot.  While the character of John seems to be the true thread that ties both ends of the story together, I’m not sure that the character creates enough of a balance between the two worlds.  While Damon Pooser does an excellent job with the character of John, there is a large responsibility put on that character’s shoulders.   Overall, I felt Before Your Very Eyes was too sentimental to be strong cautionary tale, but then it was too radical to be an emotional story.  And yet, for some, that may be the perfect way to tell a 9/11 story – for that may be exactly where their own feelings of 9/11 come to rest.  In that respect then this play is a great voice for those who are still confused by the events.

The good news is, if this subject intrigues you, but if you feel puzzled, or driven, or emotional, or anything at all after the performance, you can stick around for a talk back with the ensemble and explore your own feelings with some lively discussion.  Additionally, some  special post show panels will be held:

Friday June 11th: “Historical Events and the Media” – MJ Robinson, Ph.D.

Saturday June 12th: “Memory, Media and Misrecognition” – Marion Wrenn, Ph. D.

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