"The Flu Season," the new play by Will Eno that's currently playing on the Lab Stage at The Clarence Brown Theatre at the University of Tennessee, comes at you like other people's unshielded sneezes.
The dialogue - more like those embryos of thoughts that come into your mind just before you open your mouth to say something - comes in flashes. Then it's gone, covering you in ways that are both strange and familiar.
The result is a funny, awkward and simultaneously sad encounter between two people who didn't plan on being together but ended up in a tangle of crazy love at the Crossroads Psychiatric Center.
Just as there is no real dialogue in this play, there is no real set. Just a blank stage with a few pieces of furniture that Female Orderly, played by Sarah Peacock Anderson, and Male Orderly, played by Matthew Charles Russell Badman, move around to form spaces that two guides named Prologue and Epilogue identify.
It's a patient in-take office one moment, a dayroom at another, the infirmary at another.
Prologue, played by Jonathan Vissor, and Epilogue, played by Matthew Bassett, are like opposing Greek choruses.
At the center of "Flu Season" are the confused inmates/patients, Man, played by Michael Moreno, and Woman, played by Amy Elizabeth Mathews.
Mathews' terrifically portrayed Woman is both vulnerable and subtly manipulative.
As Man, Moreno is bewildered, withdrawn and oddly threatening. He can make one laugh and feel clumsy at the same time.
Moreno has that Gene Wilder quality of looking like he is about to say something funny, but when it isn't, he comes off with tinges of sizzling sarcasm instead.
Like everyone else in this play, whether "The Flu Season" is an allegory, a metaphor or even a modern parable, the characters who run this asylum are known only by their titles, Doctor and Nurse.
Superbly played by Steve Fitchpatrick and Cycerli Ash, respectively, Doctor and Nurse comprise their own soap opera within the context of the emotional nuttiness going on around them.
Despite "Flu Season's" fragmented nature, this isn't post-modern deconstructionist theater, but traditional, linear storytelling that will drag you into the middle of its verbal pieces.
It's just sort of like putting back together cubes of poet Edith Sitwell's stream-of-consciousness words after they have gone through the ice crusher on the refrigerator door.
You can catch "Flu" through Oct. 18. Performances are at 7:30 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees on Saturday and Sunday. All tickets are $10 and may be purchased online at www.clarencebrowntheatre.com or by calling 865-974-5161.
Harold Duckett is a freelance contributor to the News Sentinel, writing about theater and music.
© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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