The Flu Season & Intermission

Will Eno

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781840023701
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783198436
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

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.

THE FLU SEASON

ACT ONE

Scene 1

DOCTOR enters upstage, near a door. MAN is sitting downstage, in darkness.

DOCTOR: All alone in the all-dark, are we? Sitting in the twilight of the Exit light, licking our wounds with our wounded tongue, dreaming of some great difference, some healing hand, some heavenly or electrical light? Or just sitting there? Which? There is a difference. Tell us. The shuffling coughing world awaits. Give us a little of your disquiet.

MAN: I’m not doing anything.

DOCTOR: Well, not anything or not, we still need the light.

He turns on a light switch. Lights up.

It adds a sort of decorum to our proceedings, brightens up the otherwise muted décor of our shadowy procession. And it helps us to see, finally. But how was it, without it?

MAN: Darker.

DOCTOR: I see. Less light. But what about you? How are you?

MAN: No.

DOCTOR: (Pause.) I’m sorry? I said, ‘How are you?’

MAN: I’m sorry, I thought you said, ‘Who are you?’

DOCTOR: (Brief pause.) Even if I had, wouldn’t ‘No’ still have been the wrong answer?

MAN: The mind doesn’t work this way.

DOCTOR: What way?

MAN: Quickly. Talkatively. I don’t know. Quickly.

DOCTOR: I’m sorry?

MAN: Nothing. Can I go lie down?

DOCTOR: First, I have to quickly ask you a question or two.

MAN: (He inhales and begins holding his breath. He speaks with great difficulty.) Yur tha dogdor. You know bess. I yield doo tha medigal prefezhional.

DOCTOR: The first question is, (He reads.) ‘In your personal dealings with people, with the certain persons who people your immediate surroundings, have you ever personally felt it humanly necessary to present, solely for the sole and lone purpose of individuality itself, a persona, such that…’

MAN is turning blue.

This is not that important. Would you like to go lie down?

MAN: (He exhales.) I really would.

DOCTOR: We can talk later. I do need you to sign something. Nothing very serious or breathtaking, just more paper for the future to shred. A form. Strictly a formality.

DOCTOR begins to fill out a form.

MAN: (Watching DOCTOR from across the desk.) How do you do that?

DOCTOR: Do what?

MAN: Write upside-down like that?

DOCTOR: (Flips the paper around, showing that he was writing right-side up.) Voila!

MAN: Oh, right. I get so used to seeing things from my own perspective.

DOCTOR: I see. From my own, I guess, yes? Please sign.

MAN: (He signs.) Voila. (Looking at his signature.) Look at that. It really is strictly a formality. This is me — strictly, formally me — but it’s not the only me. There’s a hundred ways I could do it, all different, all mine. Looking at my little slanted mess of a signature, I have to wonder where my life will take me.

DOCTOR: I’ll show you your room.

MAN: (Looking back down at signature.) I should have seen that somehow.

DOCTOR and MAN exit. NURSE and WOMAN are on the other side of the stage. NURSE at desk, WOMAN seated before it. Lights up.

NURSE: I think that would be fine.

WOMAN: (Pause.) What would? No one said anything. You’re just going to start talking to me, totally out of the blue?

NURSE: Yes, dear. I am. I think people will understand. Maybe you’ve seen a baby born, or a grown-up die. Amazing. Totally out of the blue. And, as someone once said to someone, everything has to start somewhere.

WOMAN: Well, so, then, start.

NURSE: In fact, dear, we’re almost finished. So, lastly, any allergy or injury or personal personal history that you would like to make public. Any distinguishing marks, inside or out? A birthmark in the shape of anything? Some internalized agony wholly without form? Any even sketchy sense of your character to help us empathize with you, to help us live more empathically, more heroically, within the life-size form of our own familiar pain?

WOMAN: No.

NURSE: Splendid. I will duly note that. (She writes for thirty seconds in her notebook.)

WOMAN: Are they still spelling ‘No’ with just two letters, or is it more, now?

NURSE: Oh, this — I’m sorry. I’m just scribbling. You’re probably wondering where my little scribbles will take you. Yes? Either way, it all comes to something. A period, at least. A comma, or, dot-dot-dot, in some sad cases. (Pause.) Well, I think you’ll be a wonderful —

WOMAN: (Interrupting.) No, I won’t. I won’t be a wonderful anything. Whatever noun was about to come out of you. I will be here until I leave here, and I was only here because some family — reportedly mine — brought me here, and left me here.

NURSE: Families are only groups of people. And groups of people mean well, they try. Unless they’re angry mobs with broken bottles and golf clubs, and even then, they still — in their way — try. Here we also try to create a familial atmosphere. Or at least we try to act like a group of people. And the grounds are beautiful, this lovely time of year. The temperature dropping. Fall. Us, trying. All the nasty allergens dying off or flying somewhere warmer. The wonderful maple trees.

WOMAN: Yes, wonderful wonderful. Beautiful trees shedding their leaves, as I disintegrate into an animal, snow gently falling onto the uncombed hair of me, a cold cold girl, a sometime bitch in heat.

NURSE: Yes, well, you’re tired, I’m sure, and possibly a little more elegiac than the situation seems to call for. I’ll show you where your room is.

They exit.

PROLOGUE: In the world of our world, it is now late afternoon, a few days later. Our new admissions are settling in. The setting autumn sun is streaming through the thinning trees on the hospital property’s edge. We are in the Crossroads Psychiatric Retreat Center. We are at a pay phone in the hall.

EPILOGUE: Very nice, fine. No argument here. A few days later, a pay phone in the hall.

Scene 2

MAN is standing near a pay phone, WOMAN enters.

WOMAN: I need to call somebody.

MAN: I’m waiting for someone to call.

WOMAN: I’ll only be a second.

MAN: What if you suddenly find something else to talk about?

WOMAN: What if your phone call never comes?

MAN: What if the place you call is filled with people you haven’t talked to in years? A line of loved ones and distant cousins, lined up through the house, waiting for their chance to get on the phone and twirl their hair and talk to you?

WOMAN: What if the person you’re saying is going to call wrote the number down wrong and then lost the tiny piece of paper and was lying in the first place when he said he’d call at all?

MAN: It’s a she. And she’ll call. Go make your second-long call somewhere else. This is for normal human use. Phone calls lasting into the minutes and hours, years of long-distance and polite chatter, trailing off into raging and expensive silences. Humanity, on the horn. Conversation.

WOMAN: So make some conversation.

MAN: I will. (Pause.) Nice weather I’m having. Yes, I would have to agree with myself, there. That’s a nice haircut I have. Yes, thank you, it is but a sign of human civilization. Like standing up straight and not eating worms, it’s not something I can really take credit for.

WOMAN begins to walk away.

And I see you wander through life in a social architecture called the family, the rubbley remains of which we build our new relations on. Yes, we do, and we use the same name and share the same features and we all move apart so as to later hold reunions.

WOMAN is gone.

Ice cream, you scream. This is how the mind works. Poorly. Around. On the ruin of the last thought. I’m glad we had this little chat. Et cetera. ‘Social architecture.’ I’m an idiot. She has nice hair. My last ruined thought.

PROLOGUE: He is certainly outgoing and verbal, certainly expectant and full of hope, standing by a phone that doesn’t take incoming calls. She is walking back and forth somewhere, ingoing, unverbal, biting her nails, rethinking the last scene. But cut to the offices of the doctor and the nurse! It is morning, days later.

EPILOGUE: In a little while, we begin to depart from reality, from the little mess of real life we built our play on. Hardly even noticeable. The lying and pretending, the trying and revising into ruin. A signature move. It’s only natural. If we could control life, it wouldn’t be life. If we could control our likeness of it, it wouldn’t be a likeness.

Scene 3

NURSE in chair, with WOMAN on couch. On the other side of the stage, in very separate light, DOCTOR is in his chair, with MAN on couch.

WOMAN: He stayed waiting, I left. That’s the story. I don’t know. (Pause.) Can I leave?

NURSE: In a little. Once — I am reminded — I didn’t know, either. On a train, in a dress, in the winter. Me, and the snow coming down, as if in some famous short story, into the ocean off the shore of some rocky land. I saw a horse, from the train. I was on my ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• THE FLU SEASON
• INTERMISSION