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Reprinted in 2012
Copyright © Will Eno, 2003
Intermission © copyright 2002 by the Antioch Review, Inc.
Intermission first appeared in the Antioch Review, Vol. 60, no. 4.
Reprinted by permission of the Editors.
Will Eno is hereby identified as author of these works in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
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PB ISBN: 9781840023701
E ISBN: 9781783198436
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THE FLU SEASON
INTERMISSION
‘We step in the puddle, you know, and we do not. We live, these bright cold days on earth, and we don’t. We tell our little story, staring out. We devise the beginning knowing the end, and this is trouble. We trudge on, losing ground, looking back, trying, telling a tale of summer, a sinking feeling amid the leaving geese and slush. It’s coming, little one. Truth. Now, where’s my shoes?’
—from the film By Dint of the Bridge’s Collapse
PROLOGUE
A Narrator. He should differ physically from Epilogue. Perhaps he is large, and Epilogue is skinny.
Where Prologue is warm and tender, Epilogue would be cold, might even have a flair for a seductive kind of cruelty. Both narrators remain discretely on stage, except where noted. Though Prologue is not aware of Epilogue, the latter is aware of the former.
EPILOGUE
A Narrator. As above
MAN
late-twenties
WOMAN
late-twenties
DOCTOR
late-fifties
NURSE
fifties
Setting
The play takes place in a mental health institution of a not very specific type. The play also takes place, certainly, in a theatre, as each narrator makes clear.
Acts and Scenes
There are two acts. The first is made up of nine scenes. The second, twelve scenes.
Special attention should be paid to the casting of the roles of the two narrators. Ideally, it is through them that the feelings of the play pass, on their way to the audience. Through its relation to the narrators and the narration, the audience is meant to feel those feelings — attraction and ambivalence, desire and self-rebuke — that are felt by characters in the play. In this way, the audience is meant to participate in its own love story, and not just watch someone else’s. In this way, the audience may feel tenderness, loss, and disappointment, in a new and improved way. Also, there is action that occurs off-stage whose only expression is in the narrators’ emotional (or unemotional) relation to it. This is not to say that there is anything terrifically complicated going on here. These are all only means to a feeling.
The Flu Season was first performed at the Gate Theatre on 7 April 2003 with the follwoing cast in order of appearance:
PROLOGUE Martin Parr
EPILOGUE Alan Cox
DOCTOR Damien Thomas
MAN Matthew Delamere
NURSE Pamela Miles
WOMAN Raquel Cassidy
Director Erica Whyman
Designer Soutra Gilmour
Lighting Designer Anthony Simpson
Sound Designer Michael Oliva
Assistant Director Hanna Berrigan
Stage Manager Fiona Green
Set Builder Simon Plumridge
The design of The Flu Season was generously supported by Jenny Hall.
PROLOGUE: (Enters, in darkness. Footsteps. Pause.) Darkness. Footsteps. A little pause. (Pause.) It’s quiet and dark. But you knew that. (Pause.) I could leave it all alone. I could let us shudder by ourselves. Leave us uncomforted by the shaky fiction of anything shared, of any common story. I could let us wreck ourselves in the dark, shiver closer to death, slowly, unnoticeably, instead of making such a big production out of it. But I won’t. So, savor it, the dark. Like everything, it’s ending. Yes, as for the darkness, at least: The End.
Lights up.
Hello. My name is Prologue. What else would it be. Welcome to a play whose title is ‘The Snow Romance’. It is a chronicle of love and no love, of interiors and exteriors, of weather, change, entry-level psychology, and time; but, oh, lo — what chronicle isn’t. Composed one spring, it follows the lives of four or five people living in the season just previous. I’ll be brief. We are in a sort of hospital. The time is almost winter. The lights fall.
The lights don’t fall.
EPILOGUE: Right. About the title, the play is now called ‘The Flu Season’. A lot of down-time has gone by since the first draft was written, or, quote, composed. The new title stands for the fatigue, for all the sick-days wasted in coming up with a title at all. ‘The Flu Season.’ I don’t know. Could use some work, another year of scribbling, erasing. There’s always a different word, some other title, something better the language might cough up. My character, we’ll call him Epilogue. Could have also been called Regrets. Or, Mr Sorry-So-Sorry. Could have been called, I don’t know, Steve Stevenson, the names don’t matter. Can you hear me, all right? Can you see me?
(Motioning to PROLOGUE.) He can’t. Strange. Theatre. This. Certain things we have to live with. Anyway, I come later, after, more coldly, and with a little less optimism. I’ll revise a line, add an afterthought, subtract a feeling. I’ll try to speak plainly. But I liked that last part. It describes life. I quote: ‘I’ll be brief. We are in a sort of hospital. The time is almost winter. The lights fall.’
Lights lower on PROLOGUE and EPILOGUE.
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.