FLUX
nytheatre.com review by Sharon Fogarty
August 15, 2002
Flux features good actors in difficult roles in an intellectually
driven play with so many words and so little emotion. The talented and
statuesque Kathrin Kana plays Jane, whose sexy laughter and
seductiveness make it believable that Tarquin, nobly played by Elliot V.
Kotek, a handsome and charming actor with an endearing perpetual slump,
picks her up at a bar and takes her back to his apartment. The couple
enter drunk. Jane gets drunker and becomes grotesque. Tarquin sobers
painfully as the date goes on and Jane quickly transforms into a dose of
poison come to visit. They flirt over admittedlycliche questions. Jane insults Tarquin sexually and makes lewd comments about getting into the sack more quickly. At last, there is a touching moment when Jane talks about a man she loved, then quickly dismisses it as a lie. This game continues, peppered with jokes about rape and incest. Even if Jane were the victim, any compassion the audience might have for her is used up in the first hour.
Author Tony Dunham does well in torturing us with the mystery of why this feminine monster won’t leave, until it is revealed that Tarquin has written a book on women that Jane is determined to punish him for.
Terry Burstein’s artful, minimalist direction is decidedly non-physical until the end, and claustrophobic in that the couple rarely take their eyes off each other in this spacious loft/theatre. Burstein’s staging, together with Sarah Martin’s comfortable, tasteful apartment set and Rachel Oftedahl’s deceptively soothing lighting, turn a funny and sexy one-night stand into the world’s worst date. Dunham and Burstein succeed in showing the ugliest feminist next to an ignorant chauvinist and make us remember them painfully.
