Everyone, Interrupted

For anyone who's in Oxford, totally go see The Flu Season at the Burton/Taylor Studio this weekend. It's sort of a love story, sort of set in a mental hospital. When I read a review that basically warned that nothing good happens to anyone, I told the guy I was going with that I was worried it would be like The Book of Job - The Musical! (or the entire plot of the horrifically mismarketed The Family Stone), but I really, really liked it. (I'm not convinced that my friend did, but I have a pretty high tolerance for what the Cherwell24 reviewer derided as pseudo-sophistication, so there you go.) And part of it was probably that I was dredging up everything I know about Brechtian staging, since this has two narrators - Prologue and Epilogue - and Prologue is this really upbeat, optimistic woman and Epilogue is this wonderfully bitchy, sarcastic guy (in a really great suit). Anyway, as the show goes on, Prologue basically has a total breakdown, and Epilogue makes even less heartening proclamations about the state of art and humankind (although while Prologue gets really disheveled and weepy, every time Epilogue spoke I kept being like, wow, I really want to know where he got that suit). The sort of sweet, dizzy nurse was also really charming, and I sort of wanted to be her best friend. Anyway, through the entire play I was like, yay, fuck the fourth wall, politicize the opera and I think some people were like, whoa, this is sort of weird. They sort of have a point, but I still liked it.