The Flu Season and Other Plays

by Will Eno

“Will Eno is one of the finest younger playwrights I have come across in a number of years. His work is inventive, disciplined and, at the same time, wild and evocative. His ear is splendid and his mind is agile.”—Edward Albee

“An original, a maverick wordsmith whose weird, wry dramas gurgle with the grim humor and pain of life. Eno specializes in the connections of the unconnected, the apologetic murmurings of the disengaged.”— Guardian

Winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for best New York debut by an American playwright, The Flu Season is a reluctant love story, in spite of itself. Set in a hospital and a theater, it is a play that revels in ambivalence and derives a flailing energy from its doubts whether a love story is ever really a love story.

Will Eno has been called “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation” (New York Times) —he is a playwright with an extraordinary voice and a singular theatrical vision. Also included in this volume are A Tragedy and Intermission.

Will Eno is the author of Thom Pain (based on nothing) , which ran for a year Off-Broadway and was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Other works include Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions, The Flu Season, a tragedy , and Intermission .

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre

110 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Eno is one of the most brilliant playwrights of this age! I adore his cynical viewpoint and humor. The Flu Season is my favorite play, and probably always will be.

[Gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Eno has such a unique voice in modern theatre. I love his use of surreal and absurd features with such human cores. Love.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I’M A TOTAL AMATEUR THESE ARE JUST RANDOM THOUGHTS NONE OF THIS REALLY MATTERS *

Flu Season - 3/5 Stars

I’ve only read Flu Season and Intermission, but I can already tell Will Eno has a super distinct style of writing. It’s like you’re reading a story through one of those foggy windows at a doctor or dentist’s office. You have to take a moment to process everything that has been written, because it’s not quite how humans talk, but it’s super effective at making you feel a certain way. I’m not totally sure I’m making sense while writing this, but that also makes sense because that’s how I felt while reading it.

I got powerful feelings from a lot of the scenes between the patients, but almost nothing from the male and female doctor (nurse? I can’t remember) characters. Definitely themes of loss and longing, but everything felt incredibly ethereal. They were probably in a mental hospital, I think, but also maybe they weren’t and that was the point.

I also liked the Prologue and Epilogue characters as ideas, and they had some impactful moments, but damn were they even harder to parse than the core of the play sometimes.

Just remembered that there were some genuinely hilarious moments in this as well. The woman giving the man a cake and singing happy birthday, him pointing out that his birthday isn’t until Spring, her responding: “how would I know that? We’ve barely talked,” is some amazing, surreal shit.

Intermission - 5/5 Stars

Mr. Smith talking about his dog hit me like a ton of fucking wet bricks. Holy shit that’s some of the saddest shit I’ve ever read. This play was arguably more effective (for me) at communicating the impermanence of life than Flu Season was, even though they were both super bleak.

Not something to read to cheer up, but I’m getting the impression that Eno isn’t trying to cheer us up.

It really nailed me with the realization that the setting of your story is almost irrelevant. Like, it’s cute and makes sense that “Intermission” came in this book between two other plays, but the fact that the 4 characters were watching a play almost didn’t matter to me. Their conversation could have happened on a park bench or an airport terminal, and the dialogue been slightly tweaked to reference their surroundings, and it would have hit just as hard.

I haven’t read a ton of plays, but I have a feeling that I’m going to think about this one for a long time. It seems like one that will impact me differently every time I read it.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read enough Will Eno at this point to know that there isn't anything he does that doesn't come across as incredibly smart. As someone who first encountered him through 2013's The Realistic Joneses and 2014's The Open House, I could also add "hilarious" and "poignant" to the list. As for this collection of older stuff, "smart" occasionally flirts with "too smart for its own, or at least my own, good". These pieces from 2004 and 2008 all impress in terms of some formalist exercise, but they don't always entertain (and on occasion, they do grate.) The best out of three here also happens to be the shortest. Intermission's setting is, as you might have guessed, in the middle of another play entirely, although Eno uses that fake play for little more than a point of entry into a "what is the value of art to life" riff. It's got its moments but ultimately best functions to show the bare bones of what he would flesh out in later works.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly don't remember how I felt about this. I read this for my playwriting class in college and I guess it's okay? Perhaps one day I'll reread it and will write a better review for it. Until then two stars it is.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love Flu Season, Not so much on the other two :(

[Robert Monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

The flu season - 4
Intermission - 3
Tragedy: a tragedy - 5

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this so much more than I did.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but not great; insightful, but not profound. Will Eno struggles against all odds to portray life and give it meaning, and to unearth some truth or understanding. He fails, yes, but only just slightly. He searches deep into the human experience and finds some pure gems, but he never quite manages to bring them to the surface. Instead, they remain just underneath. They call to the reader as if from underwater, and only little bubbles come up, the remnants of powerful and valuable words spoken just beneath the surface. Much of this - perhaps most - is Eno's fault. He seems afraid of his own shadow, of what he might find, or of what we, his audience, might think of him. When prefacing Tragedy: A Tragedy (which should in and of itself tip the reader off that Eno is too self conscious and unsure to let his writing and the powerful title speak for themselves) he writes movingly about a reporter who,

"...Stands for us, somehow, standing there. He stands for us standing here wondering what we're standing here for. Us, in the wrong place, the wrong time, in a sort of rapture, with life behind us. Us, with only the early technology of our vocabulary, a tongue, trying to identify the rapturous, trying to sum up the miraculous, standing right in front of it. Possibly." (74)

Possibly, he writes, as if he fears he has gone too far in humanizing the character, and the audience. It is, in its full context, somewhat clever. But this very wit that so often propels him to moments of greatness, both in this collection and in Thom Pain, can be equally detrimental. When he uses it well, it can augment his insight. But sometimes, (as in this instance) it serves to disguise his fear. And that fear, of course, is exactly what Eno repeatedly tries to address in his work. How can a writer address the fear of being human, when he is too afraid to write it honestly? When he hides behind humor, and cannot will himself to bring what gems he has mined into the open, for all to see? If Will Eno ever learns how to manage this, he'll deserve a five-star rating. But until then, a disappointing four stars for the immense effort and wit he has managed to pull together, without actually reaching his - and our - desires.

[Chuck O'Connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eno admits in the production notes to this collection's titular play that his attempt, for that piece, is to write something, "brave and new and moving and meaningful, rather than just 'experimental' for the sake of being experimental." I estimate by the remaining two pieces in this collection (thin sketches of ideas that lack forward narrative progression or nuanced human observation) that "experimental" is the dramatic standard he believes worth exploring. I estimate he attempts these experiments because he is attempting something, "brave and new and moving and meaningful" with these forms. In my estimation his writing fails his test. This work seems to scream authorial intrusion where the characters imagined are nothing more than ventriloquist dummies for Eno's solipsism. His writing lacks mature observation corresponding to anything other than the effete absurdities of someone who is trying much too hard to do something "new". How this guy gets produced and has been lauded confuses me.

[Dylan]

I may need to re-read this...It is not a light "transit-read"

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tragedy: a Tragedy was particularly brilliant.

[KarenO · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eloquently and masterfully protesting mortality----yet even the protest grows old.

[stig · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I had liked the title play as much as the two shorter plays, I would've clicked the fourth star.