| SOC student’s play featured in the Katzen 
Photo courtesy of Patrick Flynn
Center, Patrick Flynn; behind him from left, Jennifer Cumberworth, Emily Dickens, Sean Bartley, Nick Jonczak, Roddy Flynn, Ezree Mualem, Charlie Biscotto, and Anne Leonard. SOC graduate student Patrick Flynn filled the Katzen Arts Center’s black-box theatre Jan. 19–20 with three student performances of his play Untitled Masterpiece. Written for the Contemporary Stage Company in Wilmington, Del., the summer before Flynn came to AU in 2005, the satirical play offered the audience a fresh take on life after graduation. The main character, recent college graduate Joe Meursault, struggles to find himself through a barrage of changing scenes and rotating characters that try to reduce his life to a series of TV shows. Throughout, he encounters his first job interview as an infomercial, an office romance as a game show, and group-house living as wacky sitcom. “When I was going through this stuff in the three years after I graduated college, I was really angry, but I didn’t know why,” said Flynn on the play’s inspiration. “It took those three years to step back and see that what I was angry at was all of these unrealistic expectations I had. And all of these expectations were perpetuated by television.” Flynn, who’s on schedule to earn his MA in film and video this spring, got the opportunity to produce and direct the play at AU while taking a directing class from DPA professor Carl Menninger. When he asked about the possibility of performing the play on campus last fall, Menninger told him that two dates had just opened in January. That gave Flynn just a few weeks to find a cast and rehearse, but he jumped at the chance to get his work before an audience again. “You just don’t say ‘no’ to an opportunity like that,” said Flynn. —MG |
