This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
There are experimental plays that toy with Atlanta audiences’ expectations, and then there is the comedy “Flay’s Anatomy” by playwright Nathan Jerpe, which is operating on a creative level so bonkers and daring, it nearly defies all attempts at conventional summary.
The first three full-length sections of “Flay’s Anatomy” will be presented in installments from August until October at Limelight Theater, directed by Rebekah Suellau. “Part One: The Injection” will be staged from Aug. 23-25. The second and third parts will follow in subsequent months.
Credit: Photo courtesy of 2024 Fringe Festival
Credit: Photo courtesy of 2024 Fringe Festival
The playwright said in a recent interview that “Flay’s Anatomy” — which is a play cycle made up of full-length play “episodes” written in blank verse and iambic pentameter — takes place on a cruise liner named Incontinence around 1830. The passengers and crew have strange, silly, biological mishaps while they are taking a fantastic voyage through a bovine beast, similar to the 1960s sci-fi film about a submarine crew navigating a human body.
Some characters recur in every episode; others just appear for comedic moments. Jerpe said the audience should be able to understand and enjoy “Flay’s Anatomy,” despite the antiquated language, for it is very silly and stylized, complete with ridiculous visuals and colorful costumes. Scripts will be made available to the audience so they can follow along.
“Every scene has two functions,” Jerpe said. “One is to move the main plot forward, but a lot of the scenes play on their own with their own setting and the central development of something that happens. So I guess you can kind of think of it as a plot-driven sequence of sketches, which is pretty experimental. But that’s what we did at Fringe. We took six scenes from three different episodes, and we left the text pretty much the same, but we remixed them a little bit and actually jumbled them a little bit, and the humor and meaning still came through. You’re not going to get that same amount of comprehension as if you had sat down and seen them all in order or read the books.”
Sections and scenes from the script have been presented regularly around Atlanta, including performances and readings at the 2024 Atlanta Fringe Festival, Kennesaw State University’s New Works Festival and through Working Title Playwrights. Jerpe said he began the script while attending meetings of the Writers Exchange at Eyedrum around 2011.
“We have revealed four episodes so far, but the fourth episode ends on a cliffhanger,” Jerpe said. “It’s not finished. I have more material that I’m working on, but, yeah, the answer is unknown exactly how many episodes there’ll be. But there’ll be at least five. I have a fifth one, and we’re just trying to see how deep into it we can go.”
Credit: Photo courtesy of Nathan Jerpe
Credit: Photo courtesy of Nathan Jerpe
The idea for the work came about because Jerpe appreciated the language of early 19th century playwrights, before prose ruled the day.
“I have felt drawn to Romantic poetry and some of the early 19th-century playwrights, like Goethe and some of the translations of Aristophanes that were starting to show up around Victorian times,” he said. “I do read a lot of that kind of work. I was drawn to it, and finding the setting was where this piece clicked.”
By writing in an older style, though, Jerpe said he knows the work might not initially connect with modern performers and audiences.
“I think at first it doesn’t,” he said. “I think there is an initial period of alienation, which is one of the themes of the work, but I have found that goes away pretty quickly when it is heard by actors that have spent a lot of time with it and then rehearsed with it.”
Jerpe has seen audiences come to appreciate how weird, new, inventive and different the work is.
“One of the humorous things for me is how quickly you start connecting to it,” he said. “Not right away at first — there is a little bit of a wall there. There’s a two-century wall of anachronism you kind of have to climb over. But once you start to get the hang of it a little bit — especially with actors that really, really have been training with it — the barrier to comprehension isn’t really that high anymore. And that, to me, is one of the funny and entertaining discoveries of it.”
IF YOU GO
“Part One: The Injection” of “Flay’s Anatomy”
Friday-Sunday, Aug. 23-25. 9:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday. $15 plus ticketing fee. Limelight Theater, 349 Decatur St. SE, Atlanta. flaysanatomy.tix.page
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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, “Impacted,” was published by the Story Plant.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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