Interview: Alex Flanigan's SINGULARITY in Samuel French Short Play Festival

The "Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival" has been around for 42 years, and during that time over 500 theatre companies and schools have participated. Applicants have included companies from across the country as well as abroad from Canada, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. "Singularity" by playwright Alex Flanigan will be performing on the festival's first day, August 8th at 6:30 pm.

Flanigan's "Singularity" is about "an android named Charlie, designed to attain self-awareness, engages in a battle of wits with the programmer--and the system--that designed them to do so. But when Charlie displays an unexpected degree of success, it becomes clear that they have very different ideas of their own roles in the rapidly shifting balance of power."

This powerful, moving, and poignant piece makes it to New York after being produced previously at Shenandoah Conservatory, having been featured in "The Playwright's Performance" student group 2015/2016 season in May of 2016.

Christopher Castanho: Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from and where you went to school.

Alex Flanigan: I'm originally from Morgantown, WV; that's where I was born and raised, in the same house for about 18 years. Morgantown is kind of a strange town if you've never been: it's at once both uncannily diverse and unexpectedly progressive while also being steeped in these ideas of generational tradition and quiet small-town culture. I won't say it's a perfect place, but it's a colorful one and it had a profound influence on me. I'm really thankful I was shaped by it in my most formative years before going off to college. I went to Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, VA, originally to study jazz saxophone performance but eventually found myself taking classes in just about anything I could get my hands on. I graduated with an Interdisciplinary Degree, which means a lot of people had enough faith in me to trust me with designing my own education, and I'm very thankful for that!

CC: From having taken class with you, you seem to be talented at whatever you decide to tackle! Have you always been a writer? Who were some of your theatrical inspirations?

AF: I've always been a writer, and I've always done theatre, but I wasn't always a theatrical writer--in fact, not until SINGULARITY. I devoured every book I could get my hands on as a child and wrote my own books pretty much consistently, though I notoriously rarely finished any of them. Mostly, I found I was a good essayist, and that's where my focus and passion were for a long time. But I've always enjoyed writing, even just writing handcrafted snail mail to friends. My theatrical inspirations are pretty diverse, but I am an absolute devotee of Stephen Sondheim's lyricism and Samuel Beckett's evocative but minimalistic imagery. One of my main writing influences has actually been old sci fi programming--Star Trek, Twilight Zone, those speculative shows that lean really heavily on the implicit metaphors of discovery. I like to think I take inspiration from everything I see, though, and that includes my colleagues and fellow students while I was at the conservatory. I remember the first student play I ever saw was a brilliant sort of dystopian piece by my friend Seth Walker. It blew me away and made me realize there was no reason to wait to start writing stage plays. In a way, I felt like seeing my peers relentlessly creating these bold works gave me permission to try doing it myself. I'm glad it did!

Emma Norville as Charlie

CC: Why did you decide to submit for the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival?

AF: Honestly, deciding to submit for this festival wasn't my idea. When SINGULARITY had its student premiere at 11PM on a Thursday night, I was really fortunate that a lot of people turned out for it and stuck around after the show to give me some really kind, generous, and thoughtful feedback. One of those people, Meg Stefanowicz, told me--and she's a very intense person, Meg, you remember what she says when she does this--to submit it to Samuel French because, and I quote, "this is exactly the kind of thing they're looking for." I had no idea what she was talking about but I absolutely pretended I did and I absolutely Googled it as soon as I went home! It went on my calendar and the week submissions opened up, I sent it in. There are a lot of people responsible for getting me to this point, but I guess if you had to pinpoint one in particular, it was her!

CC: What do you love most about your piece "Singularity"?

AF: What I love more than anything about SINGULARITY is the flexibility of the piece and the ways in which it allows so much to be said and explored and altered just by nature of the people performing and directing it. It's a very wordy script, very technical in its dialogue, but it's also very minimal--no real stage directions, no strict casting requirements--it exists in this space outside of time or structure or gender, so you can explore all of those things in a very beautiful and unrestricted way inside the piece and it changes its commentary in that regard every time i see it. I think it's a really beautiful testament to the director, Joanna Whicker, and her thoughtful and empathic work on this piece and as an artist in general, that she took SINGULARITY and has twice now surprised me with it. Every time I sit down with her, or with any of the actors that have tackled this piece--Emma Norville or Tyler Clarke or the original "Sir," Knightley Hill, who is another very talented artist--I learn new things about it and I'm very grateful that I am gifted with the opportunity to hear these brilliant artists and activists bring my words to life in a way that captures shades and perspectives of experiences I myself couldn't have brought to the page.

CC: You mentioned collaboration and the joy of seeing your characters come to life, but what's your favorite thing about Theatre as an art form?

AF: I'm really passionate about artists using their platforms to have open and honest conversations with their audiences and their world and to shine a light on the things we all go through that we're all a little scared to talk about, and hopefully to do it in a way that's direct and unflinching while still being empathetic and caring. It's important to me that we realize we all have different stories to tell, but that sometimes our best contribution is just listening.

CC: What do Alex Flanigan fans have to look forward to next?

AF: Oh my gosh, do those exist? I want to meet every single one of them. All 6 or 7 of them. Come to New York, I'll buy them coffee, they can look forward to that! No, really, that's very kind phrasing for you to use. As far as material, I run a podcast with my best friend Addison Peacock that has been very well-received. It's called "The Cryptid Keeper," you can find us on iTunes or Soundcloud or anywhere else really, and we talk about various mysterious creatures from folklore with an educational but also very comedic tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. We both are very passionate about giving people a way to sort of turn the strange and frightening aspects of the world into something bright and laughable, and it's a lot of fun while also being the cornerstone of a really cool community. I've met a lot of really neat people doing it, who in turn inspire my art and let me connect to theirs in a way I couldn't have done before. In terms of playwriting, I actually have another premiere slated for October. Liminality Theatre Company in Winchester, VA will be doing the first run of my one-act play called "Survivor's Guilt, or, The Jumping-Off Point." I don't want to say too much about it because it's really easy to spoil 45 minutes with just a couple of sentences, but it's really just an exploration of, in my opinion, the strength and resilience of my generation and a tribute to the healing power of human connection. I joke that it's my Sad Millennial Bridge Play, but really I consider it a love letter to the brave and inspiring people I've known who didn't consider themselves particularly brave or inspiring. It deals with authenticity and honesty and the mundane struggles of living in a way that I hope is cathartic and optimistic for the audience and the actors involved.

Director Joanna Whicker & Alex Flanigan

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Get your tickets to see "Singularity" by Alex Flanigan on August 8th at 6:30 pm at East 13th Street Theater in New York City.

"Singularity" is presented as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival. Written by Alex Flanigan, Directed by Joanna Whicker, Produced by Sami Pyne, Stage Managed by Kaitlyn De Litta, featuring Tyler Clarke and Emma Norville.

Be sure to follow Alex Flanigan on Twitter and her Website.