Flint City Theatre featuring Flint writers

Flint City Theatre is showcasing the work of Flint playwrights in its 2010-2011 season. The season opened with Forest for the Trees, co-written by Bob Gerics and Megan Donahue, and will feature Misdirected by Bob Gerics and Earl the Vampire by Sean Michael Welch.

FCT began in 2001 as Dan Gerics' master's thesis for Eastern Michigan University. Plays, with an occasional exception, are performed in the anteroom of the Good Beans Café, 328 N. Grand Traverse.

Donahue has been an actress involved with FCT since 2004.

"I auditioned for Hamlet and never went away," she laughed.

Forest for the Trees was her fourth work to be produced by FCT. She has written two short plays and her 2008 play, Touch of the God Kissed, was her UM-Flint thesis.

Performing in front of an audience with so many familiar faces is sometimes a vulnerable experience, Donahue said.

"The act of writing is always vulnerable, but there's that element of 'Hey! Look at this!' in theater," she explained.

Forest for the Trees explored the taboo of sexual tension in family relationships and featured full nudity from its two actors. Donahue said audiences were interested and engaged.

"I'm a musician as well, and used to performing music as well as acting," Gerics added. "I try and be objective and ask myself, 'If I didn't write this, how would I feel about it?' But you do feel very vulnerable, performing in front of people you know."

Donahue, who says her true love is guerilla theater and cites playwrights Marsha Normana and John Patrick Shanley as influences, says working in the confines of the Good Beans' Anteroom has helped shape her aesthetic.

"It formed my need for the absolutely essential. Now I think exclusively in terms of black box theater. There's not a lot of room for extraneous writing. You have to get to the point in a small space. It requires theater to be more immediate."

While Donahue anticipates a move to Chicago next year ("I'll be joining the Diaspora," she sighed), she said she is grateful for her experience as a Flint artist. "This has been a great place to get started. Just being able to put a script up in front an audience without a lot of hoopla is pretty amazing. If anything, there's so much theater in Flint that sometimes figuring out how to share actors between FCT, UM-Flint, Vertigo and Flint Community Players is challenging."

Bob Gerics, brother of FCT's founder, has been involved with Flint theater since the 1980s when he performed with groups at Buckham Alley and the Masonic Temple. Forest for the Trees and Misdirected are his first successes at writing full-length pieces. It was the process of collaborative writing, he said, that gave him the confidence to write alone.

"It was a very interesting process," he said. "Sometimes we went to our respective homes, wrote and got together to edit and critique. Sometimes we were in the same room, writing in our own corners or looking over each other's shoulders. We reinforced each other's good ideas and criticized the bad ones. I respect Megan's opinion more than my own, and when I would get her approval it really gave me confidence. I'd think, 'if she likes this, it must be worth doing.'"

Gerics' play, Misdirected, opens Dec. 2 and runs for two weekends at the Good Beans Café. "It's a surreal story about an actor who finds a director stepping in and talking to him in rehearsal as well as in his personal life," he said.

Tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis.

"We're not only doing this for our egos, but to let people experience different types of theater. We don't want anyone to be slowed down by ticket prices," Gerics explained.

Earl the Vampire by Flint expatriate Sean Michael Welch will be performed in March 2011.

"It's a satire about vampires trying to establish themselves as a recognized minority in America. Underneath the satire is a family drama where once unbreakable bonds are torn apart by an ever encroaching world," said Welch, who is now working for an MFA from the Actors Studio Drama School in New York.

Welch first produced the play at UM-Flint in 1998. He has since had numerous plays produced by FCT and UM-Flint.

Asked about his relationship with FCT, Welch said, "It's nice to have a place where you have no fear that you will be misunderstood — the rhythms of speech, the humor necessary, etc. Playwrights like to believe they somehow catch a universal wave. Sometimes we do, but there's something to be said for having people around who know exactly where you're coming from.

"Samuel Beckett had Alan Schneider, Tennessee Williams had Elia Kazan, I have the Flint coalition. That seems to be a presumptuous parallel, but there is comfort in thinking it," he said.

Visit www.flintcitytheatre.com for more information.

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