Flynn Center for the Performing Arts :: 2007/2008 Season

Dee Dee Bridgewater
"Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song" by David Margolick

Wednesday, October 14 at 7:30 pm
Anyone who has heard Billie Holiday sing Strange Fruit knows of, if not understands, the awful shame blacks have had to bear living in America. The first two lines explain it: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” Holiday first sang this dirge in early 1939 in the integrated Café Society nightclub in New York, and soon after that fateful event, it became Holiday’s signature song. David Margolick tells that story and many more concerning Strange Fruit in this biography of the song itself.
MainStage Performance: Sunday, November 1 at 7:00 pm

Double Edge Theatre
"The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz

Wednesday, November 18 at 7:30 pm
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz’s uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family’s life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable—and most chilling—is the portrait of the author’s father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds’ eggs to hatch in his attic, believes tailors’ dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one.
FlynnSpace Performance: Friday & Saturday, November 20 & 21 at 8 pm

Miguel Gutierrez "Last Meadow"
"Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill

Wednesday, January 13 at 7:30 pm
Dutch banker Hans, and his British wife Rachel, a lawyer, get more than they bargain for when they transfer their jobs from London to Manhattan for an American experience. After the World Trade Center bombing, they move out of their Tribeca loft into the Hotel Chelsea, and soon Rachel decamps with their baby son back to London. Hans visits regularly but the marriage flounders. Distraught and lonely, he joins a Cricket league made up mostly of Asian and Caribbean immigrants. Soon he (along with the reader) falls under the sway of Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian umpire. Chuck leads Hans on a “Heart of Darkness” tour of New York’s immigrant underbelly. Hans begins to realize that Chuck might be a dangerous friend to have.
FlynnSpace Performance: Friday & Saturday, January 15 & 16 at 8 pm

Ed Asner is "FDR"
"FDR" by Jean Edward Smith

Wednesday, March 10 at 7:30 pm
As Franklin Roosevelt approached the stage at the 1936 Democratic Convention, the steel braces on his useless legs and the support of his son’s arm allowing him, in great pain, to simulate walking, he was jostled, and he crashed to the ground, scattering the pages of his speech. “Clean me up,” he said, “and keep your feet off those damned sheets.” Minutes later, utterly poised, he told an audience and a nation ravaged by the Depression that they had “a rendezvous with destiny.” Smith, in this remarkable, sympathetic biography, doesn’t flinch at Roosevelt’s mistakes; the Roosevelt who emerges here is flawed and magnificent.
MainStage Performance: Saturday, March 6 at 8 pm