Absinthe

Black Box Underdog

WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH FLINT MICHIGAN SUCKS, KINDLY REMIND THEM:

FLINT HAS THE BEST SEX PER CAPITA IN THE COUNTRY

Why absinthe? Because as a paying audience you deserve to be the recipient of unique sensory experience, and are in a sense, seeing heritage inacted. Flint once had a very active theater scene, that raised plays in the IMA and later Whiting, that performed musicals up on the North End, and put up more experimental and labor-oriented pieces in black-box style venues throughout the city. We are setting the stage again. We will consider the names of Billy Durant and Dallas Dort, we also call upon Lycurgis and Pericles. They give way easily to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; we follow along, we cannot miss Shakespeare, and hit soundly upon Wilde, Artaud, Brecht, Beckett, and Brook, roughly in that order. There is from a more common angle, Williams, also, Kushner, also, Churchill, and there are many more and many up-and-coming.

We come from the position of heritage, this city, this art, this point in time, and project into the future.

The Black Box Underground is already a number of things; it will hopefully become much more. At this point, we are a self-acknowledged, self-empowered, non-profit organization promoting interaction with and exploration of our society, the world, and the universe through experiments in performance. We are a low-budget theater group committed to our community (the Flint area) and each-other. We are also friends, sometimes surrogate family, and willing students.

We hope to be a pain-in-the-ass, but a happy, reflective pain-in-the-ass.

So far our only "Official" production has been of Caryl Churchill's The Skriker performed August 27 and 28, 1999 at Bower Theater. An odd play with strange language involving demons, infanticide, myth and shoes, we made an opening mark in the city. Our unofficial productions include dancing on vehicles, chalking Flint's glorious downtown and studying the finer theatre of Chicago in groups.
We have also sponsored several poetry readings. One was held in Flint's Beans and Leaves Cafe, and Flushing's the Elbow Room.