A Night Full of ‘Red Flags’ (REVIEW)
Capital W’s entry in the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival is a Rorshack test of your dating life. (Mild Spoiler Warning)
Red Flags is, ostensibly, about a first date. The date is between you and a petite brunette named Emma. Yet as the title may imply, there’s something amiss about Emma. Or maybe there’s something wrong with you, too.
The new play, which comes from Capital W of Hamlet-Mobile fame, is a bold work. Emma (played by Lauren Flans) is the only character and you are the only guest. Rather than monologue-ing you for the duration of the 50-minute show, she requires you to have a conversation with her. It’s probably, at least verbally, the most interactive immersive experience I’ve attended since ABC Project’s (B)arbershop. (One could argue that ABC’s Fringe remount, (A)partment 8 is similar to Red Flags in that it’s a one-on-one show, but actor Keight Lane really does all the heavy lifting there regardless of how much you talk back.)
The Red Flags experience begins, as many do, with an email. You fill out and exchange dating profiles, then Emma picks your meeting place, which is, of course, within the Fringe zone. She’s a writer who grew up in New Jersey, who claims she can’t live without Jane Austen novels, her new rescue dog, and love. She seems unsure of herself, but not entirely abnormal.
My date with Emma was on a Friday night at 9 p.m. When I approached the intersection she’d selected, I looked around for her and didn’t see anyone who looked like her “dating profile” photos. A man I didn’t know informed me that the crosswalk button I had pressed had changed to “walk.” I told him I was looking for someone. He asked me too many questions, even after I told him I was waiting for an actor from an immersive show to meet me, and I began to wonder if he was a plant. I was already feeling awkward enough about my faux-date. I decided to cross the street so I could be alone, and that’s when I realized that the mere premise of the show was already affecting me. I was nervous to be going on a date, even though it wasn’t a real date.
Shortly after crossing the street, Emma arrived. She suggested we go for a walk or grab a drink at a nearby bar. Given that I had walked to the rendezvous point, I suggested the bar. We were carded at the door, then we each ordered and paid for a beer at the bar. I was surprised by how natural it all felt. We sat on the patio, and I had to wonder if the staff here knew about Red Flags or if they just thought they had a serial dater on their hands. I wondered how many times she’d been here before, with other dates.
How you read Emma will vary based on who you are, naturally. Regardless of your gender identity or sexual orientation, you will meet the same Emma. As a woman who has gone on dates with men and women in the past, Emma would be within the realm of people I might agree to meet. We’re about the same age, she’s cute, and we seem to have a lot in common. She’s a writer. I’m a writer. We both struggle with uncertainty about our futures. She loves her dog. I love my cats. I’m seeing someone, but this doesn’t bother her. She’s dating around too.
Throughout the next 40 or so minutes, I got to know Emma and she got to know me. Because the promotional materials of the show had led me to believe I’d be going on a “bad” date, I expected the date to crash and burn spectacularly. I expected it to be like a movie about a haunted house, where the creaks in the attic and the window that keeps opening on its own suddenly turn into a raging poltergeist that hurls me down a flight of stairs while my kitchen fills with bats. But the beauty of Red Flags is that it isn’t like that. Emma is so relatable, and she bounces off whatever you say with ease. She’s so genuine that she feels like a real person. I didn’t want to run away; I wanted to empathize. In fact, Emma is not even the worst date I’ve ever been on. (That honor goes to a screenwriter who told me that because I was a journalist, I wasn’t a real writer like he was, and who later texted me several times about having a threesome with his friend.)
Adding to Flans’ believable performance, it also doesn’t hurt that Capital W’s Lauren Ludwig and Monica Miklas created in Emma a fully fleshed out and dynamic character. Though somewhat evasive, she does have a coherent backstory full of feasible details. I was initially worried that I would meet what some folks like to a call “a clinger.” Women are often unfairly painted as excessively needy in fiction, and I was concerned that’s all Emma would be — possessive, and talking in cliches about how we were going to be together forever. But the Emma that unfolded wasn’t a stereotype, and I was honestly surprised at how similar some of our fears were. Though there were certain anecdotes in which I felt like she made bad choices, I got a picture of the life that led her to them. This kept leading me to wonder: if there’s something’s wrong with Emma, maybe there’s also something wrong with me? In this way, by the time the big reveal came, when Emma was ready to show me the deepest layer of her personal Hell, she had become a real person that I cared about. And I found myself thinking that I could overlook the skeleton in the closet if she’d let me help her. I could, at the very least, be Emma’s friend.
I walked home from my date with Emma, feeling somewhat sad that she’d gone. But for a show simply described as a “bad date,” I felt like I got a whole lot more out of it than that.
Red Flags is part of the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival, and currently sold out. An extension is planned, and it will also be part of the 2017 San Diego Fringe. To learn about possible extensions, sign up at Capital W’s website.
