‘Flesh Before Breakfast’ at Windmill offers fourth episodic installment of ‘Flay’s Anatomy’

Picture your favorite long-running TV show — the highs and lows that come with binging episode after episode. This is the experience playwright Nathan Jerpe seeks to conjure with Flay’s Anatomy, a madcap theatrical comedy presented in episodic format. The fourth installment of Flay’s, Flesh Before Breakfast, is on stage May 15 through May 24 at Windmill Arts Center and was preceded by FlayFest, a series of readings for episodes 1 through 3. 

Described in a previous review by ArtsATL theater critic Benjamin Carr as “operating at a creative level so bonkers and daring, it nearly defies all attempts at conventional summary,” Flay’s Anatomy is a comedy in verse about the voyage of the leisure ship Incontinence. The project originated over a decade ago as a series of poems and transitioned into a work of theater when Jerpe became involved with Working Title Playwrights. It has been performed at various locations across Atlanta.

Like with any segmented show, the project faces the challenge of staging a continuous narrative. It was Rebekah Suellau, director of episode 4 and Jerpe’s longtime collaborator, who had the idea to stage readings of each previous episode to allow audiences the chance to catch up. Readings began on May 11 and featured an episode each night with a different director and a different cast, allowing for a multitude of interpretations. 

“It’s been a really extraordinary experience because now we have this kind of kaleidoscope of four successive interpretations of four episodes,” Jerpe says. “The directors all make different decisions and have different casts, and the same characters recur throughout but played by up to four different actors.”

Suellau also offers her take on the project: “With Flay’s Anatomy, Nathan has created an artistic playground that stretches the imagination of every collaborator who touches it.”

In addition to its episodic nature, the project also satirizes long-running television, leaning into the more melodramatic aspects of shows like Grey’s Anatomy or daytime soaps like Days of Our Lives.

“Part of the theme, content and shape of [Flay’s Anatomy] is that it’s kind of an unmanageable size, which is part of the joke but also part of the meaning. It’s all about amplitude, maximalism and just being intentionally too much,” Jerpe says.

This relates to the absurdity of the storylines more than the production design, which actually follows a more low-budget, ragtag aesthetic. “We like to show the seams in what we’re doing,” Jerpe explains. “There are props and some set pieces, but it’s a lot of cardboard and it’s very low tech, which actually allows us to focus more on content than on glitz and spectacle.” This pseudo-Brechtian technique allows the audience to acknowledge the artifice of the production and just embrace its silliness.

Besides offering audiences a comedic romp, the ongoing episodes allow Flay’s Anatomy to act as a sort of dialogue between television and live theater.

“I’ve tried to cultivate in myself an awareness of different forms of writing, and, for me, the message over and over again with theater is the importance of showing up. That’s the one thing that theater demands but also supplies that these other forms don’t,” Jerpe says. “We have this reflection of television, which of course is not television, set in a time when television was not yet invented. So it invites us to think of what episodic format might look like in theater in the early 19th century.” 

Where & When

The fourth installment of Flay’s Anatomy, Flesh Before Breakfast, is on stage at Windmill Arts May 15 through May 24. Tickets, $16.
2823 Church St., East Point.

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Luke Evans is an Atlanta-based writer, critic and dramaturg. He covers theater for ArtsATL and Broadway World Atlanta and has worked with theaters such as the Alliance, Actor’s Express, Out Front Theatre and Woodstock Arts. He’s a graduate of Oglethorpe University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, and the University of Houston, where he earned his master’s.