GRANDUNCLE ASCENDANT

Now that the holidays are approaching (like, the day after tomorrow), there is no better time to start using the blog to plug our holiday show. Of course, being The Brick, our holiday show involves not Christmas or Hanukkah or even, alas, Kwanzaa, but rather a made-up holiday known as Kisselsrite.

Anybody who was at the inaugural Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee in December 2005 may recall a short play that I wrote called "Granduncle Tells the Children a Story of Kisselsrite During the War," a kind of alternate-world dark Arctic fairy tale. Well, Piper McKenzie (i.e. myself and Hope Cartelli) have decided to expand this concept into The Granduncle Quadrilogy: Tales from the Land of Ice, which you can find out more about at Piper McKenzie's website.

Among other things, we've partnered with Yarn AudioWorks to create three Granduncle-themed podcasts, in which Richard Harrington, as the title character, shares fables from his grim, fantastic world. The first one, "The Walrus and the School of Fish," went up last week, and today we posted the second one, "The Dog Who Liked People Too Much." (A third, "The Flight of the Mammoths," will appear on Tuesday, December 2.)

Please give these a listen if you can - they're only three minutes each, and they will fill you with a wintry, disoriented feeling that will hopefully remind you to give thanks for the warmth and coziness of what we hope to be a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Tweet Relief

Okay, seriously, how many of you out there use Twitter? It’s such an interesting new technology, but we’re not afraid to say that we’re still struggling with how best to use it. The problem is keeping tweets from seeming like microblogging spam – we don’t want to just flood you with Brick news that you can already find on this blog and in our e-blasts (though obviously we’ll be doing a little bit of that); we also want to set up new and interesting conversations, create special Twitter-only discounts and deals, and explore new types of communication that we don’t even know we can have yet.

Some other indie/off-off theater spaces and companies are Twittering these days, such as Ars Nova, Aztec Economy, the NY Neo-Futurists, and Vampire Cowboys, but searching doesn’t seem to reveal too many others. There are plenty of writers and artists and bloggers twittering, but there are no doubt many more we’re unaware of. And it’s difficult to suss out who potential past or future audience members might be, since search terms like “Brooklyn theater” are incredibly vague.

If you're thinking of using Twitter, why not start by dropping a line @bricktheater? We're even setting up a Twitter account for our next show, The Granduncle Quadrilogy: @granduncle.

And for current users: any recommendations about who @bricktheater might be interested in following? Is anyone using any other microblogging sites instead?

NOVEMBER REIGN

We have clearly been remiss about blogging this month as heartily as we'd like, but we hope to redress that in the coming weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, hyper-millennia, and eons.

A great place to start is with a reminder that, holy crap, this is the FINAL WEEKEND for our current production, Lord Oxford Brings You the Second American Revolution, Live! Houses will get full, so do not miss your last chance to check out this one-of-a-kind amalgam of revisionist history, live television, cabaret crooning and dark clowndom!

The Greenpoint Gazette says, "Timely and funny ... draws on juxtapositions of history as old as our nation, and as new as McCain-Palin 2008. The fact that within that bloody scope we get some laughs, some sexiness, and some reflection is a tribute to the power of good writing, original work, and actual live people doing actual live things. Why don't you switch off your TV? Go see some theater."

A lot of good things come from Greenpoint, including many of our readers, so, yeah, there you go. Buy tickets HERE.

(Photo Credit: Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors Photography)