B(rick)log

Aaron Baker

2011-10-16T08:27:00.000-07:00

Aaron Baker was our Clint Eastwood. He rode into town one day from out of nowhere and with his signature cocked-double-eyebrow expression, said nothing.

Nobody knew who he was. Tall, stocky, bald, chain smoker. Looking like he was ready to deliver a message from your bookie. Then, mysteriously, and again almost without a word, he volunteered to help you strike your set, build your complicated website, edit your feature film, perform the supporting part in your play, copyedit your promotional literature, buy a seat to every show you ever perform, orchestrate your multi-platform interactive cell phone environmental theater experience from a remote location, and cook you a gourmet dinner.

When he did speak, it was short and to the point. A few syllables in that trademarked smoky, understated, throaty bass voice of his. It was so spare you often worried you weren’t getting the whole picture. Why doesn’t he say anything? Is he angry? Depressed? Lulling me into a false sense of security until he has the opportunity to kill me? He can’t truly be the open-hearted artist trapped inside the exterior of a fierce gun-for-hire, traveling from town to town, dispensing gratuitous kindness wherever he roamed that he appeared to be, can he?

He could. And much more. He was an illustrator. And a musician. And a graphic designer. And a software engineer. And a grammar Nazi. And a television producer. And a writer. And a filmmaker. And a clown. And an actor. And a director. And a photographer. And a fanatic. And a nerd. And a fiancé. And a friend.

He was a jack of all trades and master of all.

He was a master ninja of life.

He was the man with no name.

To many among us, he was known simply as Walkup, Walkup.

Brick staff members will recognize that nom de plume from the theater’s ticketing system, which requires a first and last name to enter a sale into the computer. If a theatergoer refuses, or if the box office staffer forgets, the system records Walkup, Walkup as the patron’s name. Aaron was always Walkup Walkup. He absolutely insisted. Everyone knew his name. And everyone knew when he was in attendance. But no one could prove it.

Well Aaron, my friend? I have bad news for you. I can prove it. Today a packed house of your friends and loved ones bears irrefutable witness that you were here. Today, this jury of your peers will take in a wealth of video, still photography and testimonial evidence that will go to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Aaron Baker was here. Future accountants and Ticketing Managers of The Brick will pour over the hundreds of performances we host for years to come and from years past and see listed on the presale register of nearly every show, that eternal smoking gun: Walkup, Walkup. You were here, Aaron Baker. And you will always be here. Ninja, cowboy, spaceman, chupacabra, brick. Ride on, Aaron. Ride on.

PRETTY LITTLE DEAD THING

2011-01-25T16:51:00.001-08:00

One of the first productions I did at The Brick, back in 2004, was a performance of The Pragmatists, an obscure early play by the equally obscure 20th-century Polish playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, aka Witkacy. A theorist in addition to a creator, his concept of Pure Form posited a method of creating theatrical art using formal elements (color, sound, movement, etc.) as the primary structures of the play and then letting the narrative fall into place where it will, as nearly an afterthought. A catchphrase he used to encapsulate this theory was "Unity in Plurality."

My company, Piper McKenzie, has gone on to do many productions at The Brick, and my producing-and-marriage partner Hope Cartelli and I have both ended up becoming associate directors of the space. I would say that the phrase Unity in Plurality has been a kind of unspoken motto throughout all of this - both within our individual works and over the course of our (ahem) oeuvre as a whole. However, little that we've done has embodied the idea quite so fully as the project that we're premiering at The Brick this weekend: Piper McKenzie's Dainty Cadaver.

The idea behind the Dainty Cadaver is that of an exquisite corpse: one writer writes a scene; a second writer reads it and writes her own; a third reads the second scene - but not the first - and writes his own - and so on. It's a game we've attempted before, and it played a small role in The Brick's prehistory (see this origin story), but this time we're trying it on a much bigger scale: 18 writers creating three plays, which have been staged by three directors over the course of three nights, featuring more than two dozen performers.

The directors more than have their work cut out for them trying to reign this raging river of constantly shifting narrative into a single stream - creating Unity in Plurality, natch - but what I've seen from rehearsals (full disclosure: I have a cameo in Team B's piece so I've been following that process pretty closely) has made me even more excited about what I've seen than I was reading the plays on paper - and I was VERY excited about that. Watching these awesome writers - some of whom are familiar faces to Brick audience, others of whom are relatively new - figure out how to use their own voice and abilities while building upon each other's work has been really exciting, and I'm fascinated to see what audiences think about this grand experiment. Will these plays be believable as sustained narratives, or will they be totally balls-out chunks of random weirdness? Or somewhere in between?

In the meantime, the writers have all been participating in a series of Mad-Libs-style blog interview profiles doodads on PMcK's blog The Piperline. They'll give you an glimpse into the personalities that have led these individuals into the bastard art of playwriting - as opposed to something respectable, like locksmithery or being a soldier of fortune - as well as a hint of what kind of mayhem to expect on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Check it out!

And there are clearly more to come over the next few days! Also, Aaron Riccio wrote about the piece today, using it as an opportunity to use the phrase "the esteemed and always-up-for-an-experiment Brick Theater," which is certainly a nice thing. Buy your tickets for all three today! Unity in Plurality! WOOOOOO!!!

THE BRICK PRESENTS ITS 2011 SEASON

2011-01-11T13:22:00.000-08:00

In 2010, Time Out New York celebrated The Brick as Essential New York! "For the nerds, outcasts and mad experimenters of theater. That includes both creators and spectators." From January to July of 2011, The Brick is making good on this claim by presenting a series of productions and festivals that display the range and boldness of its many artists - whether they be returning favorites or brand new faces!

PIPER McKENZIE'S DAINTY CADAVER will run January 28-30. This show is an Exquisite Corpse-style playmaking project in which multiple playwrights collaborate on a single work without knowing what the hell the others are doing. Each writer reads the previous scene, writes a new scene, and passes it on to the next writer - who doesn't see any of what came earlier. Beautiful madness ensues.

For its inaugural edition, Piper McKenzie will present one-night-only performances of three new plays written in this unique collaborative style, with results ranging from inspired chaos to eerie synchronicity - all tied together by the unique voices of 18 hot playwrights, including:

Johnna Adams (The Angel Eaters Trilogy), Eric Bland (Emancipatory Politics: A Romantic Tragedy), Danny Bowes (Q&A), Maggie Cino (Ascending Bodily), James Comtois (The Little One), John DeVore (Tupperware Orgy), Cara Francis (The Soup Show), Matt Freeman (Brandywine Distillery Fire), Justin Maxwell (Your Lithopedion), Jeff Lewonczyk (Theater of the Arcade), Rich Lovejoy (A Brief History of Murder), Qui Nguyen (Alice in Slasherland), Carolyn Raship (Antarctica), Mac Rogers (Viral), August Schulenburg (The Lesser Seductions of History), Crystal Skillman (The Vigil or the Guided Cradle), Alexis Sottile (Small Dinner) and Art Wallace (The Plowman's Lunch)

Find out more at http://www.pipermckenzie.com/daintycadaver

The Machine presents THE SISTER February 16-26. Some are allowed names. Some, only roles. In Colleen's family, she is The Sister. The role of The Sister is clear: Take abuse. Work the machine. And if you're really bad? You might have to wear the dog collar.

The Sister marks the first collaboration between emerging playwright Eric John Meyer (Not Winehouse) The Truck Project's 2010 Artist in Transit) and director Jess Chayes of The Assembly (Horse Trade Resident Theater Company 2009-2010; Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater). Find out more about them at their websites: www.ericjohnmeyer.com, www.jesschayes.com

THE IRANIAN THEATER FESTIVAL will be presented March 3-26. Iran stands at the crossroad of some of the oldest civilizations in history. As heir to Persian, Assyrian, Sumetic, Arab and other cultures, Iranian theater and performance from ancient times through today has been a vibrant hybrid. Yet Iranian theater is underrepresented on American stages.

The Brick proposes to expand the boundaries of this cultural moment, and collaborate with Iranian theater artists in the U.S. and abroad, by hosting and producing The Iranian Theater Festival.

The festival will include new works, in Farsi and English, from legendary Iranian exile and Helman-Hammet Grant Award-winner Assurbanipal Babilla, a celebration of Reza Abdoh, Two Stories That End in Suicide by Piehole (inspired by Sadegh Hedayet's The Blind Owl), A preview excerpt from Brendan Regimbal & Samara Naeymi's Aviary, Leila Ghaznavi's Silken Veils, newly-commissioned contemporary works from Iranian-based playwrights and participants of the Fadjr International Theatre Festival and a special celebration of the traditional Iranian New Year's holiday, Nowruz. Visit www.bricktheater.com/iraniantheaterfestival for more.

The Mad Ones present NEW UNTITLED PREMIERE March 31-April 16. The Mad Ones, winners of 3 New York Innovative Theater Awards (including Outstanding Production of a Play) for Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, return to the Brick this April with their sophomore effort. Shrouded in mystery, the Mad Ones are busy in their laboratory cooking up another vibrantly detailed retro construction with live music. As Time Out New York says, "rest assured, you are safe in the hands of some confident new theatrical talents."

THE LITTLE CHAOS will run April 21-30. "When I was twelve, I smashed a vase over my father's head and killed him. At sixteen, I was the leader of a gang. One day we killed a guy who was sitting on a bench with a girl. We pissed down on him from a hill. He came up and gave us a dressing down. So we went for him, and he just keeled over. You know, with brass knuckles. And then he was dead. Just kicked the bucket."

A trio of outsiders that refuses to join a syndicate gets involved in a series of murders -- at first out of a need for protection; then to cover its tracks and finally for money.

Based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1969 film Love is Colder than Death, Chaos is the story of "poor souls who didn't know what to do with themselves, who were simply set down, as they are, and who weren't given a chance" (as Fassbinder himself put it.) Inspired by spaghetti westerns and Hollywood gangster films (in the vein of Raoul Wash), the show depicts a Munich of chain-smokers, fat prostitutes and troubled youths. Directed by Stiven Luka

Depth Charge presents THE ABORTION PLAY May 12-21.
A fable celebrating bourgeois individualism, nihilism, and equality in which Hour Heroine narrowly avoids disaster and fulfills her social destiny as a petite-bourgeois thanks to the greatest weapon in the long struggle for a free and equal world: abortion.

From the creators of Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill! comes the newest work of Depth Charge.

THE BRICK'S ANNUAL SUMMER THEME FESTIVAL will take place June 2 - 25, 2011. This year's theme is THE COMIC BOOK THEATER FESTIVAL. The influence of comics on our culture continues to grow. From the pop fantasias of Hollywood blockbusters to the rawness and refinement of intimate memoirs - and everything in between - it's impossible to deny the wide appeal of comics' words and images. The theater, of course, is no less immune to its spell. Next summer, The Brick will invite one of history's newest art forms to meet one of its oldest - and, through collaborations between visual and dramatic artists, the form and content of comics will collide with the content and form of theater to create strange new hybrids across both mediums.

Visit www.bricktheater.com/comics for more. Applications now online!

GAME PLAY 2011: A Celebration of Video Game Performance Art will be presented July 7-31.

Now in its 3rd year, the video game performance festival continues in what Seth Schiesel of The New York Times called "the most ambitious effort I know of to fuse the techniques and live presentation of theater with the themes, structures and technology of interactive electronic entertainment." See the mediums of stage and game collide in the most unexpected and surprising ways. Applications now online!

All shows will take place at The Brick (575 Metropolitan Avenue between Union and Lorimer, Brooklyn). Tickets may be purchased online at www.bricktheater.com or by calling 212-352-3101.

THE YEAR IN BRICK: 2010

2010-12-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

Dear Supporters of The Brick:

We are writing to ask for your continuing financial support to help The Brick continue its programming in 2011 and beyond.

The Brick has been running strong now for 8 years, and we couldn't have gotten here without you.

Below are some of the highlights of 2010!

And here is where you can help us make 2011 possible!

http://www.bricktheater.com/donationpage

THE 8^TH YEAR IN BRICK: 2010

THE BRICK IS CROWNED KING OF THE NERDS & OUTCASTS!

(1) Time Out New York featured The Brick as one of 17 "Essential New York Theater" venues and shows, along with The Public Theater, St. Ann's Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Time Out's verdict: "Williamsburg's scrappy proliferator of smart-alecky themed festivals (Moral Values, Anti-Depressant et al.) is for the nerds, outcasts and mad experimenters of theater. That includes both creators and spectators."

Read here!

"A FOR-REAL, ONLY-IN-NEW YORK KIND OF THEATER"

(2) Metromix featured The Brick in a Thanksgiving tribute on "The top 10 reasons to be thankful for New York's wild and wonderful theater scene." Its description captures the spirit of The Brick well:

"Hats off, please for a moment of silence as we remember the late Ohio Theater. But their questing, DIY spirit lives on across the river in Williamsburg's only full-time theater space, The Brick. The constant churn of new work by local theater artists on the cheap ($15 to $20 tickets) is a plus, not a minus. Summertime means festivals like 'Fight Fest' (showcasing the art of stage combat) and 'Game Play' ('video game performance art,' which is as cool as that sounds). The Brick is a for-real, only-in-New York kind of theater. Thank goodness there are a few left."

Read here!

BRICK SHOWS TAKE TOP HONORS AT THE NYIT AWARDS!

(3) Brick shows from the 2009-2010 season again made a big splash at the annual New York Innovative Theatre Foundation awards. Brick shows took 11 nominations (Infectious Opportunity, Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury, Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot Wars, and The Vigil or the Guided Cradle) and 4 awards (Samuel and Alasdair - Outstanding Production of a Play, Outstanding Ensemble, Outstanding Sound Design; The Vigil or the Guided Cradle - Crystal Skillman, Outstanding Original Full-Length Script).

Read here!

THE TIMES RAVES ABOUT GAME PLAY

(4) The New York Times raved about our second year of Game Play, The Brick's new festival dedicated to the art of video-themed performance:

"... what if the characters and stories of classic video games were reimagined and reinterpreted as live theater in front of you? Even as someone who writes about video games for a living, I had not imagined such a thing possible until attending 'Theater of the Arcade,' the most provocative and intriguing of four different shows I recently saw as part of the Game Play festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."

Read here!

CLOWNS INVADE YET AGAIN

(5) This year brought back the biggest, craziest and best attended New York Clown Theatre Festival yet. The festival began with the traditional Union Square-to-Williamsburg parade and public pie fight, then proceeded to 21 Mainstage shows, 5 cabarets, 2 workshops, and a closing day clown funeral through the streets of Williamsburg.

See Rocketboom's video feature here!

THE BRICK EXISTS! GETS A WIKIPEDIA ENTRY!

(6) View here! At last! We're as real as the history of Pomerania!

FIGHT FEST WARPS CHRISTMAS!
ENCOURAGES CHILDREN TO RESORT TO VIOLENCE!

(7) Evil Santa Claus, Busty Medieval Vixens, Bloodthirsty Clowns, The Three Swashbuckling Kings and Warring Inbreds fought to redefine the holidays at The Brick's Fight Fest 2010! As promoted by The New York Times here and here!

Which just goes to show: A little, 50-seat Brooklyn theater with heart and great supporters can get a lot done.

Please help us keep doing it! Please consider a generous one-time donation, or a monthly subscription plan. It's extremely easy at our donation page -- or by mailing in a check using our donor form.

We share 50% of the box office from each show with the artists. The other 50% doesn't come close to covering our costs to keep The Brick going. We need your help to keep our pro-artist, pro-audience, pro-quality-theater model alive. Thanks again.

Best,

Michael, Robert, Hope, Jeff, Gyda, Ian, Berit and Roger

and the 240-plus Bricklayer volunteers.

www.bricktheater.com

P.S. On tap for 2011: The Iranian Theater Festival, The Comic Book Theater Festival in June, the third annual installment of Game Play in July, Late Night & Kids' shows and Mainstage World Premieres from tomorrow's "Mad Experimenters!"

A copy of our latest annual report may be obtained, upon request, from us directly or from the New York State Attorney General's Charities Bureau, Attn: FOIL Officer, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.

THE NEW SUMMER FESTIVAL THEME IS...

2010-01-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

The new Brick Summer Festival theme trumpets the end of print media, the Haitian Earthquake and the triumphal return of Republican power to Washington.

What.

Too Soon?

From June 4th to July 3rd, 2010, The Brick Theater, Inc. proudly presents

THE TOO SOON FESTIVAL
A premature summer theater festival.

Is the future happening now? Is the world whizzing past at a dizzying pace? Are you both running to catch up and hiding away from it all? Half-baked notions, frustrated youth, uncomfortable trends, traumatic events, terrifying predictions, raw nerves and un-come-upon comeuppances will be exploited, filmed, published, performed and presented before their time at THE TOO SOON FESTIVAL. Only at The Brick.

THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR AMAZING FESTIVAL NAME SUGGESTIONS! You contributed over 400 festival theme names (!) on

The festival name was inspired by Adam McGovern, who suggested "The Too-Far Festival", and by Moira Stone, who commented "Too soon?", and many others who suggested a festival name involving themes about the encroaching future. Moira and Adam will receive Full-Festival Passes.

More to be announced soon, including awards to the winner of the Most-Posted Suggestions and to 3 random posters from each of The Brick's Facebook, Twitter and Blog pages! Check back here, here and here to find out who won!

To apply for The Too Soon Festival (and many other Brick programs), please click here.

MAKE GOOD ON THOSE CRAZY IDEAS YOU TELL US ABOUT WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK.

2010-01-06T06:20:00.000-08:00

Every year around this time The Brick's staff gets together and discusses possible themes for our upcoming Summer Theme Festival. After a few weeks of heavy drinking and chasing each other around the office waving blunt instruments, we come up with something satisfying and run with it.

This year, however, we said to ourselves, "Hey, you know those thousands of people who support The Brick by attending shows and reading our emails? What if let them in on the fun this year?"

And so here's our offer:

Between now and Friday, January 15, we ask you to share your suggestions of a possible name and theme for the Summer Festival.

You can make as many suggestions as you like, and you can do it in any of three places:

We will take a look at every single response we receive and use them to select a festival theme that strikes our fancy. We'll be sending out daily challenges on Facebook and Twitter to help stoke your creativity. And, to sweeten the pot, we will offer THREE FULL-FESTIVAL PASSES to contributors chosen at random - one from the blog, one from Facebook, and one from Twitter. The final festival theme will be announced on Tuesday, January 19.

So seriously, what are you waiting for? Start churning out some ideas. What would YOU like to see on the Brick stage this June?

THE YEAR IN BRICK: 2009

2009-12-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Friend, Supporter, Fighter:

The Brick has always felt a little contrarian.

Take fundraising letters. We admit we don't like them. Don't like sending them, because talking about how broke you are and how important your mission is and how we need your support this year more than ever, more than any year ever in the history of The Brick, even more than last year (when we said the same thing), and how we heard just the other day from a charmed theatregoer who saw his first show at The Brick, it was a riveting experience and his eyes glistened with moist happiness as he told the story of how ..... how .....

Sorry, where were we?

Yes. Money. Yes. Need. Please send.

Go here: www.bricktheater.com/donationpage

To the point, here is

THE YEAR IN BRICK: 2009

BLOOD, CARTILAGE AND PROTESTANT CLOWNS ABOUND!

(1) The Brick's stage was awash in blood this year. From the conclusion of Penny Dreadful, the smash horror series, to the medieval surgery of The Nosemaker's Apprentice to the Vampiric Space Amazon of Fassbinder's Blood on the Cat's Neck to the chef stylings of Titus Andronicus and the carnage of The Blood Brothers present ... The New Guignol. Also, there were Protestants and clowns. Who drink blood. (For the full 2009 line-up: click here.)

"SMALL BUT MIGHTY"

(2) Time Out New York measured our bust-line in an elite roundup of the Best Cheap Off-Off Broadway theaters. Called us "small but mighty." That's right.

THE BRICK PROVIDES DRUGS!

(3) Theatrical drugs, that is. We cheerfully raised our collective finger to the Depression (sorry, Recession) with The Antidepressant Festival. The New York Times responded, "No one tops the Brick Theater when it comes to oddball concepts for theater festivals." One drug-addled piece, Suspicious Package: Rx, was chosen for publication in Plays and Playwrights 2010 (New York Theatre Experience). Audiences also raised their collective finger to the Recession: attendance increased a whopping 43% from The Brick's prior summer fest.

HAILED AT 30,000 FEET!

(4) The Brick goes global: United Airlines' flight magazine, Hemispheres, featured The Brick in an article on Game Play, our month devoted to video game theater. Awesome.

STUNNING HONOR BESTOWED, DANCING ENSUES

(5) The New York Innovative Theatre Awards bestowed its honorary Caffe Cino Fellowship Award on The Brick - given annually to "an Off-Off Broadway theatre company that consistently produces outstanding work" (as featured in The New York Times). The Brick accepted the award by sending 20 of its loyalists (including roller-skaters) onstage to dance to the Commodores' "Brick House." The awards host then stated: "I don't really know what we just saw."

MORE DAMNED BLOOD!

(6) You wanted more mayhem. We gave it to you, with Fight Fest: the first ever festival devoted to the art of stage combat. (Click here or an exclusive Brick video promo starring

Taimak of the legendary fight film, The Last Dragon). Among the offerings, Piper McKenzie's Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury cut a swath through Man's bloody evolution, Last Life had the world's final inhabitants literally wrestling for control in a "fightsical," while The Ninja Cherry Orchard racked up a puzzling Chekhovian body-count of 63 characters. We're still cleaning the blood off the marleys.

BRICK ALUMS OVERWHELM "PEOPLE OF THE YEAR"!

(7) nytheatre.com's annual "People of the Year" awarded 7 out of 15 wins to Brick Alumni! Congratulations to Inverse Theatre, Nosedive Productions, Alyssa Simon, Shannon Sindelar, Paco Tolson, Matthew Trumbull and Richard Lovejoy (whose two-part magnum opus, A Brief History of Murder, will out at The Brick this January)! Congratulations, also, to our other friends and colleagues on the list!

And, last but not least:

YOU ARE AMPLY PRAISED!

(8) You: You answered our fundraising plea last year, radically increasing our donor pool, and bolstered our ticket sales by coming to see many, many Brick shows. Our tentative conclusion on reviewing the year-end books (subject to the accountants!) is that for the first time in The Brick's 7-year history, we're covering all of our costs in 2009 through outside donations, grants and ticket sales. Wow.

We could wrap up with the typical fundraising plea and exhort: It's not enough! We need to do more! To get to that next level! etc. etc.

But for a moment we want to celebrate. You out there made all of the above happen in 2009. The Brick is a unique place. Please continue to give (www.bricktheater.com/donationpage - only 10 more days to get that tax write-off!) - and to come see the shows. You keep us doing what we're doing.

best,

Michael, Robert, Hope, Jeff, Gyda, Ian, Berit

and the 200-plus Bricklayer volunteers

www.bricktheater.com

----------------------------

THE BLOOD BROTHERS JUST WANT YOU TO EAT RIGHT

2009-10-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Paper of Record has seen fit to pick The Brick and The Blood Brothers as a very cost-efficient and satisfying way to spend your All Hallows’ Eve goodwill, cheer, and cash.

Come closing night for a spookily fun post-show celebration and maybe gore effects-guru Stephanie Cox-Williams will let you snack on some of the props.

Buy your tix fast-like and marvel at the scary smoothness of the brothers’ heads in person!

"RAMBO SOLO" CREATOR MEETS RAMBO BOOK-O AUTHOR!

2009-07-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

Zachary Oberzan's Indie Theatre hit Rambo Solo took the theater world by sneak attack last year. This Thursday, see the movie "Flooding with Love for The Kid", which it detailed, at The Brick for free! (8pm! RSVP now!)

And right now, read about how First Blood author David Morrell bought Zachary breakfast last week!

David Morrell Bought Me Breakfast

By Zachary Oberzan

Early this morning, David Morrell bought me breakfast. If you had told that ten-year-old child, opening First Blood and reading for the first time, “His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid…,” that in twenty-five years, the guy who wrote this magical, tragic work of fiction would be sitting across from him chatting about books, movies, theater, Polish politics, and airplanes, he most certainly would have believed you. Children believe in heroes, and they secretly believe in their deepest heart of hearts they will some day meet their hero. And maybe even become their hero.

If you happened to see Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Rambo Solo or my one-man film Flooding with Love for The Kid, you know of my admiration, well, maybe mania is a better word, when it comes to the nov

el First Blood. What I didn’t know, however, was that the guy who wrote this book would turn out to be a man of uncanny generosity and authenticity. When presenting those projects there was a fear, known to many artists who borrow work, of the ominous “cease and desist” letter.

I had wanted to contact Mr. Morrell, to share the work he inspired, but really did fear that “cease” letter. As fate would have it, Mr. Morrell did indeed learn of these projects through the grapevine. But to my great astonishment and joy, he was thrilled. This is a man who enjoys sharing his work and is touched by the impact it has on other people’s lives. That’s his bottom line. Sure, if Stallone makes a few hundred million bucks off of Mr. Morrell’s imagination, he deserves his fee. But if you’re a young artist in NYC who uses his work, he is flattered, supportive, and he wants to meet you.

Mr. Morrell, who now lives in New Mexico, was in NYC to receive the International Thriller Writer’s top award for his extensive and influential body of work, and to promote his latest novel, The Shimmer. We had made contact during the off-Broadway run of Rambo Solo, and he became a big fan of the film I made, even going so far as to promote it on his own website. We planned to meet when he was in town.

We met at the Grand Hyatt, wher

e he was staying. I was very nervous, and glad to feel nervous, because that was clear proof that something important was happening to me. That first handshake was twenty-five years in the making. He was fit and vivacious in a way that belied his sixty-odd years. And maybe I

imagined it, but he was perhaps slightly nervous about meeting me. This was one of the great qualities I discovered. He is not at all taken by his success. Completely down-to-earth, friendly, humble, maybe even a little shy, he does not have the ego of a man responsible for creating a literary character known the world over. (“There are five characters from thrillers that became internationally known,” he told me. “Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, James Bond, Rambo, and Harry Potter.”)

He asked me about the progress of Rambo Solo, and I told him how well it went

in NYC and recently in Montreal, and how the response in Europe was maybe slightly more distanced. I chalked that up to the 100 mile an hour English that I speak during the show, as well as Europe’s relationship with the concept of Rambo, which I imagine is different than America’s. “Have you done it yet in Poland? Let me tell you about an experience I had.” He was in Poland in 2001, at an event where ex-President Clinton was

making an appearance. Strangely though, the press was giving him a lot of attention, despite the presence of Clinton. He asked a reporter why the fuss over him. The answer: Solidarity were huge Rambo fans. “They would have rallies, and watch those Rambo films, then put on the headbands like Rambo, and go out and march.” In the 80’s, Rambo of course was the poster-boy of anti-communism, due to Stallone’s choice of characterization.

This led me to a question I was deeply curious about, from an artist’s point of view. I asked what it was like to create a book, and a character, and then to see that creation take off in the public’s perception in a way very different from what was initially intended. He was very accepting of this fact, and glad to see how his work was adapted and celebrated by others. I guess that’s why he was thrilled to learn of my little contributions.

We talked about a lot of non-Rambo related stuff, too. He had just received his pilot’s license a few weeks ago. (Mr. Morrell is a self-described ‘method-actor’ when it comes to his writing. If he’s writing about a pilot, he learns to fly.) His zest for life truly impressed me. How many guys at retirement age go

out and get a pilot’s license and start flying around the country by themselves? He answered a lot of questions I had about airports. I learned about soft landings and short landings (the short landings are the toughest part of the license test.) We talked a bit about his family, and a bit about my career. We bonded over the fact that I recently departed my day job and am living an artist’s life full time. I also learned a few things about the film industry and a writer’s relationship with it. (Not always pretty).

As the conversation drifted back to First Blood, we discussed some of the points of the book, its qualities of Greek tragedy, and the time when he was writing it. “I was reading Joseph Campbell at the time, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and there’s that Jung

ian influence,” he said. “Rambo’s journey through the cave with the bats, his emergence on a higher plain of awareness…that’s very Jungian.”

We talked for an hour and a half before he had to get to a radio interview uptown, which happened to be near my apartment. He offered to share his cab. If he hadn’t been pressed for time, I would have loved to show him my film set. Our conversation continued in the cab. I learned some great facts: In an early treatment, John Travolta was going to be a comic sidekick in Rambo II. The idea for Rambo II (Mr. Morrell wrote the subsequent novelization, but not the screenplay) came from the producer’s hunting buddy, who thought it would be great to send Rambo back to Viet Nam. At one point, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen were considered for the roles of Teasle and Rambo, respectively, in the film First Blood. Sylvester Stallone is lovely to meet in person. And a suspicion of mine was confirmed: that cave scene in Cliffhanger where Sly is engulfed by a million bats was almost certainly inspired by First Blood’s bat cave episode. “Sly knows the book very well,” Mr. Morrell winked. Not quite as well as I, though, I thought.

Nearing our stop, I asked, “Besides my humble adaptation, did you ever want to see a big film version of your First Blood, done completely true to the novel?” Gracious as ever, he said, “Oh, they did a great job with the movie they made, [director] Ted Kotcheff did a great job. Watching Sly run around in the woods with that, that tunic thing he wears…” he said, smiling. “Besides,” he went on, no one’s really interested in Viet Nam anymore, and the money it would take to recreate that era…you’d have to get cars from ‘72…I don’t think that will happen.”

“Yeah,” I said, “But would you want to see it done? Because I’m going to make it.”

“Well, then you’ll really run into copyright issues with the film studios,” he laughed.

“Oh, I don’t mean anytime soon,”

I said. “It’s a long term project. But I’m going to do it.” He chuckled. I think maybe he thought I was joking.

We got out of the cab. Despite my protestations, he paid for that, too. “It’s OK, I make more money than you.” Couldn’t argue with that.

We shook hands again and I told him what a pleasure and honor it was to meet him. “Listen,” he said, looking down the street. “What you’re doing is great. Your energy and openness and enthusiasm remind me of myself when I was beginning. I think we’re both on a voyage. Don’t worry about the ending. It’s the voyage that counts.” He suddenly and briefly locked eyes with me. “We’re kindred spirits,” he said.

So I want tell that ten-year-old kid, thanks for believing. It came true. Mission accomplished.

CHANGING THE FACE OF INDIE THEATER--ONE FESTIVAL AT A TIME

2009-07-09T09:24:00.001-07:00

Writer/Editor/Critic Aaron Riccio proclaims a new reviewing policy in reaction to his moving experiences at The Antidepressant Festival. We knew our theatrical drugs had potency, but damn!

"Congratulations, Brick. Your Antidepressant Festival has successfully anti-depressed me, mainly by reminding me how many good companies there are out there. At the same time, it's also made me more aware of a potential bias on my blog, one of under-representation. The following is an attempt to address that:

------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Artist,

Are you involved in a new, full production--as a writer, director, actor, stagehand, &c.--that you think is good? Is it running for at least a week (four performances)? If so, feel free to send me information and an invite to your show. If I am not already booked, I will come and write about it here. (Be forewarned: I will not pull punches that are squarely deserved.)

Sincerely,

Aaron

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope that this will help widen the range of shows that I'm currently covering--the off-off-Broadway beat--so that equal weight is given both to new artists and established companies (and vice versa)."

Thank you Mr. Riccio for your generous coverage and for moving the ball forward for Indie Theater Artists!

The Brick

Drugs of Yesteryear

2009-06-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

Though sales of our "prescription drugs" have been gangbusters at the Antidepressant Fest, we really need to get some ads like these. Heroin! The Sedative for Coughs!

COLONISTS SEIZE THE SHIP...OF YOUR HEART! PROTECT THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN!

2009-05-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

Just 2 Sundays left!

Performances at 3pm and 7pm!

Bring the kids!

"It's rare that I see a show with you that I want to go on longer than it already has, but this time I really wanted it to keep going." The L Magazine

"But to those who think they have seen it all before, I give you the humble earthworm of the stunningly vibrant and fresh puppet community of “The Colonists,” now on stage at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg." The Brooklyn Paper

"It's a really wonderful show, with the magical surprise feeling of good puppetry - lots of intense artism in the puppets and set - and the left-field head-cocking genius that made for some of Jollyship's best comedy." fishunderwater.blogspot.com

See the new trailer!

THE TIMES PLAYS ODDBALL WITH THE BRICK

2009-05-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

In Summer Stages, The New York Times previews The Antidepressant Festival and concludes that "No one tops the Brick Theater when it comes to oddball concepts for theater festivals." Inside sources say The Brick beat out Lincoln Center's Sweater Lint Festival and BAM's Pagan Bath Toys Celebration by a nose.

CHEER UP THE GLOOMY CENTAUR. OR DIE TRYING!

2009-05-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

Young Adventurer,

Do you dare to face the sad Centaur without professional counseling?

There! The gauntlet is thrown! Show your mettle!

Time Out New York previews The Antidepressant Festival with this 1980s-era mini video game preview from the creators of Adventure Quest! Play it now to see if you can survive the perilous journey depicted in full 10-color pixelated graphics! See...the well-rendered Market Square! Witness...the dimly lit apothecary! Thrill to...the same well-rendered Market Square with a broken window!

Be wary of the Octopus Cult and please don't tell us what you do with the Unicorn femur.

Play it here.

HEY LOOKIT! SOME DAGUERROTYPES FROM THEM SHANTYTOWN BALL COCKADOOEY!

2009-05-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Shantytown Ball last Saturday night was attended by many individuals who ran the gamut of the socioeconomic costuming spectrum. There were Dapper Dans, Flapper Flos, Homeless Hennies and Down-and-out Dexters to spare. We Brickers are astoundingly grateful for all the support we received, both from those who planned the party and those who attended it. Our extensive photo set from the evening is available at Flickr, but here are a few choice images to start with. Thanks to all!

All photos courtesy the indispensible Ken Stein/Runs with Scissors.

HOW TO DRESS LIKE A HOBO: TEN HELPFUL HINTS TO PREPARE FOR THE BRICK'S SHANTYTOWN BALL

2009-04-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows how to dress fancy: put on a tie or a dress or something else you buy at the store. But dressing like a hobo – as opposed to a disgusting, friendless slob – requires energy, discipline, and a number of other things we pretend to console ourselves with when we no longer have money.

If you carefully follow our advice, you can arrive at The Brick’s Shantytown Ball on Saturday looking and smelling like you just stepped out of a boxcar.

STEP #1: Hats
We cannot stress this enough: Hobos Wear Hats. If you do not have a hat, you are not a hobo, you are a bum, and will be given the eponymous rush. Hats need not be literal hats: tin cans, burlap sacks and pie plates attached to the head with fraying strands of rope will do nicely.

STEP # 2: Proper Sizing
The hobo’s clothes cannot be “just right” – they must be either painfully small or comically large. A random combination of the two is preferable.

STEP # 3: Personalized Accessories
Inexplicable totems – such as carefully whittled figurines of long-dead statesmen (William Jennings Bryan, Daniel Webster, et al) or bent forks worn on a string around the neck – are excellent conversation pieces and can provide a wonderful excuse for a knife fight when touched without permission.

STEP # 4: The Hobo Rag
Every time a hobo needs to wipe something off his mouth, brow or elsewhere, a hobo rag must be pulled from deep within a pocket. This rag must have gone unwashed for at least two election cycles, and be so well-used that it actually leaves excess residue on one’s person whenever it is applied.

STEP # 5: Patches
At least three per garment – and if any of them use floral fabric be prepared to be called a pansy.

STEP # 6: Shoes
Footwear should either A) not match, B) be full of gaping holes (particularly in the big toe area) or C) cause the wearer to repeatedly groan “Oh, my corns” or “Oh, my bunions” or “Oh, my goddamn corns and bunions.”

STEP # 7: Hair
The more there is, the more dogged and futile should be the effort to contain it. If pomade is unavailable, it’s easy to make your own: just find something sticky (this shouldn’t be difficult) and rub. If a hobo is trying to make a big and ultimately futile show of respectability, a grueling cold-water shave can be attempted on whatever party of the body is relevant.

STEP # 8: Stains
Yes. Each one should have its origin in a different substance and come with a long, complicated backstory that can while away the entire trip from Duluth to Cincinnati.

STEP # 9: Sentimental Letters
They can be from potential employers, former lovers, innocent little sisters who may or may not still be alive, mothers who believed in you back when you still had a shot at being something big, or the Archduke of France – but every self-respecting hobo needs an oft-folded missive of some sort that is pulled out and stared at wistfully during moments of relative calm.

STEP # 10: Confidence
You know what? Everyone else can go to hell – cuz you’re a hobo, son.

Hopefully these easy-to-follow will help you prepare an ineffable costume that will make you the belle of the Shantytown. Remember, pre-purchased tickets are $20 - TWENTY MEASLY DOLLARS - so use the discount code "earlybird" and come on by Saturday dressed as a hobo (or as a flapper or dandy, fine, but that’s a copout). Galapagos, Dumbo, 8pm to midnight. Buy your tix at http://bricktheater.com/shantytown

And if you’re not currently in NYC - aka The Big Dirty, Palookasburg, the City of Brotherly Punching and Stabbing - do please consider sending us a donation, which will allow us to provide sartorial guidance (and do theater and stuff) for another year. Be a home-baked pie cooling on an unguarded windowsill - support The Brick.

SMALL BUT MIGHTY

2009-02-26T13:03:00.000-08:00

In this week's Time Out New York, The Brick is a record-breaking three out of "769 ways to enjoy the city without breaking the bank!" (Here, here and here.)

"Small but mighty, this tiny cube in Williamsburg plays host to clown shows, radio theater, environmental productions of classics (like last season’s Notes from Underground) and drolly themed festivals that thoughtfully investigate concepts like “pretentiousness” or “antidepressants.”"

ANTIDEPRESSANT WATCH: ANTI-ANTIDEPRESSANTS

2009-02-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

As reported by Onion News Network this week, the FDA has at last approved the new drug Despondex for the insufferably cheerful among us. The disease is highly contagious. Please treat the infected immediately upon diagnosis. Side effects may include Schadenfreude.

Click here for the full report.

IMMEDIATE THEATRE!

2009-02-11T18:43:00.000-08:00

"If theatre fails to react rapidly to current events, whether it be the Middle East crisis or the global financial meltdown, it will be reduced to the role of an impotent bystander. What theatre can also do is delve behind the headlines." Michael Billington in The Guardian today, responding to a short play Caryl Churchill just wrote about Gaza (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/feb/11/royal-court-theatre-gaza)

We're attempting to react rapidly to current events in our devised piece, Times 365:24:7, that is coming to The Brick's mainstage in a little over a month... we start previews on March 13th. As the blogger is here, we feel like we're chasing after events trying to respond to them and create interesting characters who are defined by the news in different ways: whether as makers of the news or receivers or subjects...

I'm Anna, the director of the show and artistic director of Bone Orchard. I think that because the theatre is a live medium that combines words and images in real time, it has a responsibility to be current. I don't really understand why we/the field don't strive for this more. It definitely sets up the risk of failure, but then failure is important, if terrifying. Samuel Beckett: 'No matter, try again, fail again, fail better.'

Why else do you make anything artistic except to be part of a dialogue with the present moment - to enlarge the present in some way, to respond to it and take it into a different kind of conversation?

Film does this actually more than theatre right now, but this is ironic because film is an artform that is always necessarily behind itself because of the production and editing process. Theatre, however, has the potential to exploit its liveness and ability to react immediately to events...
so we are making immediate theatre to attempt this: to build a piece that has strong foundations (scenes and characters that the actors develop over time), but that can also adapt and grow, changing each night a little as the news itself does.

ANTIDEPRESSANT WATCH: SLATE.COM

2009-01-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

Slate's new blog, The Happiness Project: How to Be Happier (mercifully changed from its original title: The Happiness Project: How to Be Depressed) re-affirms the growing trend towards national happiness pursuit. Amongst strategies recently championed: write knock-knock jokes, moderate your cookie intake, visit the zoo, and crowd onto the National Mall with 2,000,000 freezing people.

TIME OUT NY PROFILES PENNY DREADFUL

2009-01-16T12:44:00.000-08:00

Matt Gray (Co-Creator of Penny Dreadful with Bryan Enk) is interviewed by David Cote for The TONY Blog this week. What do we learn about the "byzantine sci-fi retro-melodramatic soap opera?" Is there an alien presence behind it all!?

See Episode #10 (”The Science and the Seance: Two Tales of Love and Horror”) this Sat, January 17 at 11pm [SOLD OUT!] and Sun, January 18 at 2pm. Click here for tickets.

ANTIDEPRESSANT WATCH: STEPHEN COLBERT

2009-01-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

Thursday night, "conservative" Stephen Colbert confessed his addiction to happy pills.

"It's been tough keeping my mood up with the innauguration less than two weeks away," he bemoaned. The Comedy Central pundit then sampled his Innaugural Advent Calendar's daily offering.

"Zoloft? Paxil!"

See him medicate here.

GRANDUNCLE: LAST CALL!

2008-12-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

There are still a few tickets left for the final two performances of The Granduncle Quadrilogy, so look sharp!

Meanwhile, some more press:

Greg Burgett in the New York Press:

The Granduncle Quadrilogy, now in its final weekend, seems to have slipped in just under the wire, an impressive ode to lives needlessly centered on conflict and tradition… Inhabiting a world lovingly created by writer Jeff Lewonczyk and director Hope Cartelli, the characters traverse a frosty stage of minimally-adorned white. Wearing expensive looking, perhaps budget-hogging layers of fur and long johns, they parse Granduncle's unreliably remembered life spent eating "puffin's beak" and at a mandated week in "honeymoon camp" (his residence beside "Lake Intestinal" and time atop of "Mount Cranium" imply a rich, interior fantasy state).

And Samantha O'Brien in OffOffOnline:

While multiple deaths on frozen tundra might not be everyone’s idea of holiday cheer, the Brick Theater’s dark comedy, The Granduncle Quadrilogy: Tales from the Land of Ice, makes for good morbid fun. Jeff Lewonczyk’s script so extensively crafts entire cultures with their own lexicons, traditions, and histories that it feels like fictional anthropology. In the cast’s capable hands, even the most peculiar traditions or phrasings (describing smell as “taste for nose” was a favorite of mine) seem natural. Granduncle largely succeeds in telling a good story well—a simple goal, but one too often overlooked or unnecessarily complicated by aggressively experimental or ironic productions. Such a uniquely imaginative show as this is enough to put you in the holiday spirit – no matter how many bodies pile up.

In the interest of fairness, I also feel compelled to mention a review in Time Out New York, with which I have understandable quibbles.

Hope to see you at the show!

MEDICAL THEATER

2008-12-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

From today's New York Post...

ANXIOUS APPLE IS NOW PILL CITY
By ANDY GELLER

Nervous New Yorkers are popping more pills.

Prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs, anti-depressants and sleep aids are surging as residents struggle with the economic crisis, Crain's New York Business reports.

"If we looked to diagnose the city, I'd say it has an anxiety disorder," psychotherapist Dr. Mel Schwartz told the weekly.

In September and October, sleep-aid prescriptions reportedly rose by more than 7 percent, to 366,870, compared with those months in 2007.

You heard it here first - the City is primed and ready for The Antidepressant Festival...

NYTHEATRE.COM'S "PEOPLE OF THE YEAR 2008" INCLUDES 3 BRICK ALUMNI!

2008-12-16T07:36:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Gyda Arber, Michael Criscuolo and Ivanna Cullinan on their citations as nytheatre.com's People of the Year 2008!

All 3 are also Master Masons of The Brick.

What was that you said?

What is the ultra-secret society known as The Master Masons of The Brick?

We can't tell you that.

"WILDLY IMAGINATIVE AND ENGAGING TO THE SENSES"

2008-12-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

The greatly anticipated Granduncle review from nytheatre.com’s very own Martin Denton posted today, and we’re thrilled to say that he liked it! Here are some highlights:

It's a funny show, and also a melancholy one; wildly imaginative and engaging to the senses. Jeffrey Lewonczyk … has pulled out all the stops in imagining an alternative universe in which to set his story that is at once weird and off-kilter and incisively familiar. Also Hope Cartelli, the director, who with a crackerjack design team has realized Lewonczyk's imaginary world in vivid and robust detail.

Each of the tales' various thematic ideas give free rein to Lewonczyk's imagination, and the fun derives from seeing how he'll use exotic ingredients like an albatross egg or a mammoth trunk in contexts you just don't see coming. When he gets to create from whole cloth a second new world—in the last piece, when Granduncle's wanderings take him to a land so warm and fertile that you can pick and choose which birds you will eat—Lewonczyk goes into overdrive.

Also, we’ve posted a few new pics on Flickr. Enjoy - or else.

(Photos, as ever, by Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors)

OHIO OH NO

2008-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Ohio Theater, one of Manhattan's essential performance spaces, is in danger of closing, according to Alexis Soloski at The Village Voice. We've had a great relationship with them over the years - especially when they were our sister space during Untitled Theater Company #61's Havel Festival in Fall 2006 - and, despite Soho Think Tank Artistic Director Robert Lyons's lack of sanguinity about a long-term solution, we wish them the best in a struggle that too many theater spaces these days are facing.

AND THE 2009 BRICK SUMMER FESTIVAL THEME IS...

2008-12-08T10:11:00.000-08:00

... well, rather than just up and TELL you, why don't you treat yourself to the full multimedia treatment, in the form of the video that was presented at Friday night's announcement party?

Ladies and gentlemen, start popping!

THE GRANDUNCLE QUADRILOGY: LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS HERE!

2008-12-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

We had a wonderful opening weekend, and thank you to the many individuals who came out to support us during our first three shows.

I’m opening up this page as a set place for audience members to leave comments about the show, whatever those comments may be. We already received a thoughtful and inspiring mini-review of the Friday performance on one of last week’s posts, and if you’d like to read it click here and scroll down.

We also received a generally positive review on Gothamist, which is exciting. Some key quotes:

If Joseph Campbell ever got really baked and told his grandchildren a meandering bedtime story, it might have sounded something like The Granduncle Quadrilogy… There's an endearing 'let's put on a play' charm at work here... the minimalist set proves you don't need much to evoke an alternate reality in the theater. With just a white backdrop suggesting a desolate snow-blind north country, and Julianne Kroboth's elaborately funky costumes of pelts and feathers, director Hope Cartelli transports the audience deep into the tundra.

There are a couple of comments on that post as well, one of which simply says “I dig this play,” the other of which says “FUR IS DEAD,” in reference to the photo (which happens to be the same one at the top of this post). In response to the latter, let me quote Hope, who told me in an email today that “all fur in the piece is recycled vintage that would have otherwise gone to the trash and is better off serving a show then festering in Staten Island!” So in other words, no animals were harmed in the making of this show.

Let the comments commence!

(Photo of Richard Harrington & Fred Backus: Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors)

A FIRST GLIMPSE AT GRANDUNCLE

2008-12-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

(Melissa Roth, Richard Harrington, Fred Backus)

Tonight is the preview performance of The Granduncle Quadrilogy, our last chance to tinker and play before the official opening tomorrow. At last night's dress rehearsal, Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors Photography came by to take some production photos, and the first of them are housed in a set at The Brick's Flickr page. Here's a glimpse; more will follow. Let me say that, as a gratified writer, I am so unbearably excited that my bones are likely to shatter.

(Gavin Starr Kendall, Richard Harrington)

(Richard Harrington and Friend)

NYTHEATRECAST & BLOG LOVE FROM FLUX

2008-12-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

I recently had the always-welcome pleasure of sitting down with Nytheatre.com’s Martin Denton to record a podcast about an upcoming show – in this case (wait for it), The Granduncle Quadrilogy! Equally as pleasant was the fact that, after discussing a bit about the genesis and process of developing Granduncle, Martin asked me to stick around and help him with a rundown of some of the other interesting holiday shows around town. So after you schedule when you’d like to check out The GQ at The Brick, let our witty repartee guide you towards other holiday theater options. Listen to the podcast!

I’d also like to thank August Shulenberg of the Flux Theater Ensemble for giving us a shout-out in the Flux blog, in a new goings-on-about-town feature, Flux Fusion. Earlier this year I was honored to be a featured playwright in Flux’s Imagination Compact (a series of new short plays revolving around the characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and, more recently, I thrilled to the first play in the Flux production of Johnna Adams’ Angel Eaters Trilogy. Thanks for the good press, Gus!

THE FEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

2008-12-02T13:03:00.000-08:00

As anyone who’s spent more than eleven months around The Brick already knows, we’re known for our festivals. The New York Clown Theatre Festival, the Havel Festival and the Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee are only a few examples of our past prowess as a Live Entertainment Aggregator.

At the center of our season each year, however, is our summer festival, which has explored a different theme each year since 2004’s Hell Festival. Coming up with an exciting, relevant themes is quite a challenge. We’ll be announcing this year’s Summer Festival Theme at Friday night’s opening party for The Granduncle Quadrilogy (doors open at 10pm!); however, we decided we’d like to share with you, our readers, a few of the discarded festival ideas that litter our pathway to glory. If you have any festival ideas of your own that you feel should be relegated to the gutter, please, share them with us!

FAILED FESTIVAL THEMES

The Phlegm Festival
The Politeness Festival
The Vague Sense of Disquiet Festival
The Slow Leaking Gas Festival
The Baader-Meinhof Festival
The Everybody Poops Festival
The John McCain Festival
The Festival Conducted Entirely Through Facebook
The Just Say No To Hemorrhoids Festival (Sponsored by Preparation H)
The Copyright Infringement Festival
The Burning Piles of Money Festival
The Ramen Noodle Festival
The Lawyers, Guns, and Money Festival
The Irrelevant-to-Current-Modes-of-Discourse Festival
A Gertrude Stein Festival Is a Gertrude Stein Festival Is a Gertrude Stein Festival
The Credit Default Swap Festival
The Convertible Stock Options Festival
The Unknownably Complex Financial Instruments Festival
The Hank-Paulson-Is-Cute Festival
The Empty Checking Account Festival
The Running Low on Our Savings Account Too, Unless We Get Some Real Good Press Festival
The Doing-What-We-Do-All-The-Time-Only-More-of-It-In-Less-Time-So-You'll-Pay-Attention Festival
The Arts-and-Theatre-Journalists-Don't-Know-Their-Heads-From-Their-Asses Festival
The Oh I Don't Know, Something With Kittens, People Like Kittens, Right? Festival
The Blowjob Festival (free blowjob with every ticket!)
The Eviction Festival

"THE FLIGHT OF THE MAMMOTHS"

2008-12-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

The third and final Granduncle Fable created by Piper McKenzie and Yarn AudioWorks (and read so beautifully by Richard Harrington, in the role of Granduncle) has been posted at PiperMckenzie.com. It features audio recordings of ACTUAL MAMMOTHS, captured in the wild by the intrepid Eric Winick. Also, more horrible deaths. Listen to it HERE.

"THE FESTIVAL FACTORY"

2008-12-01T11:19:00.000-08:00

What do we have in common with P.S 122, Soho Rep, St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Civilians, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Les Freres Corbusier, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Red Bull Theater, the Chocolate Factory, La MaMa and the LAByrinth Theater Company?

We’re all included in this week’s New York Magazine feature about essential indie theater spaces!

It’s tremendous to be in the company of each and every one of these spaces and companies, and we hope to be able to continue contributing to the cultural conversation for some time to come. Thanks to New York mag for the shout-out.

Also, note that our tagline is “The Festival Factory.” Though as you all know we offer much more than just festivals, we’re proud to acknowledge their importance in our overall gestalt.

And what better segue than to mention that we’ll be announcing the theme for the 2009 Summer Festival at this Friday night’s opening party for The Granduncle Quadrilogy? The party’s expected to begin at around 10pm, but we see no reason why you shouldn’t come for the performance ahead of time!

GRANDUNCLE ASCENDANT

2008-11-25T06:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-21T07:59:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-20T08:08:00.000-08:00

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)

THE LORD OXFORD HOUR

2008-10-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Behold, you! A video message from LORD OXFORD and PATTY O'PATTICAKE regarding The Brick's currently-running show, in which they star, as themselves, in the show, that is currently running, at The Brick. You - behold!

'TIS THE SEASON

2008-10-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

As pretty much every corner of the Brick Empire aside from this one is aware, we presently bask in the dawn sparkle of our first-ever official Mainstage Season. You can read all of the details of this momentous new epoch in theatrical history at bricktheater.com/mainstage.

Though we’ve been presenting programming more or less year-round since our inception in late 2002, to date we’re known most for our festivals (such as September’s third annual New York Clown Theatre Festival, for which we extend a hearty and belated thanks to all those who helped make it such a mallet-to-the-cranium success!). But this 2008-2009 Mainstage Season represents the first time we’ve brought together a carefully curated selection of shows under the same rubric, with each production being given the full range of The Brick’s resources.

So please, readers of the B(rick)log, join us in congratulating Robert Honeywell, Piper McKenzie, Old Kent Road Theater, Bone Orchard, Nick Jones, Rachel Shukert, and Third Lows for being so fortunate as to stand astride the Crossroads of Civilized Culture. How to best to do so? Why, by purchasing one of our insanely reasonable Season Ticket Plans, naturally.

Of course, the time to take best advantage of these deals is this immediate moment, because this weekend marks the debut of our first Mainstage Season event: Episode Seven of the ongoing serial Penny Dreadful, the first season of which played to sold-out houses several months ago – a situation surely to be repeated throughout the second season’s six episodes.

Additionally, there is a mere modicum of days left before the premiere of the first full-length run of the season, Brick Co-Artistic Director Robert Honeywell’s succinctly titled opus, LORD OXFORD BRINGS YOU THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION, LIVE! being the necessary and appropriate response to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's suppression of the freedoms and dignity of the European-American settlers and their descendants in the Royal Eastern American Colonies and the inordinate conferring of special favours and privileges on the merciless Indian savages and the former Negro slaves, in the year Two Thousand and Eight

Truly, an occasion to embrace by investing in a full season of Brick entertainment. We’ll have more to say about Penny and Lord Oxford in future posts – including interviews with the creators, inspiration round-ups, and other goodies – but for now, we’ll leave you to start marking your calendars and visiting bricktheater.com for tickets.

Did I mention that you should purchase some tickets? Sorry, but I’ve been accused recently of being a bit subtle for popular tastes.

THE GREY LADY AND THE RED NOSE

2008-09-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

Nice piece in today's New York Times about the classes we have on offer as part of the New York Clown Theatre Festival. My only quibble is that the article seems to downplay how much damn fun these classes can be. Slots are still available, so this is your last chance to sign up and learn from some of the greats in the field - Jeff Raz, Christopher Bayes, Dody DiSanto, and Eric Davis!

WE MADE A MESS

2008-09-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

This past Friday's Parade/Pie Fight/Cabaret night was a slamtacular superccess, and, oboy, do we have the pictures (and video) to prove it.

Billy Parker from Gothamist came by, and snapped photos for the ages.

Here's a lovely video of the proceedings (thanks to Bobbi Williams/Smokifantastic):

Here's The Brick's Flickr set, featuring photos by our own Hope Cartelli.

Lynn Berg (who is also our own) has given us this Flickr stream.

No media from the cabaret, A) because it would have distracted the artists, and B) because there were so many damn people that we had to turn away 30 audience members, many of ourselves included. So to see shots from the shows themselves, well, I guess you'll just have to buy some tickets, wontcha?

CLOWNS (ALSO NEWS) ON THE MARCH!

2008-09-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

Tonight, come behold that Procession of Pep, that Pageant of Preposterousness, the New York Clown Theatre Festival Clown Parade! It begins at Union Square, takes the L Train to Williamsburg, where it will morph into the Slapstick Smackdown known as the New York Clown Theatre Festival Pie Fight! (Participation = free, humiliation = priceless.) And after that will be an Anthology of Asininity, the New York Clown Theatre Free Preview Cabaret! Three (3) (III) free festival-branded events! One night! Millions of slavering fans! No excuses!

To celebrate the opening night of the Festival, please allow us to share with you a collection of the wonderful press we've been receiving, which will help to elucidate and expand the madness:

AROUND TOWN - The New York Times

THE EIGHT-DAY WEEK - The New York Observer

PERFORMING ARTS - Flavorpill

A RED-NOSE AFFAIR - The Village Voice

TIPS FOR TODAY - Paper Magazine

DEVON HAWKS LUDLOW CLOWNS AROUND - Nytheatre Mike

CLOWN PREVIEW - IndieTheater.org

Hope to see you tonight!

THEY WALK AMONG US

2008-09-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

If you are a follower of The Brick, you have to have spent the summer hoeing permafrost in Franz Joseph Land to be unaware that we are nearly ready to open the third annual New York Clown Theatre Festival. However, on the off chance you actually have just returned from the Land of the Midnight Sunniness, let us give you a brief primer:

1. The Festival runs from September 5 through September 28

2. On Friday 9/5 we kick off with a Clown Parade that starts at Union Square and wends its way to The Brick via the L Train.

3. This Parade is followed by a participatory, interactive Pie Fight.

4. If you participate in the Pie Fight, you will get very dirty.

5. You will also have a kind of jaw-droppingly good time.

6. You will not have time to go home and take a shower before the Free Preview Cabaret, which highlights a number of shows that can be seen in full later in the Festival - so bring your own shampoo.

7. We are not talking about circus clowns here, but Theatre Clowns.

8. Yes, they can be scary sometimes, but only on purpose.

9. They do not do children's birthday parties, so don't ask.

10. If you see enough shows, you will develop washboard abs from all the laughter.

11. We have shows from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, and France.

12. Not to mention the entire U.S. from Hawaii to Maine.

13. Any lingering you prejudice you may have towards clowns will be shattered like some sort of tiny glass unicorn.

14. The shows are like $15 - more than a movie, sure, but do movies talk back to you?

15. There are also classes and workshops you can take to become more clownlike!

Okay, there will be more tips and tricks in future blog posts, but this is probably more than enough for you to handle. Come one, come all! And as you walk down Metropolitan Avenue, keep your eyes open - you never know who might be a clown...

COLLISIONWORKING, PART VII: CONCLUSIONS

2008-08-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

I was wrong. For your reading pleasure, we now present this final post in the "Collisionworking" Series, in which Ian W. Hill offers some final thoughts on his month of performance at The Brick. As of this writing there is at least one performance left of all three shows, so we encourage you to avail yourself of the opportunity to see as many as possible!

Postscript: Final Thoughts/Influences (on Playing Ball)

One last little piece about influences . . .

In making Everything Must Go and its predecessor in the Invisible Republic series, That's What We're Here For (an american pageant), it occurred to me that they were a sum total of a line of thought that has been growing in me since childhood. A way of looking at the world that comes about from having entertainment that I loved - just 'cause it was entertaining to me - that on some level also encouraged a way of looking at the world through questioning eyes, and expressing that questioning in funny and satiric but still sometimes cutting and dark ways.

It's shown up most in EMG and TWWHF, but it's kinda there in everything I do, and now that it's become clearer to me, it's something to be focused on with more intent in future.

The Invisible Republic shows are dedicated to Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Zappa, and Ernie Kovacs, but beyond those shows, I've realized their influence more and more infects everything I do.

Kurtzman and Bill Gaines of the Mad comic book and magazine tended to downplay any notion that there was any true satiric or political content in what they did, but if pressed, they would say that if they had a message, it was basically, "Kids, don't believe what you're being told, because everyone's trying to sell you something." Which is maybe something kids should be hearing more of today.

Zappa's message was pretty much the same, though he was also a proud capitalist who enjoyed the "proper" use of advertising.

But he disliked the fakery that everyone is always told is "just part of the business, so just go along with it," resulting in things like what happens when The Mothers of Invention are told to "lip-sync" their new single on some 60s TV show:

And occasionally he could bring some of that influence to a pop culture arena:

Ernie Kovacs instilled in me a love for the inexplicably funny at a very young age (PBS ran a series of collections of his work around 1974-1975 or so), but besides things like the perfection of the Nairobi Trio . . .

He had an entire attitude that, even when selling something, made you aware of the process in an honest way while trying to entertain:

And his beautifully "off" metacommentary extended to his own credits:

I guess in the end, what I learned from these people is how to respond to the question, "Why don't you just play ball?" Which is with raised hackles and a determination to do what is right for the work, not for anybody else (which doesn't preclude selling the work, but just selling it honestly), and to focus on the little dark scurrying things that are going on behind the scenes of the big smiley faces al around us every day (but at the same time, to understand the enjoyment you can get from those big smiley faces).

Which brings me to three last videos, from the band Negativland, a group that's also been influential on me in a few ways, in terms of collage and commentary, the last few years. Here, they take on some aspects of pop culture and advertising and language in ways I've also been trying to use, in a stage context (and I quote liberally from a quote they use in the last piece in EMG).

Enjoy. But don't necessarily believe.

COLLISIONWORKING VI: HARRY IN LOVE, Part 2

2008-08-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

With this post the guest-blogging run of Ian W. Hill comes to its conclusion. There are only three more days left to see the shows, so if you'd like to do so you should act fast. Hope to see you there!

On Harry in Love, part 2: A Big Man, Yelling (aka Influences)

Harry in Love is a comedy. A loud, broad, raucous comedy. The subtitle is A Manic Vaudeville and this is to be taken seriously. The people in it are nuts, the play itself is nuts. Wonderful.

The performance style is manic and stagy in the best way. The one-liners have to explode with a classic style of timing that goes back over a hundred years and isn't often seen so much anymore. It's a specific kind of humor, that traveled the country and eventually entered the movies and early TV, but started as something very much of vaudeville, of New York, of the comedians there, and very specifically the New York Jewish comedians there.

Now, here we are doing Harry with a cast of mostly Gentiles playing Jews and doing this stuff (except of course Ken Simon, who calls himself "God's Tummler" and who probably belongs in the Borscht Belt of several decades ago), but while the style began that way, there are plenty of fine Gentile examples of comedians who took on this style, including a couple of nice boys who started out in vaudeville and worked this schtick to the ends of their lives, in films and TV, and whose timing I find myself directly aping quite a bit in this show:

What's nice about that piece (from their film In Society though they also did it on their TV show), is that they are both almost straight men there as well for a collection of fine comedic second-bananas to do their bits off of, which is also true of this classic routine, done by many MANY comedians, but probably most famous from this version on the Abbott & Costello TV show:

The A&C connection with Harry became particularly clear when I realized there was no way I could yell the line, "I'm not ASKING him to get involved!" without directly copying Lou Costello's cadences on "I'm not ASKING you who is on second!"

Years ago, when doing this show for the first time, Michael Bruno, who was then playing Paul, mentioned looking at Gene Wilder's performance in The Producers for inspiration. I didn't mention this to Walter Brandes, who's now playing the part, as he's a very different Paul, and I'm not sure that reference would work for him.

At the same time, I'm noticing a lot more Zero Mostel in my own performance as Harry – I don't know if I didn't see it nine years ago because I couldn't see myself and Zero in the same category. Now, being a bit older (and, admittedly, a bit heavier), I find myself taking on a bit more Zero in the part.

This scene from The Producers especially gets the feel of what I'm trying to do as Harry down – sorry for the quality; it appears someone decided to videotape the film of a TV monitor, recording the sound off the speaker with the camera mic, and then post it to YouTube, but it's what there is available:

During rehearsals for this round of Harry, a name came up that I hadn't thought of before, but which now seemed extremely a propos: Jackie Gleason.

Maybe I hadn't thought of Gleason before because . . . well, to be frank, while I've always admired his technical skill, I've never at all been a fan of The Great One. He gets on my nerves, and I really, REALLY dislike Ralph Kramden and The Honeymooners

However, once he came up, I couldn't help but see the similarities, and once I could see them, I could use them.

This performance style continues down into theatre of the 60s with plays by Murray Schisgal and Bruce Jay Friedman and Jules Feiffer and even Neil Simon, but with a darker edge. Plays of a category that Richard once put Harry in, something like "big sweaty neurotic New York Jewish men yelling at other people." Unfortunately, the beautiful, fun broadness of this style seems to have vanished in the last couple of decades. It's my pleasure to bring it back for a few more times in Harry in Love, which, if it's even half as much fun to watch as to perform, must be quite a show out there in the house. Wish I could see it from there.

COLLISIONWORKING V: HARRY IN LOVE, Part 1

2008-08-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

A penultimate guest post from Ian W. Hill - last one tomorrow morning, so stay alert, citizen!

On Harry in Love, part 1: Foreman & Me

(Yesterday I said I was going to write about some more influences on Everything Must Go and then get to Harry in Love, but it's worked out differently)

I wouldn't be directing theatre today if it weren't for Richard Foreman. I maybe should say, "the work of Richard Foreman," but Richard himself is somewhat responsible personally.

The big love of my life for the longest time was Film, and all I ever wanted to do was to make movies. At the same time, I loved to act, especially on stage. For most of my teens and twenties, if you'd asked me what I really wanted to do with myself, I would have told you that I wanted to make movies and act in theatre.

I went to NYU Film School at Tisch School of the Arts, and loved it, but by the time I graduated, having made a 10-minute Junior-year film, "How Did You Manage To Steal a Car from a Rolling Train?", and an hour-long Senior film, Deep Night, which mixed black-and-white and color live action, animation of various kinds (cel, clay, pixilation), musical numbers, crazed stylistic shifts, fake documentary sections, a hand-cranked silent movie scene, metacommentary through intertitles, and basically everything that I ever wanted to do or see in movies, I was a little worn out and empty in regard to the form. I had made a film - not a great one, but a substantial one - in which I burned through most of the ideas I had about what I wanted to do with the medium, whether they belonged in the film or not. And now my big calling card was a strange, uneven hour-long film, which is a useless length for a movie anyway (as Dan O'Bannon has pointed out, having learned that lesson with John Carpenter when they made the original student film version of Dark Star - below 45 minutes, good, above 80 minutes, fine, anything in-between, there is no use for it in the world - festivals won't take it, no one's interested in watching it), and which most people didn't get and a bare few thought some kind of masterpiece (a phrase I've had applied to my work more than a few times, "some kind of masterpiece" – what is that supposed to mean?).

So, Theatre.

I had been acting on stage more and more at NYU - I wasn't in an actual acting/drama program, so my options were limited, but by Senior year I was on various stages more and more, and increasingly outside of NYU in the Off-Off-Broadway world.

At the premiere screening of Deep Night, stage director Christopher Carter Sanderson, who had directed me a few times by then, asked me how familiar I was with the work of Richard Foreman. When I said I knew the name well enough, but not the work, he said that he would someday like to direct me in Foreman's play Egyptology, and that I would be a perfect actor for Foreman's world.

As I had no idea what that meant, I tried to see the next Foreman play that was up in NYC. I didn't get in - it was sold out - but at the box office I bought the book of Richard's plays - Reverberation Machines - that contained the play Chris had mentioned. I fell in love with Richard's writing immediately, and with that play in particular. And I started thinking about it as a director, as a Theatre Director - not a position I'd much craved in past (though I'd directed plays by Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Thornton Wilder at boarding school, which I regarded as practice in the long run for directing actors on film).

Also, my best friend David LM Mcintyre was directing a lot of theatre, with me often as actor and/or dramaturg-bounceboard for him, and this - including attending some of his classes with Anne Bogart at Playwrights Horizons when I would be acting in pieces there - began to make me start thinking of directing for the stage as well. But I didn't do anything about it; I was content to sit back and act (and occasionally design, as my film school technical knowledge meant I would get tapped to do other things on shows I was acting in that needed tech people).

Eventually, I began to see Richard's shows, and this also opened my head to the possibility of directing theatre – as Joyce and Nabokov had done to me years earlier with prose, and Lynch, Godard, and Roeg had with film, I needed an example to show me that all these ideas I had in my head about what could be done in an art form weren't just crazy, that you could actually DO them and there WOULD be people who would want to share in them with you. You could create works about your personal visions/obsessions in these media, and while some people might call you self-indulgent, what the hell great was ever created in Art without an artist indulging themself?

Jump ahead a few years - I'm acting in Kirk Wood Bromley's Want's Unwished Work at NADA on Ludlow Street, and in some ways I think I've gone about as far with my acting, craftwise, in working for other people as I can. I've got a great part - actually written specifically for me by the playwright over 2 1/2 years of readings - that I'm having a wonderful time with, but I'm not using everything I want to as an actor. I'm having to hold back. I need new worlds to work in, and I'm going to have to create them myself, it would appear, if I'm going to act in them.

So I'm living in NADA during the extension of Want's, as I've lost my NYC apartment and have decamped to my Mom's place in Maine for the most part, and I've come back to do the show and help out the other shows going on there, including Edward Einhorn's production of Foreman's My Head Was a Sledgehammer.

Seeing Edward's production (done at a time when the majority of people would say, "I think Foreman's plays can only be done by Foreman" if you mentioned someone else doing one) and rereading Richard's collections gave me an idea, and I said to Aaron Beall of NADA one day, "I think NADA should do a festival of other directors doing Foreman's plays." He nodded thoughtfully and walked away.

Two days later he came back to me and said, "That idea? A festival of Foreman plays? Do it. Next June, it's yours. Get it together."

And so I did.

The reason Richard is directly responsible for me being where I am today is that he said "Yes" to the idea and encouraged and helped me a bit in getting this together (he'd say he didn't do anything, but just agreeing to it and giving some written advice to the directors was enough to give the festival a certain amount of cachet).
We did three years of the No Strings Attached festivals (named, appropriately on many levels, by Edward Einhorn) at NADA, doing somewhere around 35 plays by Richard, including several world or USA premieres. Richard saw a performance of each show. During year two, having seen me act in several of the shows, he mentioned that he had written a play called Harry in Love many years earlier, and he thought I'd be good for the part of Harry, which was quite flattering, and even more so when I saw the play – not that it's a flattering character (it ain't), but it was flattering as an actor to think a playwright would think you capable of this demanding role.

Interestingly, with Harry, though, I was back to doing the kind of theatre I had mostly walked away from when I started to direct, and it started me considering even more possibilities as a director – that I could alternate my personal, idiosyncratic pieces with other pieces that were just there to make people laugh, which I enjoy doing anyway. So now I knew I could do a wider range of plays, and I have ever since.

Richard is the man all of this comes back to then, for me. Why I do what I do, in so many ways. Even down to – as with some other people I know who started out as Foreman devotees – not bothering to see his work for the last several years, not out of disinterest, but because I have other work of my own to do, and have to get to it, and I've probably gotten most of what I can out of Richard by now (though I'm still thinking of directing the USA premiere of his play George Bataille's Bathrobe next year).

In the end, what I've learned from Richard is to be myself, and be true to myself, as an artist, whatever that may mean. Which is why I am doing, HAVE to do, Spell AND Everything Must Go AND Harry in Love all at the same time right now. Not to do so wouldn't be right, at least for me.

COLLISIONWORKING IV: SPELL

2008-08-20T05:14:00.000-07:00

Another entry from Ian W. Hill. Only three more performances of SPELL left, so order your tickets today!

On Spell: Creation and Influences

Spell started from some fragments in some notebooks and computer files. Someone was talking, and somehow I realized it was a woman named "Ann."

Ann said a few things here and there that I took down.

Someone was talking to Ann - I called him "Bill," just to give him a name at first, but I never figured that name would stick (and it didn't).

In one of the fragments, to my surprise, some witches appeared, and the word "spell" came to mind as a possible title for where this was goin g.

I finally put together one file of all the little fragments I had in different places that seemed to want to go together. It was a 4-page Word file called "SPELL" and this was what it said:

*****

(fragments to be figured out and ordered later)

(light bulb scene)

ANN
Say we had a light bulb here . . .

Light bulb on stand shoots up out of the center of the table. ANN points her finger at it like a gun, “pulls the trigger,” and it clicks on.

ANN
. . . and it’s on. I can’t just look at that and deal with it as just a light bulb

(detailed light bulb explanation to come)

Not just light bulbs. Something that complex. Tables. This table. Who built it, where, what hands, what conditions. How did he or she feel? Did they have a cold? Who did they give that cold to, later that day after they made their piece of this thing?
I m in a diner, I go to put the sugar in my coffee from one of those sugar pourers, you know, the, the diner . . ?
(Demonstrating the “diner kind” of sugar dispenser with a pouring gesture. BILL nods.)
And who made that, that there in my hand? Not just that, that there’s a factory somewhere of people, lots of people, making these. And a place in that factory, maybe a factory of its own somewhere where they just make those little metal flaps at the top of the lid that the sugar comes through. Just that little piece of metal, and how many people did it take to make that, and who are they, and what are their lives around making these little pieces of metal. I picture them. I follow them home. I watch their TV shows . . . dinner . . . evening with the kids . . . maybe friends over . . .
It’s paralyzing. Not being able to just ignore it. Accept it. If that’s . . . You get what I mean?

BILL
Does that make things difficult?

ANN
(bitter irony)
Well, it makes it difficult to acquire money. If you know what I mean. Earn my keep.

BILL
What do you want to keep?

*****

ANN
(looking off)
I hear voices . . .

BILL
Tell me about these voices.

ANN
No, I mean—

BILL
Don’t be afraid.

ANN
I’m not afraid, I just—

BILL
Stay a spell.

ANN
Stay what spell?

Spell occurs. Three witches. Silhouetted through back scrim wall.

WITCH 1
Stay.

WITCH 2
Sit.

WITCH 3
Remain.

*****

(floor becomes ceiling – fabric – on pulleys)

(noir detective)

(ANN gender switch, back and forth, unsure – ANDY, maybe?)

Sit a spell.

Spell this.

Spell it for me?

Are you good at spelling?

*****

ANN
I thought I was an artist. I was always told I was an artist, so, hey, I’m an artist, right? Then I got to thinking I was just a craftsman. Woman. Craftswoman? Person? Crafter. Crafty? Then I decided I was somewhere in between, and what kind of place is that to be? After all.

*****

(politeness/manners/chivalry part of monologue)

(being in the grey, between black and white, problems, advantages, disadvantages)

(things have moved on)

(technology. shifts.)

(bread and circuses)

(business scene with lots of machine sounds, images of money, bills, large. projected?)

(noir figures. violence. multiple beatings.)

*****

Well, anything can happen in this place.

Do you mind?

Mind?

Mind.

Me mind?

You mind.

I mind everything and nothing. All at the same time.

*****

(everything slides)

(drug, voices, insanity, dealing with it discussion) 

*****

Did you ever want to be normal?

Jesus, hell, no!
(beat)
Well, no, maybe that’s not true. For a moment, time to time, very brief. Only when I was in discomfort and wanted comfort. Thought “normal” would have given it to me. Ease. An easement, of a kind.

*****

Say this was—

(as a repeated opening to various scenes/thoughts)

(ANN and ANDY alternate imagining the lives of people in businesses/houses seen from a train – “Colonel F.G. Ward Pumping Station,” “Mr. Fox Tire Company,” “Sal’s Collision and Son,” “Action Box and Container;” a factory with cracked windows painted with green enamel; plains of burned-out, busted, and just plain left for dead vehicles; a back sunporch on a river, filled with stuff, over the windows and the screen door; two International Klein Blue doors stuck in the side of an old, shabby tin warehouse; a faded smiley face with “Always Happy To Serve You!” in italic on the yellowed sign of a building, no other signage visible.)

*****

And that was a start. To continue, I decided that Ann should preferably be played by Moira Stone, so I had a voice in my head to write for specifically.

Other things began appearing in the fragments. Bombs and terrorist references started showing=2 0up. Then I realized that Ann was being questioned in a little grey room somewhere. Was it a doctor or a military interrogator questioning her?

Maybe both?

Or maybe not, but she sees it as both.

Ann, as noted at the end of the notes above, now also had a male alter-ego, Andy. But wait, which one was the real one? Was one dreaming the other?

And maybe the interrogator was also one person split into two genders?

Possibilities continued to assert themselves.

As with most of my work for the last few years, this was becoming a piece about the United States of America, and was in some way a scream of pain about where things had gone and were going - badly - for this country that I love and feel so conflicted about. It was becoming an argument between my heart, which had begun to believe that violent revolution was the only way any positive change was going to happen here, and my head which is well aware that violent revolutions almost never work out in the long run. The argument in my ow n soul became the argument in this little chamber that is also the inside of Ann's head, with all the various voices and points of view trying to make themselves heard.

I rewatched some of my favorite movies - one of my favorite conceits, dramatically, is that the work is happening inside the head of the main character, and we are perceiving things as he/she interprets them emotionally/psychologically, not as they are "really" happening. So I watched Point Blank and Fight Club and Bad Timing and Detour and Myra Breckinridge and especially the David Lynch series of stories told inside the minds of people trying to run from the horrors of what they've done (or is being done to them) in the "real" world: Twin Peaks; Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and INLAND EMPIRE (and one could arguably include Blue Velvet and Eraserhead in this form as well, maybe).

As mentioned last entry, I also watched Ken Russell's The Devils, whic h involves a person being interrogated for a crime that they do not consider a crime by a governmental organization, and which, as typical with Russell, goes wonderfully off the rails into stylization, almost abstraction.

The Devils, which began life as a stage play by John Whiting as well as a novel by Aldous Huxley, reminded me of another stage work transformed into film that interprets and twists some real historical facts (both, oddly enough, in France) into a new statement: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (aka Marat/Sade) by Peter Weiss, directed by Peter Brook. Watching this film, I felt even more of a kinship with certain aspects of what I was going for, in terms of political debate in a cell, with madness lurking.

Here is the entire film of Marat/Sade (if you really want to watch it all online, best to click on the title link I just gave and then click on "watch in high quality" as each of the ten chapters comes up):

As this was happening, I was assembling a cast that seemed right for this play (and, luckily, Moira could do it). I wound up with a fine one to start - and still, as not all of them made it to the performances themselves, due to getting jobs they couldn't refuse - a good one to finish.

I started work with the cast with just fragments like the ones above, and some music, figuring out the scenes and structure as I went. The cast members, who I was now writing the play for and around, influenced it greatly in their own persons, attitudes, backgrounds and voices. I wrote lines of dialogue and used tones of voice I wouldn't otherwise, just because I could HEAR the voices of the actual cast talking in ways I wouldn't always have going inside my head.

For example, I had wanted, just for sonic purposes, the witches to speak non-English languages. I was tired, even as someone who speaks only English fluently and French brokenly, in the tyranny of the English language all around me and in my shows, so I cast actresses who could speak other languages. Somewhat by chance, these actresses I cast were Cuban, Palestinian, and Chinese-American. Now, in a play about patriotism, nationalism, violent revolution and/or freedom fighting (depending on how you look at it), this suddenly became Something That Had To Be Dealt With - and quotes from Castro, Che, Arafat, and Mao suddenly wound up being juggled into the mix. Which was hard, and it took me a while to figure out how to do this without upending the play into endless didactic political discussions - in fact, it took almost up to the last minute, but I'm happy with where it went.

It was weird how and where ideas would come . . . I was still trying to figure out how to write the scenes between The Man - a representation of various men from Ann's past - and the three Fragments (aspects of Ann in her past personae), without much luck when I frustratedly went out to get Berit and I some dinner one night, and as I was turning my car from Avenue S right onto Ocean Parkway, the entire way to write the first Man/Fragment scene appeared in my head just during the time I had the steering wheel turned. One of the best "Eureka!" moments I've ever had as a writer, though at the same time worrying, for it seemed like the solution was to write a scene that - to people who knew Berit and I - might sound as if it were, uncomfortably, a transcribed argument between the two of us shoved into the play. It isn't, and we don't have discussions quite like this one, but you might think it's about us if you just know us a bit.

I'm not sure how strong you could say Berit's influence on this play is. One friend, after seeing it, said, "So, you wrote a play about someone who's a combination of you and Berit going insane." I was a little put off by that, even though Berit somewhat agreed with the assessment. I think it may be a bit reductive of what the show is. Still, while I did write all of it (except for the quotes), I don't think certain aspects of it could have come out of me without B's influence in my life, especially the gender/feminist sections.

At the same time, B is worried about putting the valid feminist arguments in the mouth of a violent madwoman, but then she shrugs her shoulders and sa ys that there's no way to be 100% PC on this stuff, so why try . . .

Moira Stone as Ann, Fred Backus as General Doctor Jane, and Alyssa Simon as Doctor General Jane (or is it the other way around?)

I was writing and fixing up until days before opening, but wound up with a script I'm pretty damned proud of. There are bits I'll probably go back, look at and rethink after the run, but it's my first original 2-act play, and it works pretty much as I want it to.

More notes tomorrow on influences for Everything Must Go, and maybe I'll get to Harry in Love as well . . .

COLLISIONWORKING III: INSPIRATIONS

2008-08-18T13:12:00.001-07:00

More words - and images - and moving images - from Ian W. Hill.

On Connections and Inspirations: Spell and Everything Must Go

Something I didn’t mention in the Everything Must Go write-up, which I’ve been reminded of and encouraged to mention (especially so as to break up these massive blocks of text of ME talking about MY WORK, yeesh) was the influence of outside, older artworks in the creation of these pieces.

It’s rarely other theatre or playscripts that stick in my head and bounce around, causing some kind of inspiration in what I’m working on myself, but usually visual art and popular musics that do the trick. Sometimes film (as was the case here).

For example, in the midst of all the inspiration for EMG, in language, and dance, and images in my head of light on bodies moving, one picture and song kept coming back to me (and both wound up being used directly in the show itself), Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?:

And a song by Roxy Music that may have been somewhat inspired by Hamilton’s collage (Hamilton was a teacher of Brian Ferry at the University of Newcastle), “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”:

Somehow these captured the feel of the consumer culture/advertising world I was dealing with in the show.

For Spell, a more mysterious combination of image and song asserted itself. First, in a way that I cannot explain in any logical, conscious manner, another great 20th-Century collage filled my head in an unexplainable. inspirational way, John Heartfield's Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!:

"Hurrah, the Butter Is Finished!"

Goering: "Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat."

Bob Dylan hung over Spell in some strange spiritual way (his song, "High Water (for Charlie Patton)" from Love and Theft has been close to me since 9/11/01, and part of a direct line of thought that led to the play). For some reason, a song of his that isn't at all one of my favorites - it's nice, but not one I ever would have put at the top of my list of Dylan classics - became important to the show, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" - in particular, the version performed by The 13th Floor Elevators:

I had started Spell with some fragmentary texts that suggested a woman being interrogated by a figure that could be a doctor or a law-enforcement official. She appeared to have mental problems. Gradually, it became apparent she had done something monstrous and murderous. Then these Witches appeared - voices in her head, and they used numbers to communicate (a detail mostly dropped from the final show, but there are bits and pieces of it scattered around in there). And songs that used numbers in strange, incantatory ways suddenly became important to me - I had planned to quote from them in the show, but they mostly wound up being regulated to the pre-show mix, but something in all of them felt "right" for the show, and somehow inspired the tone of the show, like the traditional "Children Go Where I Send Thee" here performed by Johnny Cash:

"Papa Legba" by Talking Heads, performed by Pops Staples:

"Monkey Gone To Heaven" by Pixies:

"Highway 61 Revisited" by Dylan, performed by PJ Harvey:

and Love's "The Red Telephone":

This last song became not only important for its use of numbers, but also for the outchorus talking about madness, some of which is quoted from Marat/Sade (more on that in the next entry), which led neatly into the opening image of the show itself.

(another important inspirational song which didn't have the number conceit, but was connected to the show in other ways, was Patti Smith's version of "Hey Joe" where she turns it into the story of Patty Hearst - I'd include a video of that, but I found a neater video of the song done live in 1976 in a medley with "Horses," but without the Hearst conceit, so I'll just link to it - it's HERE)

Spell and Everything Must Go were created slowly over months, as I worked bits and pieces of them, and figured out what the shows were about as I went. I would hear music like some of the above, or other tracks, and know they belonged in one of the shows, but not be sure which one. The shows are extremely different, but have some strange overlaps that connect them. Berit said that EMG, which is subtitled (Invisible Republic #2) is about the Invisible Republic I keep returning to in my work (the America beneath the bright shiny surface where all the horrible scurrying things go on), and that Spell takes place inside the Invisible Republic, which seems right to me.

With the dark, nasty Spell and the deceptively cheerful and funny EMG going on together, I was reminded early on of the two films that Ken Russell made in 1971, the dark and nasty The Devils and the deceptively (?) cheerful and funny The Boy Friend, and I rewatched both films, and came away with a great deal more inspiration for both than I had anticipated.

They were both closer than I had figured to what I was trying to do in some way with my own shows, and, as I'd always had the feeling was true with Russell, I needed each show, the dark and the light, for proper balance. Here are both movies in their entirety - really. I was just looking for trailers or clips or something, but instead found that these two films (as yet unavailable on DVD) have been uploaded to YouTube. So here's Ken Russell's two 1971 features that directly influenced my two 2008 plays:

The Devils:

And here's The Boy Friend:

(and if you actually want to watch these for any length of time, I suggest clicking on the links in the titles above each video here to open the playlist directly in YouTube, where you can click on each chapter of the playlist to "watch in high quality" - an annoying new YouTube function which means embedded videos never look as good as when you see them on YouTube itself - and you HAVE to choose the "high quality" setting for each chapter as it comes up - NOTE: not all chapters of each film have a "high-quality" mode)

Once I had seen that there was some kind of connection between the two shows in my head, little bits of each show began oozing into the other -- the company where EMG takes place is mentioned in Spell, and the title of that show and the inclusion of The 13th Floor Elevators somehow fall through into EMG. Now they are a kind of matched pair, resembling each other barely, but echoing each other totally. At least for me.

Next entry: The original texts that started Spell, and more on the inspirations for that specific show.

COLLISIONWORKING II: EVERYTHING MUST GO

2008-08-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Apropos of the previous post, I had asked Ian to create a series of posts for this blog, describing each of the three shows that he has recently mounted at The Brick. Hopefully this will whet your appetite for seeing these shows! If so, act quickly - the close next weekend.

On Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2)

For the first of three entries, each on one of the three shows Gemini CollisionWorks currently has running at The Brick, I thought I’d go with the one at the top of my mind, as I have a performance of it in about seven hours.

It is, however, the hardest one to trace the lineage of . . . the other night, after our most recent performance, we had an audience that really enjoyed the show, but which then also came into the lobby afterwards wanting to talk with me about “What was that about?” and “Where did that come from?” And with this show, those questions aren’t so easy to answer. I did my best, and thinking about it then made it a little easier to deal with now.

It started (kind of) by deciding that I was going to create two original shows this year, at least. It might have been three, but I had first made this decision before the theme for the Summer festival at The Brick was announced, and when that turned out to be The Film Festival I knew it was the time to finally do my long-standing dream project, The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage rather than create an original work around the theme.

So, two original shows, both to go up in August. Spell was already bubbling at the top of my mind, not fully formed, but about as formed as I wanted it to be before going into rehearsal. As for the other one, the only thing I knew was that I wanted it to be built around a series of dances. I had a few dances planned out in my head for years to several songs, and started from the handful of those I thought could work in the context of a new play, which wound up being the dances I had dreamed to the songs “Slug” by Passengers (aka Brian Eno and U2), “Transylvanian Concubine” by Rasputina, and “Episode of Blonde” by Elvis Costello.

In the end, the latter two dances would wind up being very little like what I had pictured in my head for years (and the first almost identical) but that was the starting point.

My 2006 show That’s What We’re Here For (an american pageant) was a big, sprawling, ungainly piece that I’d like to bring back someday and fix and get completely right. It still had a lot of great things in it, especially the musical numbers, which were much liked. I got a lot of complements for them, my first baby-step into a land of dance and choreography that I’d been wanting to play in, but was too nervous about my own skills to really commit to. The praise I got for that show convinced me finally that, okay, time to do the full-out dance-theatre piece.

So I started with those dances that had been in my head for a while. Then I tried to imagine where all this could be taking place, and what came to mind was an office, and I could see the line up of desks where they could make the space interesting and also both facilitate some dance and at the same time interestingly restrict it. So what did this office produce?

Often, when creating a fake business like this, I just say they make “widgets” and leave it blank otherwise, but the more I thought about the space, it seemed to be a place where plans for selling things were schemed together. My love-hate relationship with the language of the advertising world began to come to the fore (as well as the more general officespeak that has become the province of the post-60s MBA-influenced corporate world). So it started to become “a play in dance and speech,” as I was thinking of it. I now saw mounds and mounds of jargon and more jargon and bad American speech broken up by explosions into musical numbers as releases from the tension of this horrible workplace.

Since I wanted to create this (and Spell) by going into rehearsal with a bare minimum of text and plans, and building the show around the actual voices and bodies of the performers who would be doing it, and go where that led me, I then had to start thinking about casting. I thought I’d have about 12-14 people in the show, and the only people I knew specifically that I had worked with before that I saw in this world and wanted to do the show were Gyda Arber and Dina Rose – both dancers, but of very different kinds – and Maggie Cino, with whom I’d done a well-received dance in TWWHF, and whose training is mostly in movement/acrobatics, which led to the rest of the casting in that I was now looking for dancers, or actors who could dance or at least move well, of a wide variety of types. I had two others on board for a while that I knew, but both of them had to drop out – and, not altogether smartly, I then took on the role of The Big Man – the boss of the agency – myself, which put more pressure on me during the process of this (and the other two shows) than I should have been handling.

A number of the people in the cast were new to me – actors I had been auditioning for a show I directed at Metropolitan Playhouse earlier this year - Merry Mount - or for Ambersons. Several people wound up coming from the company of Merry Mount, and another few from the auditions for Ambersons (in the case of David Arthur Bachrach, he wound up in both Ambersons and this).

After a lot of juggling around, losing some people, gaining others, we wound up with our cast of 11 – eight women and three men.

So, rehearsals. These at first consisted of me placing people around the room, looking at the pictures, and deciding what potential scenes these suggested. The cast and Berit would bounce ideas around as well, more movement would happen, and then I’d go home and write fragments of script, which I’d bring in and work at the next rehearsal. Then repeat this. Once there was the semblance of a structure, we started work on the dances.

The show went through a number of different titles before settling on the last, perfect one. For a while it was Dance To That Which One Is Created For, which is awful (and a quote from Glen or Glenda?), and for the longest time it was Invisible Republic, which I wasn’t happy with, until I realized it was a good and accurate subtitle. Everything Must Go just popped into my head one day, and was obviously right.

As I was writing, it was also apparent that, as with That’s What We’re Here For, the characters would all have stream-of-consciousness monologues about themselves, and between that, some of the Americana of the script, the quotes and use of verbal kitsch, and other connections, it became obvious that this show was #2 in a series beginning with TWWHF, which retroactively became subtitled (Invisible Republic #1). So now, between this and the NECROPOLIS plays, I have two continuing theatrical series I look to be going back to, both with their own specific rules and forms that must be kept to.

To my surprise, the dances came easy (at least easier than expected) and the writing was difficult (FAR more difficult than expected). I had some of the dances in my head, yes, but when confronted with working with REAL trained dancers on the pieces, I first tended to freeze up a bit. Even with all that, I was able to get across what I wanted, and was stunned as “Slug” and “Handsome Man” came to life in one evening in a tiny room at Champions Studios. Some of the numbers were very much choreographed fully by me, some were supervised by me – I would give a specific outline, and the dancers would fill in what I was looking for, giving me options that I could choose from, and some were very much taken over by the dancer/actors themselves when I just drew a blank on where to go (though I’d always make changes/corrections before they were set). Some had to be painfully hacked out bit by bit, but more often it was a fun process constantly full of the feeling of “Why don’t we try THIS?”

Songs and structure changed along the way. The first love song I’d picked for Becky Byers’ character turned out to be far too “passionate” to be workable in the show, and it took me forever to find a replacement song with the qualities I wanted. Gyda Arber, the musical-theatre expert of the company, also pointed out that as the number was (technically speaking) the “I Wish” number in the show, and as such, it was set too far into it, structurally. Moving it earlier in the piece suddenly solved a number of structural problems, and made the whole thing begin to take on the overall feel of a musical, albeit one with no songs, but dance numbers set to pop music of the last 75 years or so.

However, the “book” was proving problematic. I knew what had to happen in each scene, but the words just weren’t coming. I certainly have had writers’ block in the past, but not normally when writing this kind of material, where it usually just flows easily out of me. This one had to be hacked away at, slowly, or I had to sit around and wait for hours until some bright flash came to me and I began tearing through pages rapidly, trying to get as much done as long as I had the inspiration going. I wound up finishing the last pages of dialogue a mere four days before we opened. But it all worked. Thankfully.

I’m NEVER really happy with anything I do. I just can’t be, it’s me. All I see are the things I don’t like and can’t fix. However, EMG may still bring me more joy more consistently than anything else I’ve done – seeing these dances, that this is a play of MINE that has these beautiful pieces of music and movement coming together – both some serious tap hoofing and a lovely pointe solo, and everything in between – it just makes me pleased and amazed that it’s a show of mine. How the hell did THIS happen?

So, there it is, a play in dance and speeches about one day in the life of an advertising agency. But WHY and WHAT IS IT REALLY ABOUT?

Which are good questions, and not ones I can answer with any confidence. To me, the perfect show is one where those questions are raised, but they can’t be answered except by viewing the show itself, and then you can only get a non-verbal, internal answer that makes sense but can’t be put into words without being reductive.

If I had to try and say myself, I’d say it’s a cautionary tale about selling out, and the way it can happen by small degrees, without being aware that it’s even happening, until humanity (represented in the dances) is lost in a mound of jargon and rules and structures that have nothing to do with human beings, and everything to do with planned ideas of “how to run things efficiently.”

There are people who know my work well, though, who always seem to think that every one of my pieces is itself about Art and more specifically about Theatre and the creation of it, and when that idea was floated to me the other night about this piece, I couldn’t find any holes in that way of looking at it – it does seem to be a metaphor for creating theatre, at least at the level I’ve been doing it for years now – with The Big Man (played, after all, by me) as Director, pulling his subordinates (actors) together against all odds to create this project that Has To Happen Now, with a combination of motivational speaking and careful guidance, until the final project happens, and all are proud of it . . . and then it’s ephemeral and goes away, and there’s just the next tiring project to move on to tomorrow. I’ve even placed in the mouth of my character phrases that I use all the time in directing actors.

So in the end, maybe it’s a more revealing piece than I imagined, about whether all this work that goes into these theatre projects is, in the end, worth it – the kind of thinking that is just a bit on my mind these days. Certainly wasn’t intended that way, though.

I just wanted to make a pretty play with dance numbers that was fun and at the same time had some bittersweet things to say about where America had come, especially in terms of selling things to people that they probably don’t really need and maybe aren’t so good for them.

After the show the other night, the friend of a cast member asked me, “So, are you an experimental director who’s playing with mainstream forms here, or are you a more mainstream director who’s getting a little more experimental with this piece?” At first I thought I knew how to answer that question, but after a moment’s reflection it seemed a lot less clear to me.

The final moments of Everything Must Go wound up taking their inspiration from a quote of Richard Foreman’s that was related to me by director Edward Einhorn, who interned for Richard on The Universe - at the end of that Foreman play, James Urbaniak’s character had to make a decision about drinking a glass of milk or not. It is somewhat obvious by this point in the play that the glass of milk represents BAD THINGS – everything that keeps human beings trapped in their little boxes, desiring the pleasures of the body rather than larger spiritual goals. In rehearsal, Richard still wasn’t decided on the ending, and one day said to Edward, “Now if he doesn’t drink the milk, it’s a comedy – if he DOES drink the milk, it’s a tragedy.”

In Foreman’s play, Urbaniak drinks the milk. A tragedy.

As we created the ending of Everything Must Go, Berit and I flashed on the same thing with our own situation . . . “If she leaves the pen, it’s a comedy – if she TAKES the pen, it’s a tragedy.” And had to decide ourselves which way it went.

So where did our play wind up? You’ll have to see it to find out . . .

COLLISIONWORKING

2008-08-11T07:13:00.001-07:00

Greetings, Fair Reader! Last week, a trio of shows by Gemini CollisionWorks opened at The Brick, and today we present the first of a series of posts exploring their genesis and development. GCW has been responsible for many memorable shows at The Brick, most recently the Film Festival hit The Magnificent Ambersons, By Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage. Please enjoy this introductory note provided by the artists themselves...

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE FROM GEMINI COLLISIONWORKS

Gemini CollisionWorks is Ian W. Hill (arts) and Berit Johnson (crafts).

Gemini CollisionWorks has been around since 1997, at least as a name that IWH has been putting as a “production company” on all his theatre (and occasional other) artwork. The first play produced by GCW was Richard Foreman’s Egyptology (my head was a sledgehammer) as part of the No Strings Attached festival of plays by Foreman at NADA, which was also produced by IWH as GCW.

Berit became IWH’s partner in life and work in 2000, and GCW has been the two of them since 2001.

GCW became involved with The Brick vaguely in 2004 (IWH acted in a Summer Festival show), more strongly in 2005-2006, and became the tech direct ors of the space in 2007. Somewhat in return for their work in this position, GCW gets the month of August (at least for last year and this year) to do what they want, and what they want is to put up a lot of work. Last year, it was four plays on three programs, which was a bit much.

So, Gemini CollisionWorks is presenting “just” three shows in rep right now at The Brick. Of course, two of them this time were originals that were being created around the performers right up to the last minute, which were harder than almost any other shows GCW has produced.

This is somewhat foolhardy for a two-person company that does everything themselves, and drives us to the point of madness, but what the hell, we got it done and we’re pleased with the shows.

Well, Berit is pleased with the shows – Ian is too close to them to judge them in any real way and just has to keep asking Berit if any of them are any good or not . . .

IWH writes about the work as it happens at his blog, CollisionWorks, but has been asked for more info about the shows to promote them here on The Brick’s own blog.

So, in the next week or two, IWH will be looking at aspects of these three shows, how they were created, why they were created, and what they mean to us.

DAVID DIXON STRADDLES THE CINEMATHEATRICAL DIVIDE

2008-07-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer artist/filmmaker David Dixon showed his full-length film Unloosened and Root (above) at The Film Festival, accompanied by a live commentary that made for a lively and fascinating meditation on the differences between live and recorded performance. He’ll be repeating the experience on Saturday night (7/26), so we exchanged emails this week to discuss the project and encourage you, the reader, to come check it out (which you should do). Here goes…

JEFF: Your piece originally appeared at The Brick as part of "The Film Festival: A Theater Festival." Yet they were films. What is their relationship to theater/live performance?

DAVID: Unloosened and Root is a movie, yes, but at The Brick I am screening it with a live director's commentary, so there is a live performance element. I had the idea to do a live commentary about a year ago when I recorded a commentary with Ralph Lemon for the movie's DVD. Then your festival came along and seemed the perfect place to do the performance. My feeling is that the "extras" on DVD releases are becoming part of the art itself, not just adjacent supporting material. This piece is my attempt to emphasize the art of commentary. People have been telling me for years that they like my work best when I'm there to talk about it – so much for the Death of the Author – so here the talk becomes the work. Although the net effect of the performance, I'm hoping, will release the film from the question "What did he mean by that?" The performance gives "what he meant" upfront.

I'm recording the audio from these performances and will include the best one on the DVD when it is re-mastered, making a total of two commentaries, each with different information, offering an almost absurd amount of insights, anecdotes and explanations.

JEFF: How seriously do you take the boundary between theater and film? How do you feel each medium influences your concept of storytelling?

DAVID: I've done some theater but mostly as an actor, so the differences haven't influenced my storytelling as far as I can tell. I did stage a live one-man-show in 2001 titled Fake Flowers, Part IV (the old man live) and had it video taped. The day after the taping I watched it and was horrified by how weak the camera made the performance seem, but now that I've forgotten the feel of the room at the time I rather like the taped performance, an example of how powerful a live performance can be but how quickly, if it's recorded, the recording becomes the thing itself not the live performance.

Having started my art life as a (more-or-less) painter, the fleeting nature of live theater bothers me as a maker. The most joyous part of the art process for me is when the work is done and I can sit and look endlessly at the made thing. In fact, a repeated refrain in the Fake Flowers series is "Fake Flowers are Forever" – a real Dorian Gray notion – flowers that never die and are eternally in bloom, somehow outside our usual time and space but, of course, fake and static, not alive, a metaphor for painting and art.

I suppose if I were to direct a theater piece that I didn't act in I could get outside the work and watch it but I predict I would be just worried the whole time that something was going to go wrong and would not be able to relax and concentrate until after the performance was done. With a movie one can wantonly revel in its perfection, each little cut and transition staying in its place as one repeatedly watches trying to figure out what the whole means. When reading I'm constantly having to re-read sentences, could be part of the same tendency.

JEFF: What differences, if any, have you noted exhibiting film at a theater venue versus a traditional film venue?

DAVID: I started making moving images as a video artist; Unloosened and Root is my first full feature narrative film, so I'm used to showing in non-traditional film venues, by which I assume you mean a movie theater. Yet, this performance is meant to upset that assumption. During the live theater performance I encourage the audience to order the DVD from IndiePixFilms.com, the film's on online distributor, and watch the movie at home to have their private, subjective experience.

JEFF: Broadway has made a habit of appropriating Hollywood properties for musicals. If your film was to be adapted (or re-adapted) into a stage piece, what would you want to see done with it? What would you NOT want to see done with it? And what Hollywood stars would be appropriate for the casting?

DAVID: Considering that half the film is documentary and half is fiction it would be an interesting challenge to make a staged version and keep the reality/fiction distinction but I don't see this happening any time soon. As far as casting: I do act in this movie and it has always been my dream, whenever the opportunity presented itself, to have Don Knotts play me (I have a nervous energy that I think he could just land perfectly) but now that he's dead I'll have to go with my second choice, Angelina Jolie; hopefully she'll do as good a job as Cate Blanchett did with Dylan.

JEFF: What other projects are you working on right now?

DAVID: Just 10 days ago we finished the primary shooting for my next feature project tilted David Dixon is Dead, which, of course, I'm very excited about. It is relevant to the Brick performances in that I'm thinking of this movie as a sequel to Unloosened and Root. When it is finished I would like to show them as a double feature keeping the format of a live commentary over Unloosened and Root with David Dixon is Dead shown straight, with no commentary. Both films are about death rituals, art, and, to a degree, family – Unloosened and Root focusing on "the Mother" and David Dixon is Dead "the Father".

JEFF: Thank you very much, David! And audiences – check out the film this Saturday night, when it’ll be showing as part of a double feature with Depraved Indifference, an anthology of video work from monologist and performance artist Kenneth Shorr. Do it!

THE STUBBORN ILLUSION OF BONE ORCHARD

2008-07-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Over the past several days I’ve been conducting an online interview with members of Bone Orchard, the company that created the extended Film Festival show The Stubborn Illusion of Time, which has its last two performances at The Brick this upcoming Thursday and Friday. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it – it’s a fresh and exciting piece that uses the space in new and interesting ways, and it will haunt you after you see it.

JEFF: So my first question is essentially: how did the project get started? I know that Stubborn Illusion sort of rose from the ashes of a previous piece, and I'd love to know how that one came to be, and what brought you to the point of deciding to reinvent it.
ANNA JONES (director): We began a series of workshops in November with a large group of actors investigating the idea of The Immediate Present and how to put it on stage, taking New York, photography and the news as our three primary themes. We did a lot of exploring through many different exercises, improvs, installations, and presented a sketch of them at Nouriel Roubini's loft in Tribeca in December. David Dixon who is a good friend of Laura's, saw the piece there, and invited us to do something similar in his building, an old coffin factory, in Williamsburg (near Graham Avenue).

We were thrilled to be invited to rehearse and perform in such an amazing building, and on top that, for free... so really David and his building began us on a new path. As we explored it, we found we wanted to work in response to its atmosphere and its spaces - from the ramp that coffins used to be carried down to a waiting room area to stairs leading up and down to the loading dock.

We started investigating three new characters in relationship to that space who remain in this piece, The Stubborn Illusion of Time (Rudolf, an East German janitor hiding out there from the world; Francis, a 100 year old spirit whose parents owned the factory and who died in a coffin making accident(!) and Gregor, a Belarussian homeless man) and they co-existed with three characters brought over from our investigations into the news and photography (a photographer, loosely modeled on Diane Arbus who also remains in this piece; a soldier suffering from traumatic shock and a pedophile trying to discover his identity): so these characters became spirits who were dead and trying to move through their lives in order to understand who they were, what their lives were and how to get to a next stage of death... out of the limbo the coffin factory represented. So we took an audience through the building, happening upon the scenes as we got to them - they were installed in each nook and cranny of the building...

Anyway, this was all very exciting and when we finished, David told us about the Film/Theatre festival at The Brick (he curated the film branch) and encouraged us to apply with the film of the piece that he had directed the shoot of with two camera guys. So we decided to make a new piece of theatre continuing from the previous one that was made out of the ashes of that one (its film, its characters, its place) and I think you can really feel the silt of that in this piece. its become even more about being stuck in time - hence the title, the idea that past, present and future for these people is somehow indistinguishable. the film really adds to that and it was something that we wanted to explore formally and from the point of view of these characters.

JEFF: So what aspects of The Immediate Present did you need to shed on its journey to The Brick, and why?

ANNA: Well the first thing is that we lost two actors along the way for different reasons so two characters were left on the screen but not on the stage. The opening of the piece with Eddy's character, Rudolf, shedding the spirits of the two now departed spirits reflects our saying farewell to them. Of course, we also lost the traveling aspect of The Immediate Present.

JEFF: Right, of course. Reflecting that loss, what did you have to create anew in order to accommodate the new space?

ANNA: We had to create new situations and new explorations of the remaining relationships and situations in a proscenium space, also integrating the film from the last piece… we improvised, discussed, played and worked and came up with what you see now in The Stubborn Illusion of Time. It became even more about time – moments repeating, getting stuck in time, trying to move through time, moving back in time, etc.

JEFF: And how was all of this reflected in your collaborative process?

ANNA: We spent a lot of time early on discussing what the new piece would be. We had a mixture of formal ideas (wanting to play with how theatre could mimic film and wanting to mess with time) and relationship or character arc ideas (e.g. Gregor and Rudolf switching places at the end of the piece, based off the idea of Persephone going back to the living world from the Underworld for a period of time after a deal was struck!)… We improvised sections out of these conversations, tried out specific ideas different people would bring in (from text to visual) and then concentrated on threading them together into a whole piece. We had more time pressure working on this piece so we did less open playing and movement work and more specific trying out of ideas to take the material we already had into a new place.

JEFF: How has the show continued to evolve since you've been at The Brick? Has audience response and the very act of performing the show regularly wrought any additional changes?

BRIAN FARISH (Actor): The piece is deeply reflective of the personalities of the performers. I know this is true for me at least. One of the beautiful aspects of working in the form (however ambiguous) we have chosen is that is something doesn't make visceral sense to the performer, we can change it and the performer has a say in exactly what it becomes. We often would create an event and say, "No, this is entirely wrong. Just completely off." And then try exactly the opposite, sometimes finding an incredible insight into who the characters could be. Anna is very gentle (VERY) in giving direction, but gives strokes exactly where necessary. The life of the characters on stage is exactly what we want it to be, its not as if we have to conform in any way to a script. So the events, the conflict between characters often arise from the mad workings of the performers' singular brains.

So each time I perform I can ask, "Who was I, Brian, when I wanted to do this moment in the piece? Is that the same tonight? What do i now love about this part of the piece?" And the answer changes as I change as a man from night to night. And so Gregor the character changes and grows as I do. This is the case with all good performance, even in intricately scripted and heavily directed work, it is just dominant in our work rather than secondary to "getting all the moments in tonight." I ususally don't care how Gregor ends up looking.

ROWEENA MACKAY (Dramaturg): Some audience members have described the show as "creepy" and "nightmarish." I never really thought of it that way, but now I'm wondering if we've created a horror play?! I've never heard of that genre of theatre ... film, yes. Anna & I saw Bayona's The Orphanage a few months ago and were scared out of our seats ...perhaps it had an influence on the work?!

We've even come up with a new catchy sound bite for the piece:

THE STUBBORN ILLUSION OF TIME: A MULTIMEDIA GHOST STORY ABOUT THE LIVING

... not bad eh?

An audience member also told me that he was reminded of a poem by James Dickey, that our play was like a "woolly baby."

ANNA: Performing every other weekend has allowed us to make changes to strengthen the overall arc and the tech of the show. We've been really fortunate to be part of such a strong team, working on it and wanting to make it better. We got a lot of feedback early on about different narratives the audience were getting, often ones we didn't realize we put there or could be read there. As Brian says, the process of working was very collaborative and so the piece reflects all these different minds, so in a sense, it is inevitable that the audience will read different interpretations of the show depending on what they see (also because there is a lot going on onstage). We varied in our opinions as to how much we wanted to listen to them, but we were all keen to keep crafting the piece and so we really got the opportunity to do that partly because The Brick was open to us being in the space at times outside of the show, which was incredibly helpful to that process – especially the technical part of it. The length of the run because of the extension has really allowed us to become more technically proficient and speedier, particularly because the actors, especially Laura and Eddy, do so much of the technical stuff onstage. It is quite amazing to see!

And yes, like Ro, I hadn't thought about the show being so creepy. I find it quite funny! It's been interesting to hear people describe it that way and I like the idea that we have created a horror play!! The tone of the play is really influenced by the design. On seeing rehearsals, Sharath (our sound designer) came back with quite a dark, shifting surreal palette… light parts too, but that really was interesting because he was creating that in response to what he saw of what we'd devised. Similarly with the lights, Burke (lighting artist) keeps the stage infused with mystery by playing with different types of lights than you'd usually see on a theatre stage, by using the projections as light sources and by other means too such as the flash of the camera; and in general, going for a watery, quite spectral atmosphere. Laura and I had been playing with ideas about playing with practical lights, flashes of cameras, and different objects, like plastic and newspapers, since we started workshopping in November and it's great to have them thought through, made new and integrated into Burke's imaginative response to the piece.

On top of that, the way the performers live inside the world onstage I think makes it creepy too as they really inhabit this strange space that we've all made. That's partly a result of becoming an ensemble and getting to know these characters in our last piece and having the same costumes to step back into which gives them that skin again. They live inside it very deeply and so that in a sense is quite odd when I think we're often used to seeing a less 'living' mode of performance, more performative really. That varies from show to show but I like the way it can feel so dropped in that you almost feel like a voyeur in the audience rather than an audience member. I love what you wrote, Brian, about the piece changing with you each night. That's fascinating to watch.

The arc of the show is getting stronger as we do it more. I would like to have the chance to continue with the piece elsewhere and see it grow even more and Roweena and I have talked about wanting to keep working on the text and the stories that are up there and I'm sure everyone has ideas about that, including our audiences…

JEFF: Thank you all for your thoughts – it’s been wonderful to have you at The Brick. Readers, buy your tickets today!

HORRIBLE CHILD, THE MOVIE

2008-07-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

I had asked Lawrence Krauser, writer/director of the film Horrible Child (among other things), if he would consent to a blog interview in honor of tomorrow's encore screening of the film. Lawrence, devil that he is, responded in verse, with the results reproduced here. Let it whet your appetite for the film: Horrible Child will screen Wed 7/22 at 8pm.

For the record, it is a a TK Film from Best Ten Dollar Suit Pictures, designed and edited by Larissa Tokmakova, and starring Mike Daisey, T. Ryder Smith, and Paul Willis.

HORRIBLE CHILD, THE MOVIE
by Lawrence Krauser

Horrible went to a movie
And thought it was totally groovy.
Much better than Life
Whose persistent strife
Had lately been Horrible’s curse.
It was hard to imagine much worse.

But the movie, o joy, what delight!
It made all HC’s woe feel all right
Till the titles stopped rolling,
Then Its tears went cheek-strolling,
And HC sat there broken-hearting,
Awaiting the movie’s restarting.

But little did Horrible know
That It had just seen the last show.
With each minute that passed,
It became more aghast
And determined to see it again,
No matter how long till the when.

So It sat in Its seat with Its purpose,
Resourceful as the best of sherpas,
The floor a buffet
Of spilled can and may
With plenty for mouse, roach, and Child
To feast well with manners most mild.

The theatre’s custodial pod
Moved around It with diurnal plod,
Pre-Columbian greet,
Columbus’s fleet –
To Horrible their minds were that green,
Blind to what they’d never seen.

O blissful night spent undetested!
Un-evicted, not even molested!
Such a contrast to home,
It observed as the gloam
Became evening, then midnight, then morning,
And hope Its thoughts began adorning.

And then there was light, and then others -
Calm children, kind fathers, wise mothers
All here for the show -
HC felt in the know
But resisted the impulse to lecture,
Knowing fun is best had sans conjecture.

And then the good darkness descended
Attention to screen was extended
And HC was breathless
Good movies are deathless -
But what was this now that was playing?
Something else? How cruel, how betraying!

A preview it was, not sedition
But HC was dumb to tradition
From the theater it ran
Cursing God, hating Man,
Buying cameras and sets and a phone,
And making a film of its own,

True to its temper and tone.
Every night like a full moon it shone,
For an audience rapt, if alone,
In a theater of mind, home-grown.

LAURELS

2008-07-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

The Brick Theater Interpretive Dance Theater Improv Troupe interprets "Death at Film Forum" (or something).

Woah, wait, is the Film Festival over? That was fast. Oh wait, I was there. In fact, I hosted the closing night Film Festival Awards ceremony and had more to drink than I should have at the afterparty! It’s all starting to come back to me now…

I hosted it in the company of an adolescent girl named “Roberta,” who is the illegitimate daughter of one of The Brick’s biggest anonymous donors. It was awkward. We were accompanied on the piano by the Lawrence Krauser Orchestra, which made things go down more smoothly, and there were occasional performance breaks from The Brick Theater Interpretive Dance Theater Improv Troupe. The awards consisted of strips of film that we clipped live on stage right before presenting – combing the physical object of film with the temporal nature of theater, get it?

"Roberta"

Oh boy, I still have a headache…

Here are the award winners, in approximate order of presentation:

Best Re-Deconstruction of the American Dream
“Bring Me the Head of John Ford”

Most Unoriginal Show
Lisa Levy Industries for “You Bet Your Life – LIVE”

Best Seizure
Bone Orchard for “The Stubborn Illusion of Time”

Maggie Surovell accepts for Bone Orchard

Best Short Film? Ever.
Clay Chapman and Craig Macneill for “Late Bloomer”

Ian W. Hill Lifetime Achievement Award
Art Wallace, for his lifetime

Art Wallace, winner of the Ian W. Hill Lifetime Achievement Award

Best Performance by a Theater Critic
Michael Criscuolo for “Q&A: The Perception of Dawn”

Michael Criscuolo cannot be bothered to get off the phone with his girlfriend in order to accept his award.

Best Soundtrack
Joyce Miller for “Film Vs. Theater/Theatre”

The George Carlin Award for Finding Humor in Death
Old Kent Road Theater for “Death at Film Forum,” with a particular citation for Richard Lovejoy, whose magic on the stage wipes away the tears and makes us forget that George Carlin ever existed. At all. Makes it like George was never even here. On this earth.

Crappiest Indie Film Waiting to Happen
“Q&A: The Perception of Dawn”

Gyda Arber accepts on behalf of "Q&A," unaware of the big upset yet to come for her other show, "Suspicious Package"

Best Live Performance of Prerecorded Material
Stolen Chair for “Kill Me Like You Mean It”

Most Misunderstood
Gemini CollisionWorks for “The Magnificent Ambersons, by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage”

[NOTE: Gemini CollisionWorks also won this award last year for "Ian W. Hill's Hamlet"]

Best Alcoholic Newcomer
Rebecca Comtois for “Q&A: The Perception of Dawn”

Rebecca Comtois' memorable (except for her) acceptance speech

Best Handheld Zune Video Player Simultaneous Interactive Noir
Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group for “Conspicuous Parcel”

The Tim Russert Award for Terrible Sadness and Grief (and Excellence in the Communicable Arts)
Scott Eckert, from “Death at Film Forum,” for his portrayal of Scott, a journalist on the rise who won't let Tourette's Syndrome hold him back from breaking the 'Big Story.'

Best Performance by an Inanimate Object
Paperclip for “I, Object!” (Unable to attend the ceremonies due to its filming schedule for NBC’s “The Office,” Paperclip’s award was received in absentia by Ruler.)

Ruler (and friends) accept on behalf of Paperclip.

Most Ladders Used
American Story Theatre for “What I Held in My Hand” (with one ladder)

Least Likely to Be Performed on a Cruise Ship
“Code Alpha”

Best Itty-Bitty Little Costumes
“Tod & I”

The Boy from Tod & I (with friend) accepts with excruciating embarrassment

Best Jew
Ken Simon for “Q&A: The Perception of Dawn” and “Suspicious Package

Best Stage to Screen Adaptation
“Horrible Child”

Jeff schmoozes with pianist and "Horrible Child" writer/director Lawrence Krauser

Best Children's Theater Play
“Birthtaint”

The Golden Brick Award for Overall Film Festival Excellence
“The Free Opening Night Preview Cabaret and Party”

The socks Jeff wore to host with

The real star of the evening: concessions provided by Sweet Tooth of the Tiger

HUHLLAIREEUS

2008-06-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

My, aren't we just little blogging fiends today? Yes we are. Yes we are.

Ahem. So, another thing we wanted to draw to the attention of the masses: The ongoing success of Ten Directions' Bouffon Glass Menajoree, which originated at The Brick, um... goes on. At 45 Bleecker, to be precise. It's a wonderful piece of theater, and they're offering a SPECIAL DISCOUNT this weekend only! The details are unceremoniously pasted below:

2007 NY Innovative Theatre Award winner for Outstanding Production
Ten Directions, Paul Lucas Productions and the Green Room present:
Bouffon Glass Menajoree
A sacrilegious and unapologetic parody of an American Classic
Performance schedule: Fridays ONLY! June 27 - August 29 @ 10:30pm (No Show July 4)
@ the Green Room, 45 Bleecker (at Lafayette)
By Train: 6 to Bleecker St. Take B,D,F or V to Broadway / Lafayette. Take R or W to Prince St. stop and walk North and East to Bleecker and Lafayette.

Tickets $15 from Telecharge, (212) 239-6200 or www.telecharge.com
Discount code for 6/ 27: www.broadwayoffers.com Price: 2-4-1 Code: green241

Gentlemen callers beware!
Tennessee Williams’ classic tale is ripped wide open in this twisted and outrageous bouffon parody with a new ending determined by an audience member every night. Winner of the NY Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Production. "Total Theatrical sacrilege…Delicious!" -NYTheatre.com, “Must See! Hilarious!” -TimeOutNY "Genius" - CultureBot, "Hilarious Madness" - Show Showdown, "Extremely Funny" -NY Theatre Wire "Twisted Southern Goth! Absurdity at its best!” KAFI FM, MN www.bouffonglassmenajoree.com

Written in collaboration with the cast Lynn Berg, Audrey Crabtree, Aimee Leigh German and director Eric Davis

BABYLONED

2008-06-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

New online: a highlight reel from The Brick’s recent production of Babylon Babylon – lovingly filmed and edited by the nefarious Bryan Enk and the lugubrious Art Wallace. (Adjectives inserted arbitrarily.) Enjoy!

WE'VE BEEN BAD BLOGGERS

2008-06-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

How could we not be if we didn't post this glowing Village Voice review from Garrett Eisler last week? Or invite you to catch up on the latest nytheatre.com reviews of our shows? Or the other positive reviews of Suspicious Package?

But seriously, we've been so busy at The Brick, and with presenting and producing all the wonderful shows at The Film Festival: A Theater Festival, that we can hardly be blamed. (And if you dare to point out that we have a fully-functioning Mac in the box office on which we can theoretically blog between shows we'll punch you in the jaw.)

However, we are not so behind the curve that we can't tell you about our excitement regarding the Film Festival Extensions that we'll be running throughout July! The schedule (with show blurbs) is below. Read it and weep!

Birthtaint
Written by Andrew Gilchrist
Directed by Julie Rossman
Dawn sees promise in the grandiose fantasies of her large-faced friend Daniel, who dreams of one day building a theater on a cliff. She also knows scant time remains before she's lost him to the loose and cocksure girls of the Cabaret Magnifique. But will Dawn's confidence avail her? Or will she find herself in a struggle for which she's not yet prepared? In her dreams, she was special… In reality, it was always her Birthtaint...
70 minutes
Mon 6/30, 10pm
Tue 7/1, 10pm
Thu 7/10, 10pm

Death at Film Forum
Old Kent Road Theater
Written and Directed by Eric Bland
www.oldkentroadtheater.com
Four hip, overweening cinephiles compete in the cruelest of cruelties: an Indie Film-off with one auteur left standing. Naturally the story ends in murder.
105 minutes
Wed 7/2, 8pm
Sat 7/5, 8pm
Mon 7/7, 8pm

The Stubborn Illusion of Time
Bone Orchard
Created by the Company
www.boneorchard.org
Born out of improvisation, The Stubborn Illusion of Time tells the story of a living man who stumbles into an old casket factory and emerges, his head bursting with what he has seen: ghosts frozen in a photograph. Bone Orchard plays off the film of their previous theatre piece, The Immediate Present to explore the nature of reality, illusion and time itself.
75 minutes
Sun 7/6, 8pm
Fri 7/11, 10pm
Sat 7/12, 8pm
Fri 7/18, 8pm
Sat 7/19, 8pm
Thu 7/24, 8pm
Fri 7/25, 8pm

Suspicious Package
The Fifth Wall
Created by Gyda Arber
www.thefifthwall.org
In this Brooklyn Noir, you are the Detective, the Starlet, the Heiress, or the Producer in the mean streets of Williamsburg, where technology, reality, theater and film meet. Are you a victim of circumstance or the guilty party? Personal video players accompany you through the mystery and prompt you through your lines, as you star in the show.
Sat & Sun, 7/5 - 7/27
By appointment starting at 4pm

Tod & I
Piehole Productions
Created by Piehole
Puppets, shadows, and sounds remind us what it is to encounter the strangeness of death for the first time, and show us why the woods beyond the funeral home can be the perfect place to play hide and seek. Get away from the flowers and formaldehyde and come out into the dusk with Tod and I.
50 minutes
Wed 7/9, 8pm
Fri 7/11, 8pm

Stayed tuned for more stuff!

A Little Complex

2008-06-12T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm going to drop the ironic tone for a moment to say how freaking excited I am that Time Out asked us to provide a page of content for their Summer Arts issue, and, even more amazingly, that they still published it after seeing what we did! (Okay, there was still a little irony there). The image and concept will speak for themselves - click to look at a larger version of the scan:

You can also see the less readable version on Time Out's website HERE.

It's an exciting day for The Brick, for having such wonderful exposure in a major publication, and completely on our own terms - thank you, Time Out! It's also an exciting day for me, Jeff, because not only did this concept give me an excuse to start drawing again - something I've only been doing sporadically since my cartooning heyday in high school - but I actually get to see it in print, in any one of the eight dozen copies I've purchased from local newsstands!

Let me also point out that two more Film Festival shows have garnered wonderful reviews from Nytheatre.com:

DEATH AT FILM FORUM
Martin Denton/Nytheatre.com

SUSPICIOUS PACKAGE
Daniel Kelly/Nytheatre.com

Congratulations one and all!

The Review Revue, Part I

2008-06-09T08:46:00.001-07:00

We've gotten some nice notices for some Film Festival shows, and more are on the way. Since the following shows are closing this week, I want to make sure to draw your attention to what the press is saying about them so you can take advantage of their existence and not allow the fleeting, ephemeral nature of theater to bite you in the ass yet again:

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, by Orson Welles, a Reconstruction for the Stage
Nytheatre.com/Martin Denton

BRING ME THE HEAD OF JOHN FORD/CODE ALPHA
Nytheatre.com/Lucile Scott

This would appear to be an appropriate place to point out that The Film Festival: A Theater Festival has been named Nytheatre.com's Pick of the Week. Thank you once again, Nytheatre.com and all those who allow it to flourish!

While you were out...

2008-06-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

You missed these press posts and plugs and reviews for the festival. More to come next week, including Time Out New York and Backstage.

Also, your mother called.

www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/arts/25weekahead.html

www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/theater/11webtheaterlist.html

flavorpill.com/newyork/events/2008/5/30/the-film-festival-a-theater-festival?context=performing-arts

gothamist.com/2008/05/30/pencil_this_in_502.php

www.villagevoice.com/news/0822,friday-5-30,451845,2.html

www.offoffoff.com/film/2008/horrible_child.php

www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/film_rev2008.php?0=S&1=290

new-york.thedatevine.com/

matthewfreeman.blogspot.com/2008/06/film-festival-theater-festival.html

jamespeak.blogspot.com/2008/06/fifth-wall-in-association-with-brick.html

Bash

2008-05-31T09:37:00.001-07:00

Last night the literal walls of The Brick were metaphorically torn down with an awesome display of artistic revelry from the participants of THE FILM FESTIVAL. Yes, it was our Opening Night Cabaret and Like Party or Whatever, and if we were charging money we would have sold out like three times over. As it was we just crammed dozens of people into the space to watch 18 sweet preview performances and trailers by festival participants.

Of course, I personally spent most of my time in the lobby, at the bar, explaining to people that our fridge was being annoying and the beer wasn't as cold as it should be - but they still bought beer! Let that stand as an incisive parable for our times. The fact is, however, that though I heard much, I didn't actually get to physically, visually SEE most of the acts, meaning that I would like to call upon you, the Reader (preferably if you were actually, you know, present at the event) to fill in my perceptions with observations and precious memories of your own.

The rundown went approximately as follows:

1. Introduction: Robert Honeywell regaled the crowd with a bigoted defense of theatre in the face of encroaching technology, at the end of which he bled from the mouth.

2. Paranoid's Guide to History: A delightfully acerbic live lecture (with film) of the Seven Habits of Highly Paranoid People. (Watch the trailer.)

3. It's Gonna Be A Cold Night: More bleeding, this time in the name of zombie-like promotion of said show.

4. Unloosened and Root: Short film trailers by David Dixon, which since I could only hear I can only say so much about, but there was a dirty joke in there somewhere... (Watch the trailer.)

5. What I Took In My Hand: Remember Charles Lindbergh - the revered one who flew the Atlantic, as opposed to the Nazi tool who became President in The Plot Against America? Well here he was!

6. Kill Me Like You Mean It: An audio recording of Stolen Chair's absurdist noir, to be performed as a live radio drama...

7. Horrible Child: The trailer. Fine, I'll admit it, I was outside getting some air because it was hot. But you can see it on YouTube!

8. Code Alpha: Yes, I missed this one too. I'm a regrettable human being. But it's awesome! (Watch the trailer.)

9. Q&A: The Perception of Dawn: An improv scene in which the cast's attempts to answer audience questions about a fake film (part of which was shown) degenerated into a horrible brawl. No blood this time, though.

10. Birthtaint: In this film trailer a man with a freakishly oversized head seeks redemption in the company of a girl with horribly scars. Inspirational!

11. You Bet Your Life LIVE!: Lisa Levy demonstrated a round of the film trivia edition of her live game show, in which it was learned that you can't judge a movie by the type of person who buys tickets to it (or something like that).

12. Tod and I: A live puppet performance followed by a trailer. That little puppet boy breaks my heart, seriously.

13. Death at Film Forum: A film trailer featuring one of the contestants of a Project Runway-style film contest, in which a peeled orange got thrown at a concrete wall to scintillating effect. (Watch a different trailer with some of the same stuff in it.)

14. The Stubborn Illusion of Time: A freaky film/theatre hybrid in which what happens on the screen is reflected by what happens onstage, both of which featured the same ghostly actors doing ghostly things in a ghostly way. (Watch the trailer.)

15. Bring Me the Head of John Ford: A dizzying montage of classic western film clips played over a live actor's monologue, which reminded everyone why westerns are so awesome. (Watch the trailer.)

16. I, Object: Film trailer highly inspired by silent physical comedy, which featured a variation on the whole pulling-a-quarter-out-of-a-kid's-ear trick, which somehow manages never to get old for me.

17. Suspicious Package: Film trailer for an interactive iPod noir in which YOU can play the Detective, the Producer, the Heiress or the Showgirl. (Ooh, I wanna be the Showgirl!)

18. Glissando bin Laden and His Musichideen, with video by ( ): A live performance of room-shaking avant-garde music accompanied by live video, which brought the evening to its kick-ass conclusion.

And then we drank more beer. It was still warm. I'm so sorry.

So yeah, let me reiterate that a large amount of the filmed content on display can be seen on our YouTube channel, along with a whole of other Brick-centric flapdoodle.

Tonight will mark the premiere of The Brick-s 72-Hour Films, in which teams of filmmakers had 72 hours to, uh, make films. Which will now be screened! It's impossible to predict what we'll be seeing, which is what makes it a don't-miss event. Along with everything else in the Festival, of course.

Did You Know...

2008-05-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

... that The Brick hosts its own YouTube page? If so then, wow, you're a bigger nerd than we thought, because we haven't really mentioned it to anyone yet. Anyway, here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/bricktheater

At the moment, the page features trailers from a whole bunch of our Film Festival shows, and you should check them out so you can see how awesome they are order tickets now so you're not shut out when they sell to overflowing crowds!

Or, you could find out about the shows the old-fashioned way and come to our FREE PREVIEW CABARET AND OPENING NIGHT PARTY this Friday (5/30) starting at 8pm. You'll see these digital trailers as they're meant to be seen: live on stage! Take that, technology

The Wait Is Over

2008-05-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

The wide world of blogs formed by indie theater spaces in Brooklyn will never be the same. Welcome to B(RICK)LOG, the official social networking media entity of The Brick Theater, Inc. and its performance space, The Brick, in beautiful downtown Williamsburg. Here you will be treated to:

News about The Brick
Media involving events at The Brick
Commentary on what it's like to work at The Brick
Things that The Brick finds cool
Things about/around The Brick that don't fall into any of those categories
The Brick

Like all blogs, this one will evolve as we develop it and as we find out what YOU, The Reader, are most interested in. Which doesn't mean we'll stop pursuing what WE find interesting, but, you know, we'll throw you a bone every now and again.

Let the revels commence!