SMALL BUT MIGHTY

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.”"

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ANTIDEPRESSANT WATCH: ANTI-ANTIDEPRESSANTS

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!

"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

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

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

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!

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!