THE BUBBLE OF SOLACE To Perform at The Brick's Comic Book Theater Fest

A.J. has his dream job-running a comic-book shop that doubles as a shrine to all of his favorite obscure classics. It doesn't even matter that no one else shares his obsessions-when he closes the doors at night, his immersive relationship with his favorite titles makes the rest of the world disappear. But with his shop in jeopardy, he finds that the stories no longer behave as expected, and he's forced to reckon with his feelings about his equally odd mother, the pretty girl who runs the sex-toy shop next door, and a strange fan who possesses a secret about A.J.'s past.

The Bubble of Solace is a play with comics, a tale of the downfall of an idiosyncratic American nerd filled with larger-than-life projection sequences featuring original characters in multiple comics genres. This world-premiere production is written and directed by Jeff Lewonczyk, the mind behind some of Piper McKenzie's recent acclaimed offerings for grown-ups, including Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage ("Brilliant" - New York Times) and Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury ("They bring fantastic creatures to life" - Time Out New York), a New York Innovative Theater (NYIT) Award nominee for Outstanding Performance Art Production.

The show stars a cast of Piper McKenzie all-stars, including Fred Backus, Esther Crow, Gavin Starr Kendall, Roger Nasser and Melissa Roth, with artwork by Jason Robert Bell, Joe Boyle, Mark Hartman, Jeff Lewonczyk and Captain Zorikh. Patrice Miller is the assistant director, and the lighting designer is Morgan Ann Zipf.

The Bubble of Solace will perform at The Brick Theater (575 Metropolitan Avenue between Union and Lorimer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) as part of its first-ever annual Comic Book Theater Festival, a theater festival devoted to comic-book styles and themes. Tickets to all shows ($15) may be purchased online at www.bricktheater.com/comics or by calling 212-352-3101 or 212-868-4444. All performances are open for review. The performance dates are as follows:

Sat 6/25 @ 10:15pm
Sun 6/26, 4pm
Thu 6/30 @ 7pm
Fri 7/1 @ 8:45pm

Piper McKenzie (pipermckenzie.com) has been a fixture of the downtown and Brooklyn scenes since being founded by Hope Cartelli and Jeff Lewonczyk in 1998. Called "brazenly experimental, unapologetically populist, and surprisingly endearing" by Nytheatre.com, Piper McKenzie creates mock-epic movement theater and kinetic plays/musicals at the intersection of physicality, comedy and mythology (both pop-culture and historical). Recent shows include the holiday family comedy Bethlehem or Bust: How the Three Kings Teamed Up to Deliver the World's First Christmas Presents; Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage (returning to the stage in August as part of the New York International Fringe Festival); Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury; and the hit FringeNYC musical Willy Nilly: A Musical Exploitation of the Most Far-Out Cult Murders of the Psychedelic Era.

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