The Brick Theater Hosts A Presentation Of The Collisionworks 8/7-8/30

The Brick Theater, Inc. presents The Collisionworks- an annual presentation of theatre from Gemini CollisionWorks August 7 to 30, 2009. designed and directed by Ian W. Hill / assisted by Berit Johnson

For 11 months of the year, Ian W. Hill and Berit Johnson are the technical directors of The Brick, one of Brooklyn's (and New York City's) most vibrant incubators of innovative theatrical arts. But every August, when other theatre festivals run amok with whatever crazy-sounding stage enterprise they think will bring audiences into small, inefficiently-air-conditioned rooms, The Brick hands the keys to their moderately-sized, moderately well-air-conditioned room over to Hill and Johnson and they become the creative entity known as Gemini CollisionWorks, producing multiple works in rep that have run the gamut from Hill's NECROPOLIS series of dramatic collages (including the acclaimed World Gone Wrong) and his original plays Spell and Everything Must Go to the rare Richard Foreman boulevard farce Harry in Love and the bizarre Marc Spitz comedy of addiction The Hobo Got Too High.

This year, Hill, Johnson, and GCW are pleased to present four new productions, running the gamut from a violent, bloody comedy of manners to a dark documentary of institutional lies and murder in Soviet Russia to an improvisation-based combination of séance and video art to a surreal look inside the head of an elderly, dying writer on the slide toward death. These are:

A Little Piece of the Sun, by Daniel McKleinfeld, a documentary for the stage, examining the stories of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo and the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor through a collage of found texts that reveal these two stories of mass death to be one story of institutional corruption in a theatrical autopsy where Art is the only scalpel sharp enough to cut through the mangled flesh of the lies to reveal the glowing fragment of truth underneath it all.

Blood on the Cat's Neck, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, (sometimes subtitled Marilyn Monroe vs. The Vampires) is a 1971 play by the iconoclastic playwright/filmmaker in which a beautiful, blonde, vampiric Amazon of a space alien is dropped into a bourgeois cocktail party of an unlikely group of guests to attempt to learn about human beings, without much success, until her plundering of the guests' minds becomes a more direct and physical acquisition of their life essences.

George Bataille's Bathrobe, an abstract play by Richard Foreman that here receives its first fully-staged English-Language production, is interpreted by Hill as the story of an elderly, controversial writer in a prison (perhaps real, perhaps metaphoric) on his dying day, as he is confronted with his memories and regrets made flesh, both tormenting him and attempting to help him pass out of this life with peace and acceptance.

Sacrificial Offerings, by David Finkelstein and Ian W. Hill, began as an improvisational performance duet created by the two authors as the basis for a multilayered video artwork (known as Skewered Remarks) by Mr. Finkelstein for his Lake Ivan Performance Group. Mr. Hill has taken the improvised text and transformed it into the story of a drawing room séance among the upper class of many decades past, with a version of Mr. Finkelstein's video presented mid-performance as the appearance of the "spirits" into the room.

For more information on these four productions, and exact dates and times for all performances, please see the individual press releases you should also have received or contact Gemini CollisionWorks at the number or email above.

Director/designer Ian W. Hill has created 59 stage productions since 1997 as Gemini CollisionWorks, including works by Vaclav Havel, Richard Foreman, T.S. Eliot, Clive Barker, Mac Wellman, Ronald Tavel, Jeff Goode, Mark Spitz, and Edward D. Wood, Jr., as well as several original plays. As a designer (light, sound, projections, sets) and technical/artistic consultant he has worked with many other stage artists and theatres for the past 20 years. Berit Johnson has been the co-director of Gemini CollisionWorks since 2001, and has stage managed, created props and puppets, and designed many other elements for many NYC theatre companies since 1997.

at The Brick
575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
½ a block from the Lorimer stop of the L Train / Metropolitan-Grand stop of the G Train -- www.bricktheater.com
All tickets: $15.00 (except Sacrificial Offerings: tickets $10.00)
(or any two shows for $25.00, three shows for $35.00, or all for for $40.00)
Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com (212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)