The Brick Theatre Announces Its First Mainstage Season
By: Jordan Westfall Sep. 22, 2008
For the first time in its six-year history of providing audacious, high-quality theatrical experience to New York's most cutting-edge audiences, Williamsburg's Brick Theater is packaging six major productions under the umbrella of a single Mainstage Season. The Brick is also offering a variety of Season Ticket plans to ensure subscribers a first shot at its most exciting offerings to date.
All works in the Mainstage Season will enjoy full performance runs, preceded by low-cost previews performances. In addition to the mainstage shows, Penny Dreadful, The Brick's ongoing monthly serial - now in its second season! -will air two performances per month of each new episode. The Brick will also host several workshop performances of new works, as part of its ongoing commitment to developing new theater in New York City (schedule to be announced).
Tickets will be: $10 for previews, $18 for regular performances, and now three Season Ticket plans:
$45: The Threefer Pass: Admission to any three prime-time Mainstage shows ($3 off the regular ticket price!) $60: The Fiver Pass: Admission to all five of the prime-time Mainstage shows ($6 off the full ticket price!) $115: The Penny Saver Pass: Admission to all five Mainstage shows, all episodes of Penny Dreadful, and all workshop performances. ($115 - 13 performances for $9 each!)
OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 22 The Brick Theater, Inc. presents
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
Written by Robert Honeywell, Directed by Moira Stone
Hello, white people. It's awful being under the thumb of the British. Ever since they slaughtered General Washington at the Battle of Brooklyn, handed our Southern plantations over to the slaves and restricted our settlements to the lands east of the Appalachians, we've had little to celebrate. But Lord Oxford feels your pain. With his faithful orphan sidekick Pattie O'Pattycake and a merry band of Colonial actors, he'll take your mind off the sorry state of the world through songs, skits and tableaux. Don't worry. Chin up! The Declaration of Independence will live again.
Robert Honeywell brings back many of his actor/collaborators from Every Play Ever Written ("Gleefully funny ... a must-see for anyone who has been onstage" - New York Times) and Greed: A Musical Love $tory ("The best new musical in town" - nytheatre.com), for this new Bouffon-inspired musical. Developed with Sue Morrison and featuring orchestrations by Matt Van Brink played live with an onstage band.
PREVIEW: Thu 10/23, 8pm - $10 PERFORMANCES: Fri 10/24 through Sat 11/22 Thu-Sat, 8pm - $18
Plus ELECTION NIGHT SPECIAL! Tue 11/4, 8pm
Followed by Watching the Returns at The Brick!
DECEMBER 5-20 (Limited Engagement!) The Brick Theater, Inc. and Piper McKenzie present
THE GRANDUNCLE QUADRILOGY: Tales from the Land of Ice
Written by Jeff Lewonczyk, Directed by Hope Cartelli
A frozen northern country. Mammoths and walruses. The legendary death of a saintly child. A twisted winter celebration. The Granduncle Quadrilogy is a holiday special for a made-up holiday. Listen to Granduncle, ancient storyteller and veteran of an endless war, as he and his fellow citizens mix folktales, fictional ethnology, and war stories to conjure a mordant yet moving portrait of an imaginary icebound world that curiously mirrors our own.
Piper McKenzie 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 IndieTheater.org, Piper is dedicated to exploring the middle ground between high and low culture, comedy and tragedy, history and the future. Notable recent productions include this past spring's hit comedy of war and sex Babylon Babylon, the sci-fi romance serial Lady Cryptozoologist, and the celebrated Bizarre Science Fantasy dance-theater series, whose most popular installment, Macbeth Without Words, was a standout of 2007's Pretentious Festival at The Brick. www.pipermckenzie.com
PREVIEW: Thu 12/4, 8pm - $10 PERFORMANCES: Fri 12/5 through Sat 12/20 Thu-Sat, 8pm - $18
JANUARY 17 - FEBRUARY 14 The Brick Theater, Inc. and Old Kent Road Theater present
THE PROTESTANTS
Written and Directed by Eric Bland
The Protestants follows the episodic structure of a central-Virginian church service to penetrate the lives of four weird brothers-one wears a mask, one is a puppet, one is a girl, and one grew a moustache. A southern gothic epic, evangelically energetic and of a tenderness that takes its cue from violence ("that baby is so cute I wanna bite its face off"), the piece dances from a wedding to a funeral, from loss to love, from poetic dream to the daily prose of pain. Go, little Protestants, go! You're living to die; you're dying to live.
The Old Kent Road Theater creates emotive, character-based day-dreams in forms unusual and themes primordial. A roving collective of actors and designers, they fill time and space with performances that honor idiosyncrasy, experiment, and energy and strive for off-balance seduction and the anguish and/or joy that proclaim life to be a livable thing. Previous productions include the hit Death at Film Forum (which appeared in this past summer's The Film Festival: A Theater Festival), Mother Mary Come To Me, and The Children of Truffaut (all at The Brick), and In Big Cities We Are All Sentimental at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
PREVIEWS: Fri 1/16 & Sat 1/17, 8pm - $10 PERFORMANCES: Thu 1/22 through Sat 2/14 Thu-Sat, 8pm - $18
MARCH 13 - APRIL 11 The Brick Theater, Inc. and Bone Orchard present
TIMES 365:24:7 a multimedia performance exploring the phenomenon of the news
Devised by Bone Orchard
Conceived and Directed by Anna Jones
Out of all the thousands of stories that exist in the world at any given second... What makes "The News"? And how? How is it captured? How is it transmitted - socially and technologically? And how do we absorb the bombardment of narratives that daily course through our lives, vanishing almost as soon as they appear...? Indeed, can we absorb them? Compressing the perpetual, roaring stream of human stories, Bone Orchard returns to The Brick with another immersive and technological experience, this time to explore the ultimately ungraspable phenomenon of the news.
Bone Orchard is dedicated to creating powerful and original theatre for our times. It seeks to make boundary-breaking work that incorporates film and photography, and to re-think the experience of theatre each time a new piece is created. Last season, the company developed work that began as The Immediate Present, taking its audiences on a haunting journey through an old coffin factory in Williamsburg. The piece and its themes were further developed into a powerful multimedia experience, The Stubborn Illusion of Time, which played at The Brick in The Film Festival: A Theater Festival and, due to audience demand, was extended into a longer run.
PREVIEWS: Fri 3/13 & Sat 3/14, 8pm - $10 PERFORMANCES: Thu 3/18 through Sat 4/11
Thu-Sat, 8pm - $18
APRIL 24 - MAY 23 The Brick Theater, Inc. presents
THE SPORTING LIFE
Written by Nick Jones and Rachel Shukert
Anarchists! Prussians! Prostitutes! A musical about the final days of the Everleigh Club, "The Greatest Brothel in the World," penned by rising stars of absurdist comedy Nick Jones (Jollyship the Whiz-Bang) and Rachel Shukert (Bloody Mary, Have You No Shame?).
Emerging from the unfathomable depravity which was turn of the century Chicago, the Everleigh Club was named for the Everleigh Sisters, a pair of community actresses from Omaha, who created an unparalleled circus of glamour and fantasy for men of means, and a chance for aspiring prostitutes to meet, sleep with, and marry these men. But the Everleighs were marked for destruction by those who envied and feared their commitment to coital excellence: including competing madame Vic Shaw (and her retarded son Clarence), whose Anarchist-Marxist alliance plotted to frame the Everleighs for sex-murder most foul! Hilarious, subversive, and thoroughly debauched. . . a fated collaboration between two of New York's most innovative (and troubling) young talents.
PREVIEWS: Fri 4/24 & Sat 4/25, 8pm - $10 PERFORMANCES: Thu 4/30 through Sat 5/23 Thu-Sat, 8pm - $18
Monthly from OCTOBER 2008 - MARCH 2009 The Brick Theater, Inc. and Third Lows Productions present
PENNY DREADFUL Season Two Created by Matt Gray and Bryan Enk
Penny Dreadful is a serialized horror suspense adventure mystery created Bryan Enk and Matt Gray, presented by Third Lows Productions in association with The Brick Theater, Inc. The year is 1909 and the discovery of a bloodless body has San Francisco abuzz. It will be up to a second-rate showman and an oddball detective of the supernatural to put together the clues - a mysterious hearing aid, a missing creature from the darkest corner of the earth, a secret society bent on world domination, a man who can control earthquakes, and the greatest magic trick ever performed. Audiences can catch up on the story by downloading the episodes or reading the detailed synopses at www.thirdlows.com/pennydreadful
Third Lows Productions is an independent film and theatre company founded in 1992 by Bryan Enk and based in New York City. Its current projects include Penny Dreadful and the annual horror anthology film series, The Sinister Six, featuring six short horror films by six directors.
PERFORMANCES:Episode 7: Sat 10/18 at 8pm, Sun 10/19 at 2pm, Episode 8: Sat 11/15 at 8pm, Sun 11/16 at 2pm, Episode 9: Sat 12/13 at 8pm, Sun 12/14 at 2pm, Episode 10: Sat 1/17 at 8pm, Sun 1/18 at 2pm, Episode 11: Sat 2/21 at 8pm, Sun 2/22 at 2pm, Episode 12: Sat 3/28 at 8pm, Sun 3/29 at 2pm, All Performances - $15
The Brick Theater is located at 575 Metropolitan Avenue (between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on the L & G subway lines (L: Lorimer stop; G: Metropolitan stop). For more detailed directions & further information, see www.bricktheater.com.
The Brick and its non-profit company, The Brick Theater, Inc. were founded in September of 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a storage space and a yoga center, this brick- walled garage was completely refurbished into a state-of-the-art theater complex, with a large sprung floor and professional lighting and sound package.
The Brick has been home to numerous critically acclaimed original productions, including three years of the New York Clown Theatre Festival, Richard Foreman's Harry in Love, The Film Festival: A Theater Festival (featuring Death at Film Forum and The Stubborn Illusion of Time), Babylon Babylon, Notes From Underground, Bitch Macbeth, The Debate Society's A Thought About Raya, Secrets History Remembers, The Pretentious Festival (including Every Play Ever Written and Macbeth Without Words), The Present Perfect, Bouffon Glass Menajoree, Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist/Cleansed, The Death of Griffin Hunter, the Havel Festival, Sexadelic Cemetery, Greed: A Musical Love $tory, The Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest, The $ellout Festival, Adventures of Caveman Robot, Total Faith in Cosmic Love, The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, The Moral Values Festival (featuring Dear Dubya, World Gone Wrong, My Year of Porn), Tupperware Orgy, Bizarre Science Fantasy, Who is Wilford Brimley? The Musical, Jenna is nuts, Habitat, In a Strange Room (based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), Fallout Follies, Assurbanipal Babilla's Assyrian Monkey Fantasy and stagings of Chekhov's Three Sisters, O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon, Maria Irene Fornes' Abingdon Square and the Brooklyn premiere of legendary Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz's The Pragmatists.
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