The Brick Theater Presents REDBEARD & DOMICELLA 6/4-27

In Redbeard & Domicella, two high school sweethearts deliver a bold retrospective of their young marriage in "he said, she said" fashion. The witty, irrepressible Redbeard works in a bicycle shop near Brighton Beach; the slightly-built, titanic-hearted Domicella splits her time between a desk at the District Attorney's Office, and the kitchen table where she writes. The play speaks (too soon?) about instances of loss as disparate as September 11th and Michael Jackson's death, as well as Domicella's own close scrape on the wild streets of New York.

Redbeard & Domicella is a true story. "If I were to write a book about us," the real Redbeard told the real Domicella, "I would call it, The Old Man and the Noise." And so the noise set out to write the story of the old man and the noise, using things they said and things they overheard. This is an ode between man and wife, a collage of quotes, iconic objects and memories. It is also a celebration of the bicycle, a symbol of survival in a city that suffers hard but laughs harder.

Starring Bodine Alexander as Domicella and Ilya Nikhamin as Redbeard

Written by Kasia Nikhamina
Directed by Michael Rau
Sound by Abe Dolinger

REDBEARD & DOMICELLA will run Saturday, June 5 at 6pm, Tuesday, June 8 at 7pm, Saturday, June 12 at 7pm, Sunday, June 13 at 4:30pm and Wednesday, June 16 at 9pm as part of the Too Soon Festival at The Brick (575 Metropolitan Avenue between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street, Brooklyn). Tickets ($18) may be purchased online at www.bricktheater.com or by calling 1-866-811-4111.

KASIA NIKHAMINA is the author of the creative prose blog, The Mayor's Hotel (TheMayorsHotel.com). Redbeard & Domicella is her first play. Her work has been featured at Hearth Gods, a reading series at Jimmy's No. 43 in the East Village. Her one-act, Two men be in the park, is in production as part of a series of plays about Central Park, directed by Darragh Martin (The Invisible Company). She received the Philolexian Prize for her novella, Quixota, from Columbia University, where she earned her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society in 2007. She attended Stuyvesant High School, where she directed Open Mics. She has published poems and stories in Rattapallax, The Brooklyn Review, The Columbia Review, The Birch, and Poetry in Performance.

BODINE ALEXANDER is an actor, freelance video editor and producer. She is a graduate of Barnard College, and has performed in New York at PS122 and HERE Arts Center, as well as in three feature films and many shorts. Very recently, she produced and edited The Ted Haggard Monologues, a dark comedy feature film.

ILYA NIKHAMIN is "Brooklyn's best bike guru," according to the Village Voice. Until recently he worked at Roy's Sheepshead Cycle. He is an actor, photographer, and general man of wit. He also sears a fierce chicken and brews a tomato soup that holds the winter at bay.

MICHAEL RAU is a New York based director and adapter, specializing in new plays, re-imagined classics, and opera. His work has been presented at PS 122, HERE Arts Center, Ars Nova and Dixon Place and his productions have toured to Germany, Greece, and Ecuador. He recently made his German language directing premiere at Theater Bielefeld, with Thomas Bradshaw's Was Ubrig Bleibt.

His New York credits include: Evanston: A Rare Comedy, (PS 122 and HERE Arts Center), The Ted Haggard Monologues (a New York Magazine Critic's Pick) at the Collective: Unconscious, Righteous Money (Ars Nova, and toured to the Voices of Change festival in Berlin), The Italian Songbook, a chamber opera with the NYU Steinhardt School of Music, and an adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, (developed in Papingo, Greece and presented at the Bushwick Starr). His show, the games we used to play, which he co-created with Max Goldblatt, took first place at Les Fêtes théâtrales du Suroît in 2005, and his production of Four Saints in Three Acts was selected as a noteworthy production of the 2008 Opera America Director/Designer Showcase. His production of The Great God Brown was selected for the 2011 Prague Quadrennial. He has directed readings of new plays for New York Theater Workshop, Primary Stages and the Dramatists Guild.

Michael Rau is a recipient of the Willard Fellowship, a 2006 Kennedy Center Directing Fellowship, a 2007 New Play Network Directing Fellowship and a 2008 TCG National Conference Grant. He has served as an assistant for John Turturro at Classic Stage Company, Les Waters at A.R.T., Anne Bogart at Glimmerglass Opera, and RoBert Woodruff at San Francisco Opera. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2005, with honors in American Studies and Theater and has recently completed his MFA in theater directing at Columbia University. He is currently an Artist in Residence at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center and is on the faculty of the Steinhardt School of Music at NYU.

HEARTH GODS is an informal company inspired by the reading series of the same name at Jimmy's No. 43 in the East Village. An early version of Redbeard & Domicella was read in workshop at Hearth Gods in the fall of 2009. Hearth Gods is run by Michael Yates Crowley and Michael Rau.

THE BRICK was founded in 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a yoga center, and various storage spaces, this brick-walled garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was completely refurbished as a state-of-the-art performance space. Since then, The Brick has launched, produced and presented hundreds of world-premiere stage works from New York emerging artists and theater-makers from around the globe. The theater company is a proud member of New York's burgeoning Indie Theater community and informal home to an ever-expanding family of artists and avid theatergoers. Winner of the New York Innovative Theater Awards Caffé Cino Fellowship Award 2009.

For more information, visit www.TheMayorsHotel.com and www.bricktheater.com.