The Brick Theater, Inc., Presents FOURTH ANNUAL GAME PLAY, 7/6-28

The Brick Theater, Inc. will present their fourth annual GAME PLAY festival. Performances run in repertory schedule from July 6 through July 28 at The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The schedule includes:

NY_HEARTS: LES / $55 (includes yoga class, lunch, and drinks)
Jill, a mixed-media and tattoo artist, speaks to Sal on the anniversary of their first date. Over an audio storytelling app, she recalls how they fell in love on NYC’s Lower East Side, revealing sexy moments and special spots. Relive what Jill saw, tasted, and felt as she reveals the truth about Sal’s past. NY_Hearts: LES shares Jill and Sal’s romance through stories geo-tagged to various neighborhood businesses on the mobile app Moveable Feast. Part scavenger hunt, part love story, this transmedia theatrical adventure from James Carter integrates local goods and services, including a yoga studio, bar, coffee shop, and public landmarks.

OF DICE AND MEN / $15 / 90 minutes
The world of six thirty-something Dungeons and Dragons players is thrown into disarray when one of them announces he has enlisted in the Marine Reserves, and will soon be deployed overseas. This blisteringly funny and deeply affecting play from Dysfunctional Theater Company examines why we game, what it means to grow up, and what true friendship looks like.

YOU BLEW IT! / $15 / 90 minutes
It’s 1975, and there are more game shows on the air than at any other time in history. As the studio audience enters the set of the low-rated, innuendo-laden cheese-fest You Blew It!, they expect little more than the chance to glimpse some D-list celebrities and maybe get called down to compete for a full suite of bean bag furniture. The last thing they imagine is that they will be the only thing protecting the human race from certain destruction.

TEXT-BASED-ADVENTURE / $15 / 60 minutes
Three performers stand at the ready, as audience members text-message actions, lines, and other commands to them—to which they immediately respond and enact, in real time, in real life. This interactive show from webuygold creates a world in which the line between the virtual and the real is blurred; in which the options are endless and the only accountability is to yourself; and there is only one question: What route do you choose? This is Text-Based-Adventure; please do not turn off your cell phones.

KWAIDAN / $15 / 60 minutes
EK Machinima Theater returns to the Brick to present their first collection of machinima pieces since Grand Theft Ovid, which The New York Times called “an impressive feat of engineering, coordination, and storytelling.” Each piece is a retelling of a Japanese ghost story from Lafcadio Hearn’s famed collection Kwaidan. Characters from World of Warcraft and Halo Reach, among other games, are projected on a large screen and manipulated by gamers (both onstage and on the internet) to act out these “stories and studies of strange things.”

MODAL KOMBAT / $15 / 75 minutes
The return of a Game Play favorite. Formed by guitarists David Hindman and Evan Drummond, this forward-thinking ensemble has developed technology that allows classical-electric guitars to control the characters in console video games. From Obama-Pong to Guitario Kart to the eponymous Modal Kombat, this modern-day dueling banjos is a hilarious, bloody musical fight to the finish.

Their short form shows, which will all be presented under a single bill, include:

LINK / 45 minutes
An exciting dance theater piece merging the practice of contact improv with the spirit of gameplay, Link enlists volunteer players to guide a company of characters through a quest full of puzzles, battles, and—of course—inventory-building to gain powerful geometric pieces and save some royalty. There's dungeons, there's maps, there's partnering, there's magic. All in 45 minutes. Inspired by the groundbreaking Legend of Zelda, this truly unique piece pays homage to a part-puzzle, part-combat, non-verbal, multi-directional universe using the part-puzzle, part-combat, non-verbal, multi-directional language of contact improv and physical theater.

THAT CUTE RADIOACTIVE COUPLE / 15 minutes
Ray was prepared for the apocalypse, but he wasn’t prepared to share old his fallout shelter with his new wife Jane. When nuclear war strikes, this snarky couple find themselves trapped in a bunker built for one. Inspired by post-apocalyptic games like Fallout, Wasteland, and Bioshock, Charles Battersby’s dark comedy has bittersweet fun with end of the world. After the show, the story continues in a video game where audiences can explore locations seen on stage, and learn what happened after the events of the play in an interactive adventure.

THE SEQUEL / 15 minutes
Apocalypse Rising: Armies Of The Undead is advertised as the most realistic depiction of zombie warfare ever to hit videogame consoles, and teenage siblings Pete and Lisa can’t wait to play it. But as their avatars, Crazy George and Svetlana, begin their quest to fight the zombie hordes, things start to get a little bit too real. Will Pete and Lisa be brought together by their strange new game or will the weirdly realistic battle drive them apart?

For more information and tickets, visit their website here.

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