The Brick Theater Presents DAINTY CADAVER, THE SISTER et al. This Season

In 2010, Time Out New York celebrated The Brick as Essential New York! "For the nerds, outcasts and mad experimenters of theater. That includes both creators and spectators."  From January to July of 2011, The Brick is making good on this claim by presenting a series of productions and festivals that display the range and boldness of its many artists - whether they be returning favorites or brand new faces!

Piper McKenzie's DAINTY CADAVER will run January 28-30. This show is an Exquisite Corpse-style playmaking project in which multiple playwrights collaborate on a single work without knowing what the hell the others are doing. Each writer reads the previous scene, writes a new scene, and passes it on to the next writer - who doesn't see any of what came earlier. Beautiful madness ensues.

For its inaugural edition, Piper McKenzie will present one-night-only performances of three new plays written in this unique collaborative style, with results ranging from inspired chaos to eerie synchronicity - all tied together by the unique voices of 18 hot playwrights, including:

Johnna Adams (The Angel Eaters Trilogy), Eric Bland (Emancipatory Politics: A Romantic Tragedy), Danny Bowes (Q&A), Maggie Cino (Ascending Bodily), James Comtois (The Little One), John DeVore (Tupperware Orgy), Cara Francis (The Soup Show), Matt Freeman (Brandywine Distillery Fire), Justin Maxwell (Your Lithopedion), Jeff Lewonczyk (Theater of the Arcade), Rich Lovejoy (A Brief History of Murder), Qui Nguyen (Alice in Slasherland), Carolyn Raship (Antarctica), Mac Rogers (Viral), August Schulenburg (The Lesser Seductions of History), Crystal Skillman (The Vigil or the Guided Cradle), Alexis Sottile (Small Dinner) and Art Wallace (The Plowman's Lunch)

The Machine presents THE SISTER February 16-26.  Some are allowed names. Some, only roles. In Colleen's family, she is The Sister. The role of The Sister is clear: Take abuse. Work the machine. And if you're really bad? You might have to wear the dog collar.

The Sister marks the first collaboration between emerging playwright Eric John Meyer (Not Winehouse) The Truck Project's 2010 Artist in Transit) and director Jess Chayes of The Assembly (Horse Trade Resident Theater Company 2009-2010; Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater). Find out more about them at their websites: www.ericjohnmeyer.com, www.jesschayes.com

THE IRANIAN THEATER FESTIVAL will be presented March 3-26.  Iran stands at the crossroad of some of the oldest civilizations in history. As heir to Persian, Assyrian, Sumetic, Arab and other cultures, Iranian theater and performance from ancient times through today has been a vibrant hybrid. Yet Iranian theater is underrepresented on American stages.

The Brick proposes to expand the boundaries of this cultural moment, and collaborate with Iranian theater artists in the U.S. and abroad, by hosting and producing The Iranian Theater Festival.

The festival will include new works, in Farsi and English, from legendary Iranian exile and Helman-Hammet Grant Award-winner Assurbanipal Babilla, a celebration of Reza Abdoh, Two Stories That End in Suicide by Piehole (inspired by Sadegh Hedayet's The Blind Owl), A preview excerpt from Brendan Regimbal & Samara Naeymi's Aviary, Leila Ghaznavi's Silken Veils, newly-commissioned contemporary works from Iranian-based playwrights and participants of the Fadjr InterNational Theatre Festival and a special celebration of the traditional Iranian New Year's holiday, Nowruz.  Visit www.bricktheater.com/iraniantheaterfestival for more.

The Mad Ones present NEW UNTITLED PREMIERE March 31-April 16. The Mad Ones, winners of 3 New York Innovative Theater Awards (including Outstanding Production of a Play) for Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, return to the Brick this April with their sophomore effort. Shrouded in mystery, the Mad Ones are busy in their laboratory cooking up another vibrantly detailed retro construction with live music. As Time Out New York says, "rest assured, you are safe in the hands of some confident new theatrical talents."

THE LITTLE CHAOS will run April 21-30.  "When I was twelve, I smashed a vase over my father's head and killed him. At sixteen, I was the leader of a gang. One day we killed a guy who was sitting on a bench with a girl. We pissed down on him from a hill. He came up and gave us a dressing down. So we went for him, and he just keeled over. You know, with brass knuckles. And then he was dead. Just kicked the bucket."

A trio of outsiders that refuses to join a syndicate gets involved in a series of murders -- at first out of a need for protection; then to cover its tracks and finally for money.

Based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1969 film Love is Colder than Death, Chaos is the story of "poor souls who didn't know what to do with themselves, who were simply set down, as they are, and who weren't given a chance" (as Fassbinder himself put it.) Inspired by spaghetti westerns and Hollywood gangster films (in the vein of Raoul Wash), the show depicts a Munich of chain-smokers, fat prostitutes and troubled youths. Directed by Stiven Luka

Depth Charge presents THE ABORTION PLAY May 12-21.
A fable celebrating bourgeois individualism, nihilism, and equality in which Hour Heroine narrowly avoids disaster and fulfills her social destiny as a petite-bourgeois thanks to the greatest weapon in the long struggle for a free and equal world: abortion.

From the creators of Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill! comes the newest work of Depth Charge.

THE BRICK'S ANNUAL SUMMER THEME FESTIVAL will take place June 2 - 25, 2011.  This year's theme is THE COMIC BOOK THEATER FESTIVAL.  The influence of comics on our culture continues to grow. From the pop fantasias of Hollywood blockbusters to the rawness and refinement of intimate memoirs - and everything in between - it's impossible to deny the wide appeal of comics' words and images. The theater, of course, is no less immune to its spell. Next summer, The Brick will invite one of history's newest art forms to meet one of its oldest - and, through collaborations between visual and dramatic artists, the form and content of comics will collide with the content and form of theater to create strange new hybrids across both mediums.
Visit www.bricktheater.com/comics for more. Applications now online!

GAME PLAY 2011: A Celebration of Video Game Performance Art will be presented July 7-31. Now in its 3rd year, the video game performance festival continues in what Seth Schiesel of The New York Times called "the most ambitious effort I know of to fuse the techniques and live presentation of theater with the themes, structures and technology of interactive electronic entertainment." See the mediums of stage and game collide in the most unexpected and surprising ways. Applications now online!

All shows will take place at The Brick (575 Metropolitan Avenue between Union and Lorimer, Brooklyn). Tickets may be purchased online at www.bricktheater.com or by calling 212-352-3101.

 

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