The Brick Theater, Inc.
presents

Gemini CollisionWorks 2008




Three Works in Repertory:
Richard Foreman's Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville
Spell
Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2)

July 31 through August 24
See below for details.

Read the feature article in The Brooklyn Paper!





Harry in Love: 
A Manic Vaudeville

The return of the 1966 comedy by Richard Foreman  

Before he became known as the writer-director-designer of his groundbreaking and legendary abstract stage spectacles, Richard Foreman was seen as a promising playwright in a more, shall we say, traditional mode, writing “normal” plays with standard structures, characters, settings, and events, unlike those that he was to become known for from 1968 onward.   In 1966, he wrote Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville, which came very close to having a Broadway run with Vincent Gardenia in the eponymous role (though Foreman had hoped for Alec Guinness in the role – that of a large, manic, Bronx-born, Jewish New Yorker, which is a hint to the creative conflicts that kept the show from being staged at that time).  This “boulevard comedy” as Foreman calls it (he also compares it, accurately, to the 1960s plays of Murray Schisgal) remained unseen for over 30 years, until Foreman gave it to director/actor Ian W. Hill  in 1999, for the third of the No Strings Attached festivals of Foreman’s plays that Hill produced at the Nada spaces on Ludlow Street, saying that the part of Harry was a good one for Hill to play and he should do the show – which he did, to appreciative audiences and excellent reviews, for a very short run, the only run this obscure work has ever had.   Now, Harry in Love is back, with half of the cast of the ’99 production, for a slightly-longer run in a slightly-larger production.  

The plot?  Harry Rosenfeld is a big, neurotic, unnerved and unnerving man who believes his wife, Hilda, is planning to cheat on him (and he seems to be right). His response: drug her coffee and keep her knocked out until her paramour goes away. The plan works about as well as should be expected and, over several days, a number of people – the paramour, a doctor, Hilda’s brother, and an “innocent” bystander - are sucked into Harry's manic, snowballing energy as it becomes an eventual avalanche of (hysterically funny) psychosis.   While we’re probably lucky and much better-off to have the Foreman we’ve had, it’s fascinating to see this (extremely funny) play which very well might have meant a very different career for Foreman if it had made in to Broadway. It's not what you probably know from him, but it still sounds like the Richard Foreman anyone would know from his later work – almost any line from this play, out of context, would not sound at all out of place in one of his later, abstract plays. Really.  

The cast of this production is Walter Brandes*, Josephine Cashman*, Ian W. Hill, Tom Reid, Ken Simon*, and Darius Stone*.
Written by Richard Foreman
Directed by Ian W. Hill

July 31, August 2, 8, 14, 17, and 22 at 7.30 pm; August 10, 16, 24 at 4.00 pm
at The Brick
All tickets $15.00
Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com 
(212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)

Spell

An American woman who considers herself a patriot and has committed a horrible terrorist act as an act of protest and, she hopes, revolution against the government, which she believes no longer represents the law, people, and Constitution of the USA. As she is interrogated, her mind reinterprets her surroundings into a chorus of voices—witches, revolutionaries, doctors, generals, bossmen, old boyfriends, fragments of herself—arguing over the validity of her violent actions while at the same time trying to deny that the monstrous act has ever occurred, or that she could be capable of such a thing. A meditation on—among other things—whether violence can ever be truly justified, and if so, what limits are there and where does it end?

Starring Olivia Baseman, Fred Backus, Gavin Starr Kendall, Samantha Mason, Iracel Rivero, Alyssa Simon*, Moira Stone*, Liz Toft, Jeanie Tse, Rasmus Max Wirth and Rasha Zamamiri
Written and Direted by Ian W. Hill

Aug 1, 3, 7, 10, 20, 24 at 8pm; August 9, 23 at 4pm
at The Brick
All tickets $15.00
Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com 
(212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)





Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2)

A play in dance and fragmented businesspeak. A day in the life of an advertising agency as they work on a major new account, interspersed with backbiting, backstabbing, coffee breaks, office romances, motivational lectures, afternoon slumps, and a Mephistophelian boss who has his eye on a beautiful female Faust of an intern. A constantly shifting dance-theatre piece in which anything that matters must have a price, anyone is corruptible, and everything must go.

Starring Gyda Arber, David Arthur Bachrach, Becky Byers, Patrick Cann, Maggie Cino, Tory Dube, Sarah Engelke, Ian W. Hill, Dina Rose, Ariana Seigel, Julia C. Sun

Written and Directed by Ian W. Hill

Aug 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, 23 at 8pm; Aug 17 at 4pm
at The Brick
All tickets $15.00
Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com 
(212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)  

Director Ian W. Hill has created 56 stage productions since 1997 with his company Gemini CollisionWorks, including works by 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 almost 20 years, and he is currently the technical director of The Brick.   

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

* Appears Courtesy of Actors Equity Association