“Our existence is an elaborate joke: a stroke of dumb luck, a glint in the universe’s eye. What better way to acknowledge that fact than through a psychedelic cabaret, guided by the blind prophet of the Underworld themself? Part musical and part otherworldly burlesque, Hyperfantasia served the wild, the wonderful, and everything in between.”
“Experimental company Object Collection has transformed The Brick into a madhouse of assorted knickknacks, like six different living rooms all happening at once.”
“At its core, Automatic Writing is a kind of ritual magic rendered on magnetic tape. Imbued with a sense of occult-like mysticism, it transforms sound and language into a surrealist psychological space.”
“Bailey Williams’s comedy is a sharp-toothed, sometimes bewildering satire of all-consuming workplace culture.”
Read Lauren Collins-Hughes full review on the New York Times.
“The show is going to be zippy, moving, and a lot of fun,” McEntee says. “Cam is such a beguiling presence, so audiences can expect a magnetic performance as he takes us on the road but also on a journey of self-discovery — a path that’s anything but straight, which is to say it’s going to be a gay ole time.”
“The Ben Shapiro Project, which Davidson co-directed with Paul Levine, smartly explores the maddening traps set by well-dressed trolls like Shapiro. Ignoring them doesn’t work; but mocking them, Davidson notes, isn’t really effective either.”
Read Joey Sims full reviews of The Ben Shapiro Project and Our bodies like dams on his Substack.
“Hillary Gao’s new play, would you set the table if I asked you to?, considers the cost of assimilation through a uniquely theatrical and culturally specific lens. Featuring an intergenerational cast of all Asian actors…as Hillary says, ‘This play is not setting out to solve assimilation or impart any broader insights into the Asian American experience.’”
Read Billy McEntee’s full interview with Hillary Gao on Greenpointers.
“The play challenges the idea of productivity culture and investigates the power of grief – alternating between “wild hilarity and quiet devastation.” Williams wrote Events at the height of the pandemic after the sudden loss of a friend.”
“David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in On Set With Theda Bara.”
Read Lauren Collins-Hughes Full Review in the New York Times.
by Joey Sims
photo credit Walter Wlodarczyk of Chris Ignacio
On Friday, a battle against nightmares. On Saturday, the struggle to accomplish one basic task. On Sunday, a dinosaur trying to jump-rope. And on Sunday, the crushing weight of depression.
By Patrick Scorese
Exemplar of this is Pioneers Go East Collective and their episodic performance series Lucky Star. The most recent installment was live-streamed as part of Out of an Abundance of Caution (OOAC), a weekly series of avant-garde live performances curated by Lauren Miller, Jessica Almasy, and the Brick Theater’s Theresa Buchheister.
By Sarah Yenesel
Former Notre Dame Regional High School student, Kate Zibluk, is co-curating and co-creating a performance based project called “Out of Caution: The Next Generation,” to be streamed online in conjunction with The Brick Theater in New York City.
Read the full article at semissourian.com
By Laura Collins-Hughs
The second short is at least as friendly as the first but far more aching. Told in flashback, it achieves something I had not seen in all the deluge of video that has come in these past 10 months. Largely through black-and-white rehearsal stills of Barbagallo, Davis and Kaminsky, shot at The Brick in Brooklyn, it captures what theater feels like — the everyday incantation of it, and how unreachably far away that seems now.
Read the full article at nytimes.com
By Dot Armstrong
Lucky Star: superstar works like a time capsule. The film holds past, future, and present in an intimate, luscious spacetime loop. Fact and fiction, inseparable, blur and tease. Cut to disco ball, still swinging. Slow down and watch the air sparkle. Time swirls here, queerly, as fabulous histories and alien futurities shimmy together in a pleasing confusion.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Buchheister was excited to link the writer-performer Jess Barbagallo and the musician Nathan Repasz. “Nathan did one of my favorite performances of 2020,” (Buchheister) said, “a percussion piece to Mitt Romney saying that hot dog is his favorite meat.”
Read the full article at nytimes.com
