Comments (0) Best reason for theater haters to buy season tickets - 2006

Brick Theater

Once an auto shop, the Brick Theater pursues its thespian dream with blue-collar chutzpah. The facade is a matte-black garage door; the lobby is a street corner; the owners are not afraid to get their hands dirty. They program festivals, peddle tickets, hand out pieces of foam when the seats are sold out, and serve up cans of beer from a picnic cooler during intermission. The programming at this beloved black-box theater is similarly egalitarian and unpretentious. Adventures of Caveman Robot, a multimedia production based on Jason Bell and Shoshanna Weinberger's indie comic about a Jungian warrior–teddy bear, gets the same attention and support as The Pragmatists, a challenging work by early-20th-century theatrical theorist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. A recent season included The Nigerian Spam Scam Scam, a comedic staging of Dean Cameron's online hoax, which followed a nine-month correspondence between a "Nigerian widow" and Cameron himself, posing as a slightly addled, sexually confused Florida millionaire; The Kung-Fu Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's classic comedy souped up with live-action kung-fu sequences, late-'80s-MTV stage lighting, and an occasional glam-metal score; and Die Hard: The Puppet Musical, an elaborate production brought to life by a slightly psychotic bald man with a song in his heart and a cast of sock puppets that spray blood and expose cleavage. While the premises of some Brick programs sound like jokes generated from a good bong hit, the shows are impeccably executed, frequently ingenious, and usually hilarious. And given that the price of admission is rarely more than a movie ticket, there's no good excuse to miss another season.