Helen Shaw

Everything is heightened! But also confusing? That’s because you’re at the scrappy Brooklyn venue the Brick, watching the ?! New Works Festival — also known as Interrobang.

Looked at one way, Interrobang is just another installment of the 4-year-old, roving Brooklyn fest of works-in-progress, now alighting at the Brick though Saturday. You go if you want to see some 30 artists making the avant-garde, 20 minutes at a time.

This particular Interrobang series, though, is also a peek into the future of the Brick itself.

Up in the booth, the festival’s presenter-curator-light op-tech director Theresa Buchheister is watching and taking notes. This will be her theater soon, and she needs to know how it works.

Back in 2002, when Michael Gardner and Robert Honeywell founded the Brick, off the Lorimer subway stop in Williamsburg, the experimental theater world was falling apart. In Manhattan, the Lower East Side theaters were being gobbled up by developers and vomited out as condos.

“At the time,” Gardner said, “Robert and I were seeing spaces like Theatorium, Surf Reality, Todo Con Nada all becoming less viable. But then we saw the Collapsible Hole space” — a bare-bones converted garage where the gonzo group Radiohole performed — “and it was so damn inspirational! We thought, ‘Even we can find a garage! Let’s make it up as we go!’ ”

The Brick may have once been a garage, but it also seems like it might have been a bricked-up gap between two buildings: it’s narrow, the bathroom is rudimentary, and when it rains, it sounds like the Rockettes are upstairs. (There is no upstairs.) You can only reach the booth via a ladder, which Buchheister — who exclusively wears caftans — mutters about under her breath.

For 17 years, though, the cozy Brick has been the rare New York site for experimental work, much of it whimsical: a sampling of the last year of programming turns up “Buffalo Bailey’s Ranch for Gay Horses, Troubled Teen Girls and Other” and the New York Clown Theater Festival. Such themed festivals — often oriented around video games, comics or, once, the baby Jesus — have been an early playground for artists like Annie Baker and Young Jean Lee; the off-Broadway darlings the Mad Ones first performed at the Brick; and the venue’s Trans Theatre Festival (another installment comes in August) has been a crucial platform for makers and performers like Becca Blackwell and Jess Barbagallo.

For Gardner, all that lightheartedness was getting heavy. He was shouldering a punishing load as artistic director and primary caretaker of a space that presented 40 to 50 weeks a year. “It hit me that the artist in me had been getting the raw end of the deal,” he said. “But I felt very conflicted. I didn’t want to close this beautiful thing that had built a community of its own.”

The Brick had a loving, stable community, but it had also lost a certain sense of danger.

Enter Buchheister, a longtime confidant, who was a leading figure in the deep fringe scene. Gardner needed out; she’d just had a revelation about her life’s purpose. So while he and Honeywell will stay on the board of directors, come Jan. 1, the management will change.

Buchheister — an actor, writer and director with her company, Title:Point — is a throwback to the New York of 20 years ago. Inspired by her early Manhattan days interning for Richard Foreman (she was in his dadaist lumberjack comedy, “The Gods Are Pounding My Head!,” in 2005), she has done what few in experimental theater have dared to do in the post-9/11 era. She’s gone big.

Title:Point was a member of Silent Barn, the late, lamented DIY compound in Bushwick that included a functioning barber shop. At Silent Barn, Buchheister presented evenings that have proved to be lasting series, including Interrobang.

Most visibly, she started the widely flung Exponential Festival in 2016, which stands toe to toe with the big January fests like the Public Theater’s Under the Radar. For those interested in the bleeding edge, Exponential was the source, according to David Herskovits of Target Margin, the Obie-winning theater now in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

“Theresa is the best outsider curator-maker we could hope for,” he said. “Theresa doesn’t look under the radar; she lives under the radar.”

After leaving the imploding Silent Barn, Title:Point started a miniature basement venue in Williamsburg called Vital Joint. It was hard to use for anything other than comedy, though.

“Last year, I got the last hangout with my Uncle David, who I’d been talking with in the seven months of his terminal cancer diagnosis,” Buchheister said, her voice breaking a little. “He was very specific about how I should be to myself. I was like —” and here she makes a noise that’s equal parts frustration, grief and anger.

“And then,” she said, “this January’s Exponential happened, and I thought, this is how I want to be. I want to be facilitating for artists, all the time. How can I make that possible?”

So, while she loves the Brick, “it’ll change a lot,” Buchheister said. First, a renovation that will be both physical (accessibility ramps, flexible seating, stairs to the booth) and curatorial. The theater programming will expand to include her distinctly transgressive sensibility, including even more stand-up, dance, and genderqueer and drag works, with specialized collaborator-curators helping in each area.

There are venues in New York that welcome the weird — the Tank, Dixon Place — but there are signs that a Buchheister with a permanent space will be a game changer. Given the exhilarating first nights of Interrobang, Buchheister could be the conduit for a fire hose of thrilling, thoughtful, bonkers work.

Go and get a taste before the festival is over. Gardner just put in some lovely new air conditioners. “I’m proudest of creating a community,” he said, but the A/C comes a close second.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/theater/brick-theater-interrobang-buchheister.html" id="0e163117-adaf-34aa-a9f2-46328c149b60">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — A wedding-dress-wearing alien beams onstage. A robot DJ visits from Planet Nubian. A man tries to sell us a baggie of sour cream. And a pop star strips off his Pierrot outfit — a backward suit jacket and a tulle ruff — and sings “Heeeey” over and over.

Still Aiming to Confound, the Scrappy Brick Turns a Page

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Helen Shaw

Articles written by the author

Still Aiming to Confound, the Scrappy Brick Turns a Page