Boom Town on the East River

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster.

—Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

Harlem in the 1920s, Black Mountain in the 1950s and Greenwich Village in the 1960s—arguably three of the most influential artistic and cultural hotspots of "the American century." Could it be that the spirits of these movements are all alive and thriving—in Brooklyn, N.Y.? There's certainly a similar confluence of artists, geography and audience. "It's New York's Left Bank—artists rub up against each other," says Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience , the classically oriented not-for-profit company that is relocating to its first permanent home right next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, (BAM), in a yet-to-be-built facility co-designed by two of the world's eminent architects, Frank Gehry and Hugh Hardy.

According to the Brooklyn Arts Council directory, there are more than 115 multi-disciplinary arts groups based within the borough, and listings for more than 80 theatre troupes. "Face it. Brooklyn's hot," says Virginia Louloudes, executive director of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, (A.R.T./NY), which offers subsidized office space to Brooklyn theatre companies. "Theatre has always been here because of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and if the scene is not completely formed, it's been emerging for a while."

Yes, dozens of theatre companies, galleries, trendy restaurants and clubs have opened up in the last 10 or 20 years. But they're mostly small, low-budget alternative outfits. On its own, Brooklyn's 2.5 million people would rank it the third most populous city in the United States behind Los Angeles and Chicago; its population is more than Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and Denver combined. Yet those four cities host more than 20 theatres that are members of Theatre Communications Group. Brooklyn has two. So is the borough's cultural scene booming or hopelessly behind?

Context, of course, is everything, as one of Brooklyn's best novelists, Jonathan Lethem, writes at the opening of Motherless Brooklyn. Brooklyn's context is necessarily shaped by America's largest "theatre scene," which lies just across the East River in Manhattan, home to Broadway commercial productions and mainstream resident theatres like Roundabout Theatre Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons and the Public Theater, to name just a few. That leaves Brooklyn theatre artists to co-opt the margins, producing work for the most intrepid audiences, as well as for the dozens of diverse local communities.

That context seems to have forged a distinguishable aesthetic among the newest theatres in Brooklyn. I think of it as a kind of gothic postmodern. The signs of "late-stage capitalism" abound in the warehouses, factories and industrial plants that have been abandoned as jobs and manufacturing have fled to other parts of the globe. That created "cheap space"—two words that New Yorkers rarely hear put together and that artists and performers especially crave. Whole buildings are being turned into performance spaces and galleries. Recent conversions include two in a burgeoning section of town called Gowanus: the Brooklyn Lyceum, and the Old American Can Factory, which houses an artists' complex of studios in six buildings. A nondescript Williamsburg garage is home to a couple of the city's most avidly adventurous ensembles, Collapsable Giraffe and Radiohole.

One prescient developer, David Walentas, bought up a bunch of buildings in DUMBO, a forlorn, desolate industrial area "down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass." He has given whole buildings to artists—free—with the understanding that they can be used as cultural outposts until he's ready to convert the spaces into high-end housing. St. Ann's Warehouse, for one, lives on borrowed time. Arts at St. Ann's began in a landmark Episcopalian church in Brooklyn Heights as a way to bring audiences into the often empty sanctuary and to raise money for its restoration. For 21 years, artistic director Susan Feldman helped develop multigenre work like David Byrne's The Forest and Lou Reed and John Cale's Songs for Drella. She produced puppet operas by Amy Trompetter and workshopped projects like Lee Breuer's Peter and Wendy.

Four years ago, the church reclaimed its space for solely sacred purposes. Feldman relocated to the waterfront warehouse, thanks to Walentas. Eventually, she knows she'll have to move again, but while the organization's clock ticks, Feldman has attracted audiences to the area by presenting the Wooster Group, David Bowie, a reading of Salome starring Al Pacino and, this fall, a production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis. "We began as an organization designed to activate this landmark church; now, we're activating a neighborhood," says Feldman. Another organization, Nest Arts, which hosted a bevy of dance, theatre and small press ventures at its Front Street venue, already has been asked to pack up, and closed during the course of research for this article.

Capturing the Cultural Energy

Beyond these hip pockets of experiment, there's also a polyglot, fractured network of neighborhoods filled with diverse cultures and ethnicities within Brooklyn's 71 square miles (by comparison, Paris is only 41 square miles). Many artists have tried to capture this energy. One way is to find the variegated voices and put them on stage. That's what Anna Deavere Smith did after the Crown Heights riots in 1991. Her one-woman show Fires in the Mirror explored the way cultures can both implode and, by finding common ground, heal. Theatre is a perfect podium for such community building. But Fires in the Mirror played at the Public—in Manhattan. In Williamsburg, the various communities united to defeat a waste incinerator that the city proposed to place in the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. Kathryn Dickinson (full disclosure: my wife), artistic director of White Bird Productions, was inspired by Smith to write a play of interviews about this unusual community triumph. White Bird then rented a studio at BAM and presented Combustion: The Politics of Trash to the very people who populated the play.

On a website devoted to his hometown, David Neal Miller sees Brooklyn as "proof of the power of marginality" and home to the country's "most creative diasporic culture." A selective list of artists who have recently lived or been raised here might include playwrights Mac Wellman, Melissa James Gibson, Doug Wright, Lynn Nottage; filmmaker Spike Lee; musicians Norah Jones and They Might Be Giants; choreographers Mark Morris and Elizabeth Streb; actors John Turturro and Steve Buscemi; writers Paul Auster and Dave Eggers; rappers the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z. Not a lot of mainstreamers here.

There is, of course, a mainstream. You just rarely hear about it. The two ritziest neighborhoods—Brooklyn Heights, directly across the East River from Wall Street; and Park Slope, a neighborhood of beautifully appointed brownstones farther inland surrounding Prospect Park, a mini-me version of Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park—are home to long-running theatre troupes, the Heights Players and the Gallery Players. The latter is an Equity Showcase house in its 37th season, and has given many New York actors experience in standard repertoire. Heights Players began in 1956 with members of the historic Plymouth Church, made famous by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother) in the 1800s. Ryan Repertory Company is a smaller operation with a similar lineage. Founded in 1972 and still run by theatre professor Barbara Parisi (co-author of The History of Brooklyn's Three Major Performing Arts Institutions), the 40-seat theatre is planted in Bay Ridge. Kings County Shakespeare Company has now existed for more than 20 years. It once produced classics in Prospect Park in the summers, but it has moved to St. Francis College in downtown Brooklyn.

In addition, motley adventurous troupes create performances for their specific ethnic communities. There are Haitian performance groups, some of whom participate every Labor Day weekend in one of New York City's largest public events: the West Indian Day Parade. Featuring feathery, spangly, eye-popping Carnaval-style costumes alongside overstuffed floats with dance bands and steel drums, the annual Labor Day shindig draws a million spectators.

In Jewish and Hasidic communities spring is the time of year to act out. Elaborate Purim plays, obviously not open to the public, entertain community members. In Russian and Polish nightclubs, rhinestone-spangled dancers and singers perform Las Vegas–like song-and-dance revues.

Marjorie Moon arrived in Brooklyn from Ohio in 1973 to work at the Obie and AUDELCO award-winning Billie Holiday Theatre in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She never left. As executive director of one of the nation's most vital black theatres, she has come to know her audience intimately and what it will take to fill the 200-seat theatre. She plays to about 30,000 audience members every 40-week season, many of them consisting of church groups, which is only appropriate for a place once nicknamed City of Churches, and whose spires still dominate much of the low-lying skyline.

"I had no idea how this borough thing worked when I first came, so it didn't even occur to me that people didn't want to come to Brooklyn," says Moon. "I thought people would follow theatre if they were able-bodied. I thought we'd appeal to all African-Americans and the Caribbean community, wherever they are." Instead, Moon started creating packages for church groups. They could buy a block of tickets, sell them as a fundraiser and cater an event at the theatre. Moon now fills 85 percent of the available seats to see new plays. "After I limited racy language, they have trusted the theatre. They're not all upper middle class, which limits us. It's hard to get people out on Wednesday and Thursday, because we have working-class audiences. On Saturday nights, I could fill 900 seats."

Another Obie-winner in Brooklyn is Teatro TEBA. Artistic director Héctor Luis Rivera, Carmen Maldonado and Ruben Morales founded the company in 1988, performing in Spanish out of the Seagate Community Center. "We became the first touring Latin company," says Rivera. Now they produce their daring material at a public school in Park Slope and the Impact Theater in Prospect Heights. Last March, the 12-member acting ensemble premiered the original Rivera's Last Frida. Every year the non-Equity ensemble creates a new piece. Rivera is most proud of his play I Am La Julieta de Lorca, which used multimedia elements to explore the Spanish poet and playwright's personal life. "We don't pretend to be Broadway," says the Puerto Rican native, who has a graduate degree from NYU in literature. "We're an alternative to Spanish theatre. We offer the experimental; we have plays about homosexuality and incest. We're often accused of being radical and liberal by the Spanish press."

The New Immigrants

Someone once said that one out of every six Americans has had a parent or grandparent who lived in Brooklyn at some point. It's a convenient urban legend. Brooklyn has been the first stop for successive waves of immigrants from all over the world for a long time. Its population soared from about 840,000 in 1890, seven years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened, to more than 2.7 million in 1950, more than 25 percent of whom were adults born in a foreign country, according to U.S. Census figures. Such diversity inspired Walt Whitman, who edited the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper and wrote for it as well, to pen his famous "I contain multitudes." And, notably, all of America's most famous actors trod BAM's boards after its grand opening in 1861: Edwin Booth, his infamous brother John Wilkes Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Ada Rehan, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Forrest and Eleonora Duse are examples. As the waves of immigrants increased, many of their children grew up to be the country's most popular artists and entertainers.

But for most first- or second-generation immigrants, Brooklyn was a place you aspired to leave. Moving up meant moving out. After World War II, the Long Island suburbs to the east and the New Jersey sprawl to the west beckoned to many middle-class families. In 1960, Brooklyn experienced the first population drop in its history, a common urban story of "white flight" that replayed through many cities in America, even as new immigrants continued to arrive. In the early 1960s, BAM was almost sold and turned into a gymnasium.

In recent years, a new wave of immigrants have arrived from Louisiana, Ohio, New Hampshire, Arizona and, yes, even Manhattan. They're media artists, modern dancers, graphic designers, writers and performers. This influx, which began as a trickle in the late 1970s and 1980s, has turned into a boom. Brooklyn became especially popular for couples looking to start families and desirous of livable space. Dick Zigun, a former Yale graduate school playwright and the co-founder and president of Coney Island USA, remembers how he had to seduce audiences from the Lower East Side, Soho and Greenwich Village to ride the F train to Brooklyn to see his plays 20 years ago. "Now, all these same people have moved to Brooklyn," he notes. "They don't mind checking out another neighborhood, especially if they perceive it's hipper than theirs."

BAM's executive producer Joseph Melillo, who was hired by Harvey Lichtenstein to produce the Next Wave Festival in 1983, agrees that the most dramatic change in Brooklyn over the last 20 years has been its demographics. "The change is radical," he says, talking in front of a fireplace in his cozy office in the 1908 building, constructed after BAM's original home burned to the ground. "The first truth about the fundamental shift is that Brooklyn is populated by artists, most of whom are much younger than you and me. They don't think about residing in Manhattan. They think about Brooklyn and Queens out of a primal need: for light, free space and affordability."

"Right now as we speak, some actors and writers in Williamsburg are creating the masterpieces of tomorrow," surmises David Herskovits, artistic director of Target Margin, one of two TCG-certified companies based in the borough (the other being the 21-year-old Irondale Ensemble Project). Herskovits moved the offices of his brainy, stylishly eclectic company to Brooklyn—and then moved his family nearby. "All the young actors and designers who work on my shows are always inviting me to some show at One Arm Red in DUMBO or the Brick in Williamsburg," he says.

Of all the ubiquitous historic properties from a bygone era of prosperity that now house performances, the country's oldest performing arts organization, BAM, is the most important. Under Lichtenstein's direction from 1967 to 1999, it systematically upended a traditional audience's expectations of what you might find in a venerable opera house. He installed all manner of genre-defying artists, including director Robert Wilson, whose epic-sized visionary musical collaborations, from Einstein on the Beach (with composer Philip Glass) to this season's Temptation of St. Anthony (with Sweet Honey in the Rock's Bernice Reagon), established BAM as an outpost for the avant-garde. In addition, he gave the theatrical dance of Mark Morris and Pina Bausch a home, and imported the world's best foreign troupes from Europe and elsewhere. "Brooklyn is outside the central core of the performing arts in New York City," Lichtenstein told one interviewer looking back on his beginnings as he prepared to retire, "so in order to develop our audience and our reputation, it was necessary to go outside the mainstream, do new work, take unconventional approaches."

"I credit BAM with training a whole generation of theatregoers," says Susan Feldman. Feldman has done her share of development of the same audience. If there's any defining characteristic of the new Brooklyn scene, in her mind it's the way music drives the theatre, much like it did in the 1960s when Sam Shepard was a rock-and-roll drummer. "When you think of about the smaller companies like One Arm Red, and those in Williamsburg, there's a certain rock band feeling to their work. Our aesthetic came out of theatricalizing music, like Laurie Anderson and David Byrne did, which came out of working in a Gothic church that lent itself to music and multimedia."

The small experimental ensemble Radiohole is another example. Their last show, Radiohole Is Still My Name, melded a two-dimensional, full frontal performance style akin to the Wooster Group's, with a carnivalesque, whiz-bang, bells-and-whistles sideshow set. The non-narrative show began and ended with a man riding a tricycle to the sound of rooster cries, included some diddling of sexual organs, and drew on clichés about the Wild West, bravado and the post-structuralist theories of Guy Debord, who was quoted frequently. At one climactic moment the cast begins gorging on food in a frenzied fit while swigging large amounts of beer. It's as messy as a Coney Island hot dog–eating contest.

Founding Radiohole member Eric Dyer muses on whether Brooklyn itself affects the company's work. "Well, here we can afford to rehearse and perform in the same space," he says, referring to the garage they're renting from fellow Wooster Group acolytes and experimentalists, Collapsable Giraffe. "The atmosphere in our studio is pretty unique; things would be different in basement at Lincoln Center." Indeed, as audiences enter the space, free beer awaits in a tub. "Our audiences are young, and a lot are first time theatregoers," says Dyer, who works as a rigger to make money (he estimates the company's budget to be $20–30,000). "We tend to get—and I noticed this without empirical evidence—a core audience, but a lot hear about our show through the grapevine and just come to see what's going on."

Geography Is Everything

For those who don't understand quite where Brooklyn begins and ends (which includes many Manhattanites and not a few natives), it's on Long Island, a 100-odd-mile-long protrusion off the east coast of New York. But that's only the two-dimensional view. Brooklyn is not so easily reeled in or captured. Within its borders are dozens of different neighborhoods defined by class and culture. The former independent city (it became a borough in 1898) seems perpetually stuck between two visionary histories. At one extreme is the ghost of Brooklyn past, suffused with nostalgia. It's not hard to find assorted old-timers—and new-timers in their thirties or forties—who will instantly wax rhapsodic over the "glory years" of the 1950s, doo-wop and the Dodgers. The nostalgia is packaged in the form of T-shirts, Junior's cheesecake or cheesy Broadway shows called Brooklyn: The Musical.

At the other extreme, there's the fanfare of a future filled with development and change. Practically every week politicians and developers present candy-colored renderings and architectural sketches as promises of revitalization and reincarnation. One week it is a waterfront Ikea, the Swedish home furnishing behemoth, on the Red Hook waterfront where Arthur Miller's View from the Bridge is set. The next week the debate turns to another Frank Gehry–designed project: an entire neighborhood that will consist of high-rise apartment buildings surrounding an arena that will house the Brooklyn Nets professional basketball team. One of the selling points that the developer and other municipal supporters cite is that the circus would be able to come to town, along with attractions like Ice Capades. Whether financing and city approvals will fall into place remain to be seen.

Gehry's co-design for the new $22-million, 299-seat home for Theatre for a New Audience is more definite. The company couldn't find reasonable real estate in Manhattan, where it had rented Off-Broadway theatres for its entire existence. Lichtenstein, who left BAM in 1999 to chair the Local Development Corporation's Cultural District initiative, stepped in and found a bare spot across the street from BAM.

The whole Cultural District concept has been controversial. It's undeniably helped artists, starting with Mark Morris Dance Group, which has a brand-new facility. One of the other lynchpins in the neighborhood is A.R.T./NY's South Oxford Space, a beautifully renovated building that once belonged to the Visiting Nurses Association. It offers subsidized office space to 20 theatre companies, including Target Margin, White Bird Productions, Urban Bush Women, Collision Theory and other small troupes. Another such building, 80 Arts, a former state office, began a $6-million renovation last year under the Cultural District's aegis. It will eventually offer 20 arts organizations subsidized office space.

But members of the Fort Greene neighborhood, which has been largely African-American, wonder about the ramifications. As one merchant association spokesman was quoted as saying, "Whenever an institution talks of creating a cultural district, you get into some very sticky questions as to whose culture or what culture or why certain choices are made." As real-estate prices increase, a bigger question rises: Will the artists who helped create a climate conducive to large investment of capital be priced out of Brooklyn by all these grandiose schemes? Or worse: With megastores and monster developments grabbing attention and time from city officials, will the whole cultural industry be forgotten?

Ghost Lights

Many of the theatre artists and producers working there become entranced by the history of Brooklyn and the easy accessibility one has to a storied past. At the southern end of Brooklyn lies one of the borough's most notable claims to infamy: Coney Island. The pavilions and amusement rides at Luna Park and Dreamland were America's first magic kingdom. Here, by the boardwalk, from May through Labor Day, thousands flock to the wide beach, stepping gingerly around the glass shards glinting in the sand. Visitors can still ride the Wonder Wheel and on a clear day see Manhattan some 10 or 15 miles away like some dour gray Emerald City.

Every May, the Cyclone roller coaster once again begins rattling around its wooden scaffolding. But a couple of blocks away lies KeySpan Park, a sparkling new minor league baseball stadium that's been selling out practically every game of the aptly named Cyclones. Developers like Disney and Great Adventure keep inquiring about property. Coney Island seems on the verge of shedding its ghostlike habit, ready to resurrect itself into more than a shadow of its former glitter and glory.

Dick Zigun is the ringmaster of much of this circus. He's a playwright who retreated to Coney Island from a budding regional theatre career just over 20 years ago, much to the probable displeasure of his agent, Helen Merrill. His mother was born in Brooklyn but grew up and raised her son in Bridgeport, home to P.T. Barnum, whom Zigun counts as one of two prime influences, the other being William Shakespeare. He was sucked in to the Coney Island culture after being asked to curate a show in homage to John Lennon for the then eightysomething purveyor of the local Wax Museum, one of the last show-women on the boardwalk. Zigun organized more of a happening than a show, in which Charles Ludlam and Paul Zaloom were involved. Eventually, that extravaganza became the Mermaid Parade, which every June marks the beginning of summer with spectacle that's more performance art than parade.

"Then I went insane," he says one frigid January day around the potbelly stove that provides the only heat in the Coney Island Museum, which he keeps open for the odd curiosity seeker or homeless person who wanders in. Zigun's obsession with Coney Island culture and history led to his opening the museum, creating the Burlesque on the Beach series and offering an annual "Creepshow at the Freakshow" for Halloween. But the centerpiece is his authentic "10-in-one" sideshow, complete with Snake Lady and Tattoo Man. "There used to be a hundred sideshows between 1900 and 1950," he laments.

Where does he find his performers? You'd be surprised. "If you're tattooed and stick things up your nose and eat lightbulbs, you can work here and even get benefits." In the off-season he books the performers into clubs or colleges. They do a New Year's Eve show at Manhattan's Knitting Factory. "The sideshow is as indigenous an art form for this neighborhood as Native American Indian dances are to Arizona," Zigun says. "It's not Stanislavsky. It's in your face, crack-you-up, lowest common denominator. It's immigrant theatre, beyond language: Pounding a nail into your head can be understood by anyone."

Eric Richmond is another ghost lover. He runs the Brooklyn Lyceum, a former public bathhouse that once housed one of the nation's largest indoor pools, and his tenants are beginning to have a higher profile. The Neo-Futurists finished a run of several months there in the fall, which may have made the show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, the longest-running show in the history of Brooklyn. This January, Dance Theatre Workshop is bringing a site-specific piece to the space. Meanwhile, Richmond's other passion, Green-Wood Cemetery, one of the first landscaped final resting places in the nation, gets attention now that he's entered into a partnership to present music, theatre and readings at Green-Wood's spectacular chapel. A playreading series called "Only the Dead" features scripts inspired by persons buried at Green-Wood.

The Last Wave

There's only one thing missing, almost all agree: traditional mid-sized theatre spaces. Melillo, who has added a cinema and enlivened the café at BAM, says, "I'm interested in having a 300-seat theatre" as a complement to the Howard Gilman Opera House (2,109 seats) and Harvey Lichtenstein Theatre (874 seats). "Then we'd be perfectly positioned." A.R.T./NY executive director Louloudes has plans percolating for just such a venue—thanks to help from developer Walentas. The idea would be for the service organization to buy the auditorium in the old board of education building not far off Flatbush Avenue in the downtown district. "We're going to own the space and rent it out to tenants, and we hope our South Oxford groups will use it to do runs or parts of runs there."

Will such spaces be the harbinger of a more bourgeois, less boisterous theatre scene in the future? Mellowing is sure to occur. After all, there's only so long troupes like Radiohole can swill vast quantities of alcohol on stage—without even getting paid. And there are only so many undeveloped buildings to let artists romp around in.

Perhaps the ultimate death knell for Brooklyn marginality and cheap rent was rung in October. A local paper had the headline: "Camelot in the Slope." It was a story of two lawyers getting ready to move their family to a brownstone in Kings County. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg isn't just any lawyer, of course. Then again, Brooklyn isn't just any city.

John Istel teaches at Manhattan Theatre Lab and writes frequently about the arts.