The Brick Theater — a playhouse in Brooklyn, New York — already had a reputation for adapting video games to the stage with last year’s Adventure Quest (a play based on a point-and-click PC game). This summer, they up the ante with Game Play, a summer stock production of several plays that runs from July 9 through 25.

Video games return to the stage in new theater lineup

The lineup includes performance art-style shows like Modal Kombat with guitarists David Hindman and Evan Drummond controlling a Mortal Kombat game entirely with their guitars, Grand Theft Ovid where machinima artist Eddie Kim uses games like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto as puppets to tell stories from the Ovid, and Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage which is pretty self-explanatory.

In addition to the shows themselves The Brick also boasts several theme or party nights during the summer season. The bill lists a Chiptunes dance party as well as a Rock Band karaoke night — but the most interesting theme by far is the Babycastles night. We’re not sure what “Play fresh home-made video games while dancing with half-human half-arcade cyborgs,” really means, but it sounds rad to us.

We spoke to Chris Chappell, producer at The Brick, to find out more about these productions as well as some details on last year’s Adventure Quest.

GamePro:
How well did Adventure Quest do last year? Any full houses?

Chris Chappell:
Adventure Quest did enormously well last year — nearly every performance was either sold out or near capacity. A new production of it went up in St. Louis about a month ago, and in the future we’re hoping to take it to other cities as well as events like E3 and so on. (Interested parties are free to contact me!) One liability for the indie theater scene in NYC is that it can risk becoming too insular, and one of the really gratifying things about that show was that we attracted gamers, nostalgists, and other folks who don’t necessarily see theater on a regular basis. We’re hoping to achieve something similar with this new festival.

GamePro:
What’s been the response from the local theater community to your video game-themed productions? Do they treat it as real performance art, or do they get all snobby because it’s video-game-related?

Chris Chappell:The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and both the participants and the larger community (many of whom are very committed gamers) take their work here pretty seriously. Roger Ebert’s blog posts notwithstanding, I think there’s hardly anyone under 35 who doesn’t believe that games are a culturally significant form — we all grew up with them, and they’re part of the lifeblood of American culture. Actually, if anyone’s a hard sell on the festival, I think it’s probably hardcore gamers. There was some grumbling over at io9 about “twenty-something hipster douchebags” taking a condescending approach to gaming, and while that’s an understandable concern, the truth is that the folks who are putting this together are passionate about both games and theater — there’s a lot of love and reverence on display here.

GamePro:
What types of people are performing these shows? Professional actors, noob actors, students?

Chris Chappell:For the more conventionally theatrical pieces, the participants are all professional actors/directors (as much as one can be in indie theater, anyway — hardly anyone makes a living doing this stuff). For the more unconventional stuff and installations, it’s a varied array of performance and new-media artists. The performers in Grand Theft Ovid are young theater students of Eddie Kim, the show’s creator.

GamePro:
Which of the productions is the most challenging to stage?

Chris Chappell:Having seen Eddie Kim’s work in the past, I can say that [Grand Theft Ovid] is probably up there — he gets his “cast” to pull off these remarkably coordinated performances in gaming environments like WoW and Halo. It’s something to behold — either he or someone else has described it as “digital puppetry.”

Find out more about The Brick and Game Play here.

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