Fast and furious: the righteous frustration of Ashleigh Hicks’ characters in Brick Shithouse, at Found Fest 2024

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

The largest production in the Found Festival’s 13-year history of unexpected encounters with art opens this week in a place you might not even know about yet.

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As in most of Found’s surprises, that place is not a theatre. The Tesserae Factory, a vast west end warehouse, is where seven struggling 20-somethings, “best friends/ worst enemies,” are secretly, illicitly, live-streaming their fight club, hiding behind the porous barricade of anonymity (and a pay wall) in Ashleigh Hicks’ Brick Shithouse. It is, declares the playwright, “a space that lends itself really beautifully to the stylistic conceit of the show… a dream come true.”

The vision they share with director (Sarah J Culkin), fuelled by the style of cinéma vérité, is “everything happening all at once, naturalism cranked up to 11… simultaneous conversations where you pick up bits and pieces depending on where you sit, which character you’re choosing to pay attention to, which conversation you choose to follow.”

“You’re actively eavesdropping,” Hicks say of a space that contains “places where characters can hide and have privacy from each other, too….” Which is a way of saying that your Brick Shithouse will be different than everyone else’s Brick Shithouse, depending on where you sit and whom you choose to listen to. As Hicks points out, you’ll have something to talk about with the person who sat five chairs away from you, but made different choices.

The play had a work-in-progress debut at Found last year when Hicks was the festival’s Fresh Air artist-in-residence. The inspiration, though, goes back nine years to a now-unrecognizable debut draft — “the sloppiest first draft you’ve ever seen!” they insist. Director Culkin, Hicks’s friend and theatre school classmate, “really latched onto it. She saw something special in it I definitely couldn’t see.”

“When I wrote that first draft nine years ago I was wanting it to be site-specific show, outside a traditional theatre venue. It’s been in the bones of the text since the beginning,” Hicks says. And they got their wish.

Nine years of life (and theatre) have left their mark on the play, says Hicks, who wrote the first draft at 20 and is now 29, around the age of the characters, and heading like them into the 30s. They remember that younger self who “wrote from a place of anger, and not knowing where to put it. I was 20 years old, up to my armpits in theatre school — before the #MeToo movement, before intimacy directors, before conflict de-escalation. I was working a crappy part-time retail job and still couldn’t afford to move out of my parents’ place….”

“I was so angry. I was getting older, becoming an adult,” and so many socio-cultural promises were vanishing into the ether: “You go to college, you get a good job, you buy a house.…”

So, in its first incarnations, Brick Shithouse was “a very angry show,” says Hicks. “What’s developed is that it’s about so much more than that now.” What director Culkin and her team of actors and designers have done, they think, is “infuse so much joy into the play while still holding space for that anger, that righteous frustration…. They’ve added so much to the storytelling; I’ve really felt the honour of trying to be better at my job to be worthy of the immense effort this team is putting in…. It’s remarkable and humbling.”

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

A diverse cast and design team led by Even Gilchrist have brought perspectives on “what it’s like being working-class and queer in Alberta, what it’s like being a person of colour…. It feels charged in a way that’s productive, as opposed to reductive.”   

“You’re heading into your 30s. You’re out of school. Half  your friends are still living at home, working part-time jobs at West Edmonton Mall, half are married with kids…. Not that the 30s are old, gawd, I hope not! But it’s a tumultuous time: this is when you turn around … and you’re starting to feel that this is what the rest of my  life is going to look like. All the characters are at an age where they’re feeling a bit like life is leaving them behind.”

The people of Brick Shithouse, as Hicks describes, aren’t strangers. “They have some sort of history with each other — childhood friendships in all the complexities and toxicities that come with that. Some are lovers, part or present; two are soon to be step-sisters.…”

What you’ll be overhearing at the Tesserae Factory is a story about the dreams and disappointments of “working-class young people in Alberta,” says the playwright. “Seven people looking at the economy and the state of the world… They’ve started live-streaming their fight club behind a pay wall, to help make rent in the freakiin’ housing crisis. You need a whole swack of jobs to make ends meet these days.”

The cast of Ashleigh Hicks’s Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

They’re doing it anonymously, “but that anonymity is always at risk of being compromised…. Their ‘loyal audience’ starts making requests that their fights take a more explicit turn,” as Hicks describes. And the questions they have to grapple with, individually and as a group start multiplying: “how far is too far? What are your boundaries? What am I willing to do for 50 bucks? 100 bucks? 1,000 bucks? How much can I trust these people in front of me? how much can I trust people on the other side of the computer screen?”

“These things really change when there’s money on the table.”

Hicks, who has a drama degree from the U of A, has always been a writer. At age three, they remember knowing “I was going to be a writer. Forever (laughter). I’m nothing if not stubborn.” They realized pretty quickly that to arrive at the “emotional and psychological stamina you need to be an actor” would take a lot of work.

They’ve explored clowning, at the Manitoulin Conservatory run by John Turner of Mump and Smoot. And that’s been “hugely influential to me as a writer,” says the Cape Breton-born Hicks. “Most of my shows till now lean into style and away from naturalism.” Mine, for example, developed for last year’s RISER Edmonton, “had poetic moments, heightened dialogue, choral narration,” inspired by the Greeks.

In its heightened naturalism, Brick Shithouse is something of a departure, they agree, “and also a natural progression…. Everyone is talking like a real person 100 per cent of the time.”

And it’s the particular gift of director Culkin, Hicks thinks, that the plays issues of “the private and the exposed, sexuality, shame and pride are connected to a longer lineage of style.” You’ll see it in the set-up and lighting, too, of Brianne Jang’s promotion shots, which reference the paintings of Caravaggio.

“You’re watching the characters livestream, and when the camera is off, you’re still there.” There’s an exciting kind of voyeurism in that.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2024

Brick Shithouse

Theatre: fenceless theatre

Created by: Ashleigh Hicks

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Starring: Mohamed Ahmed, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Alexandra Dawkins, Sophie May Healey, Jasmine Hopfe, Moses Kouyaté, Gabriel Richardson

Where: Tesserae Factory, 11210 143 St.

Running: Friday through July 14

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca