481 van brunt st (BWAC)

Performing on the little stage at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition's gallery in Red Hook was a challenge and a joy.

I'm continuing my side-project of finding the various locations where we produced shows, and seeing what’s there now. Is it still a theater (if it ever was)?

I hadn't planned to write about working on the stage of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition quite so soon, but events intervened, as you'll see.

2022: Off the Hook

By the time 2022 rolled around, working in our usual home of the Patrick F. Daly School, "PS 15," had become more challenging. It was always challenging, for reasons I'll talk about when I get to that space, but post-pandemic it was basically impossible. So we looked around our neighborhood of Red Hook, and decided we might be able to work on a small stage built of 2x4s and plywood at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. BWAC is a collection of artists who maintained a large gallery in a warehouse on Van Brunt Street, just where it runs into the harbor.

The BWAC space had its own challenges. The stage wasn't very big, and their standard lighting - a series of clip lights - was so haphazardly wired that it took many hours of experimentation to figure out how to hang ours. Like a lot of places we worked, it didn't have anything like a proper backstage or dressing room; we had to hang blacks on either side of the stage. On the other hand, the BWAC people were wonderfully and warmly accommodating. They handed us keys and for the most part let us do what we wanted, when we wanted, as long as we weren't conflicting with their public hours too much.

For atmosphere, it was as appealing as anyplace we worked - a Civil War-era warehouse with massive, yellow pine beams, creaky wooden floors, and Romanesque windows overlooking New York Harbor. Some of the seats were your typical folding chairs, but others were plush sofas and easy chairs.

We had planned to do an Off the Hook show at BWAC in December of 2021; we had installed everything, held dress rehearsal, were ready to go. Then, one by one, actors called to say they were sick with Covid, or their roommate had Covid and they needed to isolate. We finally decided that for the sake of everyone, we had to shut down. Striking that show that never happened was heartbreaking.

But we returned in May of 2022, with the two young playwrights whose work was delayed from December, and three new ones. We hadn't really told anyone, but by that time we knew that it was to be our last Off the Hook, our last Falconworks production of any sort. In the post-show playlist I created, I led off with our friend Terry Radigan's song "G-O-O-D-B-Y-E." I'm sentimental like that, and subtle like that. An Irish goodbye - almost.

The show included a play about a school singing competition, one about an art competition, a World War I adventure set in France, and a play about a teenager who dealing with her mother's death. It ended with a post-apocalyptic fable in which aliens arrived at a destroyed earth, and invited two earthlings to return with them to their home planet. The playwright left us pondering the two people in the spaceship, as they pondered their own uncertain futures.

Afterward, we left our lights hanging in place, slightly simplified, so the BWAC people would not have to depend on clip lights. It made the man who fancied himself their technical guru nervous, but another BWAC volunteer let on that she had run shows on Broadway as an IATSE member for many years, and she could probably handle our 16-dimmer board.

Today - well, as of today the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist's Coalition space is no more. Wednesday night, an enormous fire tore through the building and destroyed it - along with, I assume, the life's work of dozens of artists, BWAC members and others who rented space in the building's lofts. It's a terrible loss for all the people who built and contributed to BWAC, for artists professional and amateur who poured their souls into their creations. It's too soon to say what those artists are going to do, of course. What they're going to do now is work through the stages of grieving. I'm heartbroken again.

If you have a few dollars to offer the folks at BWAC, I'm sure they'd appreciate it.

Previously in this series: