The Brick opened at a time of tremendous change in Williamsburg. Once a home for immigrants and later a hub for young artists, the North Brooklyn neighborhood was transforming in the early 2000s into one of the city’s trendiest and priciest areas.
The theater’s founders set out to make the Brick a destination for experimental shows when such venues were dwindling in the city. They also hoped it would be an outlet both for emerging artists and for established artists looking to try something different.
Shows at the Brick are often outlandish, quirky and just plain weird. Like a one-dog show featuring Boscoe Barles, a Shih Tzu rescue, or “Vape Kids Cool Zone: The Lost Episode,” a puppet musical about a fascist children’s show.
“The Brick is sort of a link between more professional institutional theaters and the D.I.Y. performance culture that’s in Brooklyn,” said Peter Mills Weiss, the theater’s producing artistic director.
Mr. Weiss said the Brick’s do-it-yourself vibe changed under new leadership in 2019, when a multiyear plan was put in place to expand the organization, a mission that Mr. Weiss is helping to oversee. The budget has since quadrupled.
The Brick’s current budget is larger than many but not all Off Off Broadway theaters, which often have smaller venues and produce fewer shows than the Brick. Their budgets, however, pale in comparison with those of Broadway theaters, which put on shows costing tens of millions of dollars.
Mr. Weiss said the Brick’s five-year goal now was to bring in enough revenue to, among other things, allow the organization’s three part-time employees to work full time.
The Brick is considered a “presenting theater,” meaning it curates work from outside productions, which are largely responsible for raising the money to put on their shows.
It was with Mr. Weiss’s encouragement that a recent show, “Mikey Maus in Fantasmich!,” came together as a full-length production and debuted at the Brick.
Over the years, the show’s creator and only actor, Hannah Kallenbach, had performed 10-minute segments of it at various city venues, wearing a Mickey Mouse costume she had bought online for $500.
The show is based on her own life. Mikey Maus — a German twist on the Disney character that Ms. Kallenbach created to avoid receiving cease-and-desist letters from the company’s lawyers — is booted from Disneyland by his father, lands in Times Square and wrestles with his evangelical parents who do not accept his queer identity.
After attending one of her short performances, Mr. Weiss urged Ms. Kallenbach to write a complete show. She felt overwhelmed, she said. She had never written a full-length show and had never raised money.
With the help of Dan Hasse, who would later direct the show, Ms. Kallenbach sent emails to family and friends asking for financial support. The pair came up with a budget of $6,000, roughly what they estimated it would cost for rehearsals and a four-night run.
“The first time asking for money is nerve-racking,” said Ms. Kallenbach, 33. “As an artist, you’re always telling people why you deserve to make art all the time, and it can get a little exhausting because you’re not always so confident in yourself.”
But donors responded, including a family now living in Germany whom Ms. Kallenbach used to work for as a nanny. She also raised money by performing the show in the backyard of the home of the actress Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The final donation she received — a $1,000 check — was handed off at her Bushwick rehearsal studio just days before the show debuted at the Brick.
“We are not by any means like a commercial venture, but we budgeted correctly,” Mr. Hasse, 33, said. “We pretty much stuck to it, thanks to some Amazon returns.”
After selling out its four nights at the Brick and earning a small profit, “Mikey Maus” is returning to the Brick in November for a three-week run. Mr. Hasse and Ms. Kallenbach said the budget for those performances would be much larger. Some expenses have already been accounted for and they hope to afford pay increases this time for everyone else involved in the production.
“This really can’t happen without a lot of favors,” Ms. Kallenbach said.
Matthew Haag is a Times reporter covering the New York City economy and the intersection of real estate and politics in the region.
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