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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s stayed with me, the way dangerous theatre does. So I wanted to tell you about Brick Shithouse. I was lucky to catch the last performance of the fenceless theatre production that sold out its whole run at the Found Festival.

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The people we meet in Ashleigh Hicks’s play are stalled, restless 20-somethings, millennials with college degrees that are looking awfully worthless. They’re working crap retail jobs, scrambling to put together rent money, still living with their parents, deadeningly aware they’re never going to catch up with their student loans.

And what they’re really doing for a living, these childhood friend/classmates who are still referring to their high-school relationships, is looking to the online world. Behind a pay wall that they’re kidding themselves is a fortress, they’re live-streaming their fight club to that anonymous expandable audience. When that audience starts to make ever-grosser, more appalling requests, upping the ante with hard cash, drawing the line gets harder and harder. How far will they go?

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

As one character says, once you open that door, it can’t be closed. The dangers, and the assault on individual consent and viable relationships, escalate. Once there’s a camera and a link, the notion of privacy, of personal boundaries and private moments, is a dangerous illusion.

Watching Sarah J Culkin’s production at the Tesserae Factory (a big warehouse where Freewill Shakespeare and Edmonton Opera sets get built) is a visceral (not to say blood-splattering) experience. You can feel the bruises getting kicked and the noses getting busted, at the same time you’re getting to know desperate characters on an individual basis.

Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

This is a cast of seven selflessly physical actors who literally throw themselves into the play. Sam Jeffery’s fight direction (which is almost by definition intimacy direction) is remarkable bone-rattling, on Even Gilchrist’s set design, over which a lighting grid hangs like a cage.

Brick Shithouse speaks to the moment — against a soundscore of bodies smacking down on mats — and a generation who have found themselves off the grid where ‘coming-of-age’ has traditionally happened. The memory is live, and it makes me flinch.