Setting her Stage
By the time you’ve taken your seat for Mattie Brickman’s latest play Reunions Reunions Reunions, you’ve already been handed a nametag and assigned a class year. You've even listened to college fight songs piped into the lobby and engaged with some of the actors – who have pretended to remember you from the good old days. If at this point, you’re feeling primed for a light-hearted drama that might poke fun at the combination of re-connecting and nostalgia that often characterizes re-uning, you’re in for a surprise. The play opts for a darker and more uncomfortable angle, and one that a college alumni office might not have in mind when it sends out those cheery invitations to return to campus.
Brickman calls the production and its subject matter “a tough love valentine.” She’s a big fan of real-life reunions, having attended Camp Cate twice and her alma mater Princeton University’s reunions several times. “I’m a naturally nostalgic person. I think place, and people, and certain items can be very transportive,” she offers. “You walk into your old dorm, or just setting foot on campus—these things can take you back to memories that you’ve forgotten or that have never really left you, that you realize continue to inform how you live now.”
Reunions Reunions Reunions takes that notion on, and more. It’s a complex drama involving a professor, his former student – who also happens to be the girlfriend of his son – and what transpires when they all gather on an artificial grass set strewn with crushed beer cans. Produced in an intimate Los Angeles theater for several weeks over the winter, the play challenged the audience to examine both sides of the type of tradition that characterize a college experience.
Brickman was thrilled that the play, her 11th dramatic work, was produced, and also well received. The challenge for her was timing. She had just started working as an assistant for the show runner of the hit CBS series Code Black several months earlier. So after a demanding day job, Brickman found herself at play rehearsals nights and weekends, so she could help tweak the writing. “I feel like that’s the best part. It’s a new play, and you’re going to do rewrites. It’s hard to know what you’re going to rewrite if you’re not there.” That sort of schedule called for tapping reserves, the ones “that come out when you need them,” confides Brickman. And she knows just where she learned how to store and use them.
Her first stage experience came in second grade when she was double cast with her older sister as an orphan in a Santa Barbara production of Annie. “It was thrilling, but I also remember showing up to school the next morning and being exhausted – I was in 17 performances.” That proved to be good training for her days at Cate, where she led a double life as a student and dancer, mostly off campus. Brickman remembers she and Katherine Lynn racing back and forth between classes and dance rehearsal in Santa Barbara. “We were always jumping in the car,” she recalls.
Despite that commitment, Brickman says she never envisioned dance as a career, and pursued a major in public policy at Princeton. During a junior year in London, she tried and failed to get into her first choice tutorial on international relations, and ended up in a second choice – Modern British Drama. She says she was almost surprised at how deeply it resonated with her. “I would read a play and understand the post-war era in a much more comprehensive, say than I was by studying the facts and figures in my history class.” Struck by how these plays were time capsules of political or social eras, “that was now planted in my brain as a way of writing I hadn’t really considered,” she says.
Back on the Princeton campus she tried to fit her new passion into her chosen major, even trying to convince a dean that she could write a play for her required senior thesis. No go, she was told: “Go to grad school for that.” Brickman ended up writing about the history of National Endowment for the Arts instead. “It wasn’t a play, but it was another yet thing that fueled this new interest.”
Another monkey wrench in Brickman’s personal plotline was finishing her major’s required statistics course. The class conflicted directly with a humor-writing course she was dying to take, and writing won out. When graduation rolled around, she was short a course. Though she was allowed to wear a robe, sit with her class, and stand along with her department for recognition during the ceremony, she did not earn a diploma.
Needing the statistics course led her back to California, where she could live at home and take the class at UCSB. A former dance teacher suggested she check out the university’s drama program, so Brickman added a playwriting class, where she discovered that she was good at tackling political and social issues in story form. She was hooked. “It was very fortuitous and strange, but I didn’t take my first playwriting class until after Princeton.” (Her diploma was mailed to her once she finished the stats class.)
Yale Drama School was the next step, a program Brickman calls “a wonderful playground for three years.” What distinguishes the Yale program, she explains, is that it acknowledges that plays are written to be seen. “You’re not going to learn playwriting unless you’re putting it out in front of an audience. People, the writer, and everyone involved, engage with material very differently when it’s going to be put on a stage.” Brickman was involved in multiple productions, big and small, even acting and dancing in some. “It’s a very fertile place to try things that you’ve been wanting to try and kind of learn by doing.”
What does one do after Yale Drama School? “Good question,” responds Brickman. “I’m still trying to figure that out.” Pretty successfully, it seems, though maybe it wasn’t completely apparent when she struck out for New York at the summer of 2009. Even so, Brickman had several productive years there where she wrote and saw produced a series of plays, including an outdoor audience participation show in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, and a dramatic interpretation about Hallie Flanagan, a groundbreaking theater producer who started Vassar College’s experimental theater company in the 1920s. Brickman recalls the conversation she had with Vassar when they told her, “Oh we really liked your writing, but we noticed you’ve only written for a handful of people. Do you think you could handle writing for a larger cast? And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? No one’s ever asked me to do that. Of course!’ They wanted to include as many of their theater students as possible.”
As personally rewarding as writing has been for Brickman, she could see that some better financial rewards lay in the burgeoning genre of television, or even web series. In 2012, she returned to the West Coast to work for an online channel WIGS, for a series about a young woman named Ro.
While the show was not renewed, it placed her firmly in California, close to her family, and in a locale where her twin interests in theater and television could more easily intersect. She says she loves the fast-paced and collaborative aspect of television writing and treasures the ability to be able to stick with characters over the course of a season. “Sometimes when I finish a play, I get a little sad that I’m done. It’s the characters. TV offers the chance for expansive storytelling and I love that…I hope to cobble a lifestyle together that allows for both.”
By this spring, Reunions Reunions Reunions had finished its run and Code Black was on hiatus, with Brickman and everyone else on the show hoping for a call with news of a renewal. With that in mind, Brickman is working long days on Disney lot (ABC, which is co-producing the show, owns Disney.)
Her recent deep dive into all aspects of reunions has not dissuaded her from returning to Cate in June, though she acknowledges that she’s a little surprised it's approaching so fast. “At my 10th I was mistakenly given a 15th reunion nametag. I was like, ‘15th – I can’t imagine that.’ And here it comes!”
Fortunately, she’s got plenty of good stories to share.
