Daniel's Proposal

I was born in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn in 1984. As I grew up, the neighborhood changed quite dramatically. My parents were the first crop of young professionals that began to move there in the 70s, turning what used to be fairly straightforward old world neighborhood into a yuppie wonderland. The area in which the change is most visibly apparent now- 30 years later- is near Atlantic Avenue and Court St. What used to be a string of porno theatres is now the UA movie theatre and a Barnes and Noble. What used to house the neighborhood nursery school is now a three story Duane Reade. What used to be an enormous and variously sketchy parking garage is now a sleek and expensive apartment complex, called Court House. However a block away from Court House, the other Brooklyn remains. Down the street, quite literally in its shadow, there still stands an enormous prison: The Brooklyn House of Detention. The two buildings are arranged so that the top penthouse apartment of the Court House looks down on the exercise yard of The Brooklyn House of Detention. This is the setting for my play The Heartless Giant of Atlantic Avenue- the penthouse apartment of Court House and the exercise yard of the Brooklyn House of Detention.

The play would be very loosely based on the Grimm fairy tale, “The Heartless Giant”, and would follow the story of Leo, the awkward child of two young professionals who have only recently moved into their new penthouse in Court House in Cobble Hill. While left alone one Sunday afternoon, Leo goes out onto the terrace- the terrace that is always locked and that Leo has been expressly told never to go out on- and sees the prisoners exercising in the exercise yard. There he befriends an old prisoner, a child murderer, who tore his own heart out his chest and buried it far away in order to be able to endure the hardship of life. Leo refuses to believe that any life can be so horrible as to not want to feel, and vows to get back the prisoner’s heart. Every day he goes to the prisoner, and asks him to him where in Brooklyn he has hid his stolen heart, and every day the prisoner tells Leo. But every day that Leo looks for the place that the prisoner has told him, he finds that the place the prisoner’s told him of is gone- redeveloped, redone, remodeled. Through his travels, he meets people from all across Brooklyn who help him find the heart- Hassidic Jews, French-speaking Columbian immigrants, The Mafia’s mothers they keep in Carroll Gardens, and even the President of Brooklyn himself. The play would be a mythic fable about the gentrification of Brooklyn and about Brooklyn itself- the myriad cultures present within it, the marginalization of said cultures, the nature of belonging to a community and the tendency to idealize the past.

This project would be ideally developed in conjunction with an ensemble with a passionate interest in the themes and topics covered within the piece- whether it be gentrification, Brooklyn and/or fairy tales and contemporary mythology. I feel strongly that an ensemble with their own experiences and aesthetic in any/all of these areas would be a vital part of shaping the nature of this piece.