Mattie Brickman’s Writing a Web Series

Holidays are a good time for catching up with folks you’ve lost touch with. I followed Mattie Brickman’s playwriting activites avidly when she was a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, but lost track of her work after she graduated. She’d been part of a class of playwrights who were distinguished by their absurdist sense and dark-comic instincts. Her contribution to the Carlotta Festival of New Plays in 2009 was American Catnip, set in a roller rink, but her best work on campus might have been the short-form pieces she did at the Yale Cabaret.
Got an email from Ms. Brickman this week. She’s created a new web series, Ro, which now has two eight-minute episodes plus a 15-minute “behind-the-scenes” mini-doc (in which Brickman herself appears), posted on YouTube.
Brickman’s Yale work tended towards arch relationship comedies, and Ro is a tightly staged string of dialogues set at a speed-dating even, fertile ground for the playwright.
The series is produced by WIGS, which describes itself as “the #1 channel for scripted drama on YouTube,” delivering “high-end, original series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads.” Ro’s directed by Patricia Cardoso, and the cast includes such known actors as Melonie Diaz, Jonathan Tucker and William Mapother. It’s a mystery serial of sorts, concerning the self-protective and often ridiculous disguises we don in public, whether in order to present ourselves in a better light or to move on from a difficult past.
Nice to have Mattie Brickman back on my radar. I have fond memories of that YSD playwriting class of ’09: Brickman, Matt Moses and Gonzalo Ridriguez Risco. Ro really brought me back.