About the Play:

The Brick and the Rose is a one-act drama by Lewis John Carlino. An expressionistic reading, in which ten actors, portraying forty-seven characters, are seated on stools behind music stands. The Brick and the Rose is a powerful and compelling drama that depicts a young man's spiral into drug addition in his search for life's meaning. The entire action takes place in front of back drops.

The Brick and the Rose is set in the 1950s and follows the story of a young boy from the moment of his birth in a charity hospital in the Bronx to his untimely death. In a time of hope for many immigrants and first generation New Yorkers, it's supposed to be the start of something better – but the city has a secret. Drug addiction, prostitution, poverty and gang warfare form an underworld of sleaze and violence, enticing many hopefuls before slowly dragging them under. In an effort to find something besides "hardness and hitting out, and twisted people all afraid", Tommy turns to narcotics, and thus creates his own world: one in which he is not constantly gnawed by an acute awareness of the meaninglessness of what is going on around him. He meets Alice, in whom he sees his life-long search for beauty: the rose behind the hard brick city. He knows that he has only touched this beauty for an instant, and he sees it moving farther away from him. At last, in a final escape from the squalor around him, he takes an overdose of narcotics, and ends his search. The Brick and The Rose introduces 46 characters who live in the shadow of the city – workers, immigrants, teachers and drug lords – and races through 20 years in the life of Tommy De Santo in just under an hour.

The Brick and the Rose was originally produced in 1957 at the Ivar Theatre (now part of the LA Film School), in Hollywood, California and by the Los Angeles Chapter of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). It went on to become the first presentation of the CBS Television Workshop, an anthology series, in 1960.

Cast: 3 female, 7 male

About the Playwright:

Lewis John Carlino (1932-2020) was an American director, screenwriter, and playwright. He first gained attention as a novelist and off-Broadway playwright. He worked as a director and screenwriter on a number of movies during a career which has spanned five decades. He was nominated for many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and is best known as the writer and director of The Great Santini that starred Robert Duvall as a bullying U.S. Marine Corps pilot.