Hunter Students Named Their Theater After the Brick Prison

In late 1982, he and a few friends, juniors, wanted to write and perform their own short one-act plays. The school already had companies for established plays and musicals. With faculty help they started a new one, for student-written work only, and named it after the building: The Brick Prison Playhouse.

A school can spend years on its brochure. A student can undo it in two words, and another student can turn the two words into a theater.

The first performances were on February 10 and 11, 1983. Afterward, the whole company walked through Central Park in a light snow to a friend's apartment on the Upper West Side for the cast party, and got snowed in. It was the great New York blizzard of 1983. The next morning, he wrote, Broadway was passable only through a shoulder-high trench in the snow, and he made his way downtown to find a working train, with a friend on crutches with a broken ankle.

Opening night, cast party, blizzard, crutches. Most theater companies would need ten years to accumulate that much legend.

In May 2026 the company put on The Brick of Oz, a program of original student plays and a student film, run by student producers with faculty advisers. One play was titled This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. The school says every seventh grader takes a full year of Communication and Theatre, and that the spring festival is student-written, student-directed and student-produced.

I know nothing about the plot of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I have, however, been performing it at home for sixteen years.

Our house also has a nickname among its younger residents. The middle one calls it the Lodge, because of the radiator. The youngest calls it the Castle, because of the landing. The eldest calls it "your house," which hurts more than it should.

Last weekend the middle one and the youngest put on a play in the living room. It was called The Lodge Castle. They wrote it, directed it and charged us a dollar each. There was no blizzard. It did snow popcorn.