Brad Erickson

THE OCEAN WE SWIM IN tells a story of two closeted gay artists (a writer and a painter), real people, who lived at different times in the same historic home, deep in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. I, another gay artist, live in that home today, and I have felt their presence (not literally but truly enough) since moving here several years ago. While the incidents in the play are fictional, the gay artists are inspired by historical people. The other characters are fictional.

The story is set in two time periods, the near past (2021) and the summer of 1946. The setting is the Lowcountry of South Carolina, in and around the city of Charleston. The play uses five actors to embody nine characters. To accommodate the extensive flashback, all actors are double-cast except the actor playing the nearly 100 year old artist.

Sammy, the nearly 100 year old painter, is being interviewed for a biographical profile to be included the catalog of his centennial retrospective soon to be mounted by the city’s art museum. His interviewer, Kent, is an art critic in his mid-50s who recently abandoned his high-profile job in California to turn up, strangely, in the Deep South. It’s quickly clear that Kent is running from something he wants to hide and that Sammy has a story to tell, if he can be assured the “context” will be appreciated and included. The two face off in a struggle using the old Cold War strategy of “mutual assured destruction.” The story which has haunted Sammy for three-quarters of a century must be told. The story that has driven Kent from California must be kept secret. Each has the power to restore or destroy the other.

The play wrestles with race in America, especially the South, and (white) society’s changing stance. The story looks at cultural appropriation, at the question of “gaze,” at who is allowed to tell what stories. The play asks, how do we judge the past? By whose standards? Who is culpable, and for what? Is there such a thing as redemption? Is it ever earned? How do we free the ghosts inside us?

KANSAS it the story of a Midwestern family where the recent suicide of the father has sparked a conflagration of recrimination and turmoil. Gathered after the funeral, the three sons try to make sense of the senseless situation. “It’s got to be somebody’s fault!” cries the youngest. But whose? Pushed apart by their own life choices and the tornado of politics, the brothers fight to make peace with the past and each other.

MILAGRO - Synopsis
On a rustic stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast (think Night of the Iguana) we find three American couples—one straight, one lesbian, one gay—and a handsome young Mexican artist. The action conjures A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but if the youths in the Athenian woods reveal the inexplicable, magical nature of falling in love, these couples uncover the startling miracle (milagro) of forces that can bind hearts through the outrageous fortunes of a lifetime. In the play, Oberlin, an Episcopal priest stationed in an affluent expat community in Mexico for 25 years, “borrows” his church’s money to purchase a one-of-a-kind collection of “milagros” – folk art depicting modern-day miracles wrought by the saints. On the run, and needing cash to pay back the church’s coffers, he enlists his estranged wife, Teresa, a Mexican national and renowned chef now a leftist working to feed the poor of Mexico’s South, to help him, with his assistant—the young Mexican artist—to open an “eco-resort” on a rugged portion of the Mexico coast. Their first guests, Robert and Michael and Paula and Stephanie, happen, like the Athenian youths, into a world brimming with desire, loss, and almost magical possibility. The play runs about two hours.

THE WAR AT HOME is set in the contentious moment following the first legal gay marriages in Massachusetts in 2004 and long before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision 11 years later. Jason, a Southern Baptist preacher’s gay son returns from New York to his Charleston, SC home with a new play he’s authored, and a wedding band he hides on a necklace beneath his shirt. The militantly gay-positive play's upcoming premiere in Charleston’s renowned arts festival provokes angry protests, bitterly divides Jason's parents, Dinah and Bill, and forces Bill to choose between his son and his pulpit.

A devised work of music theater, Burning Louise is set during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and follows the unlikely friendship of adult roommates Louise, a wealthy San Francisco gallerist dealing in Asian artworks and Bern, a broke gay photographer from New Orleans, on the run from something. Despite their many differences, the two are drawn to one another, discovering a psychic bond that defies explanation and serves to expose their deepest secrets, while offering a key to release them from their pasts.

Burning Louise is performed in two acts, on a unit set, with video projections, a cast of two actor/singers, soprano and tenor, and a small band. Run-time with intermission is under two hours. The piece was devised by five collaborators as part of Z Space Studio's Artist in Residence program. Collaborators include Joe Collins, Actor/Singer, Story; Brad Erickson, Writer, Story; Elaine Magree, Director, Story; Julie Queen, Actor/Singer, Story.

In a consultation room of a public clinic, a middle-aged white man, awaiting the results of his HIV rapid test, is interviewed by a hip-looking young person of color. The exchange veers away from the prescribed protocols and the two find a moment of vulnerable connection.

Recent skirmishes in the culture wars have shown us again the power of words, especially when those words are used to refer to yourself. Who exercises control? You? Or the larger culture? A culture that doesn’t really see you? In this short play, Sammy, a one hundred year-old artist living in the Deep South is about to be honored by the local fine arts museum. He receives an unseen visitor, a new-to-town Californian who has been hired to write the overview on Sammy’s career-long retrospective. Sammy informs the visitor, in no uncertain terms, precisely how he prefers to be identified -- and why.

This play is an extended monologue running about six minutes and is meant to stand alone.

“American Dream, el sueño del otro lado” (the dream of the other side) follows the lives of seven characters, each of them crossing borders—personal, political, transnational. The play is set in San Diego, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and the U.S./Mexico border, during the early years of the Obama Administration, a peak of anti-immigrant sentiment. Tom and Cara, a recently divorced couple, are attempting in very different ways to rebuild their lives. Tom is a successful architect of 45 who has come out late; he’s also the father with Cara of a teenage girl, Julie. Tom travels to Mexico and falls in love for the first time in his life—with his 25 year old Spanish teacher, Salvador. Cara, a business executive who easily controls her professional life, cannot command what she wants the most—her old life back with Tom, who is still her closest friend. Tom’s and Cara’s futures lie across seemingly impenetrable borders. During the course of the play, the characters confront their own frontiers as they try, each one, to cross with their dreams to the other side. The play runs about two hours.