At one point, the spot on Eldert Street was a dairy plant. Throughout the years, the building has transformed time and time again, from a small textile mill to a venue run by a group called The Brown Note, who catered something called the “Tsunami Bass” experience. “The owner had split the building down the middle. This side was just a warehouse, and then that side was like an office you could enter from the alleyway on Wyckoff. If you were trying to register to get your food handler’s license, you could take a standardized test there. It was a place where you could come take standardized tests,” says Noel Allain about the corner they had found along the Bushwick-Ridgewood border. Now, some $2.2 million later, it would be the home for the new beginnings of the Bushwick Starr Theater, a group that’s been run by Allain and Sue Kessler since 2007.
“It’s a combination of surreal and coming home,” Kessler says now.
When talking to both Allain and Kessler, we were interrupted several times by friends, family, and various colleagues. They had clearly become a well-connected pair.
“When I was first elected, I met with them, and even back then, they were making the best of a challenging situation,” says Julia Salazar, a local state senator who said she moved some public money around to provide funding for the expansion of the theater, registered as a non-profit.
The theater originally opened its doors at, and took its name from, its previous address at 207 Starr Street. That theater sat on a precocious second floor loft. “It had zero visibility from a street level standpoint. You could only go if you had a ticket to a show or you were invited,” Kessler told me.
Nevertheless, they persisted in that loft for over a decade, attracting the occasional attention of the New York Times for putting on off-off-Broadway shows by Jeremy O. Harris, as well as putting on more community-based initiatives, like an eco-playwriting program aimed at elementary school students called the “Big Green Theater.” All of this changed when the building they were renting was bought out and remade into residential housing, shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They plan on starting programming at the new spot in October.
“New Space Same Spirit,” reads a tagline on the new facade. To build it, Allain and Kessler had hired Peter Zuspan, an architect perhaps most well-known for designing a club in Williamsburg called National Sawdust. With Zuspan, the pair were able to transform the rusty rave warehouse, and part-time food handlers licensing testing center, into a black box theater, complete with a green room, office space, multiple bathrooms, and dressing rooms.
The duo have also made plans for a play library that has yet to open. “You go to drama school and then end with plays and everyone you know has the same ones,” says Allain, recalling a bookshelf in their old office where they first started the idea. “We have a few different ways that we feel like it could work,” says Allain, possibly starting with a simple ‘Take-a-Book, Leave-a-Book’ system.
“Smaller art entities in communities know that their role is not to [just] present the arts… it’s also about providing the community resources they don’t have,” Zuspan tells me about this.
The new space feels almost modern industrial, a kind of “minimalist steampunk” if you will, riffing off the local geography of car garage repair shops in the area. The mint green-colored half wall, a finishing touch, feels soothing, yet playful. Zuspan is modest about his contributions.
“They led all of [the design process]. I was there to listen,” says Zuspan.
The $2.2 million needed to pay him and build this was funded, in part, by taxpayers. Allain says their connections helped.
“It wasn’t like we were knocking the door introducing ourselves. They knew us, they have been supporting us,” said Allain, pointing to their support from district representatives, state senators, and their own board members, led by software developer Michael Contini and Gita Deo, a McKinsey consultant.
Though still tying in some loose ends, like building a marquee, the theater plans to kick things off next month with the premiere of “A Woman Among Women,” the latest play from Julia May Jones, mostly well-known for her 2022 novel Vladimir. But Kessler is looking beyond just filling the stage.
“We’re excited to partner with local businesses… maybe a gallery or a pop-up, food or coffee or merchants,” she says.
The Bushwick Starr is now located at 419 Eldert Street.
Photos taken by Moses Jeanfrancois for Bushwick Daily.
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