Chasing Aimee

Aimee Decker is one of the rare members of the BRASS company to have performed in all three of our mediums. Twice on stage and once on film she’s played Tommy Moore, one of the cunning criminal cabal known as The Watch and Chain Gang. And this season she premieres as Madame Hao, a Sino-Scot kingpin in this alternate century’s … Read More

Backstage at the New BRASS Christmas Play!

Since October of this year we’ve been in rehearsal for “The Christmas Case: A Lady Brass Mystery.” The show opens in Portland’s Chapel Theatre on the day after Thanksgiving and runs through till December 21st with shows on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with a Saturday matinee and one Wednesday performance on December 19th and none on the 20th). It’s been … Read More

BRASS Episode 25: Troubling Times

It is now 1886, and a new Prime Minister is in power. Arriving in Scotland, Lady Brass gets an update from the staff, while back in London, Ponder meets with a retired pugilist.

Depicting a Demagogue

Season Three of BRASS introduces a new character, Lord Trent, a dissolute aristocrat who’s catapulted to political prominence as part of the machinations of the Crime Minister. Before you protest that such a thing is too fantastical, let’s just say that despite current political events, there’s little new in the biographies and methods of demagogues. (Though yes, it’s perhaps true … Read More

BRASS Stacks 4: The Storyteller by Saki

For this episode, we return to the English master of the short sharp shock, Saki, and a delightfully mischievous narrative about the sort of tales children really enjoy, “The Storyteller.”

BRASS Stacks 3: The Mysterious Case of Miss V., by Virginia Woolf

The late 19th and early 20th century were the golden age of the ghost story. Some of the greatest tales of the supernatural were written at this time, including masterpieces by Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James, as well as short stories by such heavyweight novelists as Dickens,  George Eliot, and Henry James. A surprising name on this … Read More

Steampunk Primer: Why Dirigibles, Anyway?

One of the iconic images of Steampunk is the dirigible airship, either rigid (a zeppelin), rounded (a blimp) or some imaginative variant. Along with top hats and corsets, these inflatable aircraft are part of the basic vocabulary of alternative 19th centuries—and that includes in BRASS, where the family returns to London in Episode 1 aboard such a ship, and are … Read More