How much narrative can you discern from even the most thought-out gaming franchises? That’s what “Theater of the Arcade” in Brooklyn aims to find out, in the form of stage-play vignettes:

What if Pac-Man is really a gluttonous German burgher out to gorge himself while dodging the ghosts of those he has so callously wronged, à la Dickens?

What if the pilots in Asteroids are merely profane technicians existentially trapped within a corporation that knows nothing more than to send them into the void to shoot rocks, until they become smaller rocks and smaller rocks, until they become nothing?

I liken this in-depth re-imagination to the box art on the old Atari 2600 videogames from the 1970s and ’80s: Visualizations of the game action that were far more fully-formed than the primitive pixelation that the game cartridges actually contained. In fact, those box-art interpretations often bore only marginal resemblance to their game themes. Funny how decades later, these stage productions play off the same narrative-thin videogaming base..