Brick Cafe on 33rd Street in Astoria may not have the pedigree of Paris’ famed Café de Flore. But on the right day you can still find yourself next to a critically acclaimed theater director or someone who has chatted with a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer about how to pronounce “Hiroshima.”

Carl Forsman happens to be both. The amiable Astoria resident and Brick Cafe habitue is a founding member and artistic director of the off Broadway theater group Keen Company, where he develops projects and directs productions. In its sixth year, the award winning company recently moved into a permanent home at the Harold Clurman Theater near Times Square.

The current season recently opened with an adaptation of Matthew Burnett’s adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s last novel, “Theophilus North,” a story of a young man who leaves his job as a teacher to find adventure, only to be caught up in the peculiar life of Newport, R.I., to generally good reviews.

For Forsman, Keen Company is the incarnation of a dream, a place where he stages “plays that (Keen Company) really cared about with actors we really love to work with.”

The group’s mission statement is nothing less than to produce “sincere plays.” But what does this mean? Keen Company has most often found its core values in early 20th century works and Forsman cites Wilder’s “Our Town” as an example. “I wanted to do plays that talked about compassion and generosity but did so in a way that was literate and sophisticated,” he explained. “Wilder’s the best possible example of that ethos. His plays are eminently humanist, but they’re highly literate, very sophisticated emotionally.”

The search for sincerity, however, has also taken Keen Company to very different material, in particular its two docu dramas, staged productions based on actual people and events. Last season, the group produced Heinar Kipphardt’s “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” about the trial of the “father of the atomic bomb.”

In preparation, Forsman thoroughly researched the subject. This included long talks with Martin Sherwin, co author of the Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” which was awarded a 2006 Pulitzer Prize. The production was a critical and personal success. Anita Gates of the New York Times called it a “play of real ideas, posing questions about moral relativism, the limits of vigilance and human decency.”

Forsman deems it his best work. And for all its political resonance, he doesn’t see the play as a departure from Keen’s mission. “What could be more sincere than a guy telling his own story,” Forsman asked.

His love for the sincere also extends to where he lives. Eight years after moving to New York and six years after starting Keen Company, the 35 year old has only called one borough home. When asked why a person with Brooklyn credentials has kept a Queens‘ zip code all these years, Forsman broke out into thundering laughter. “I’m going to forget that you said that,” Forsman said. “I won’t hold that against you, man. That’s terrible.”