Great Small Works has created dozens of original Toy Theater plays, including its news-based series “Toy Theater of Terror As Usual,” shows based on classic texts and fairy tales, and entirely new works for intimate venues. The company has performed recently at Toy Theater and puppetry festivals around the world: the annual Papiertheatertreffen in Preetz, Germany, where traditional collectors and practitioners perform alongside contemporary interpreters of the form, at Sandglass Theater’s Crankie Festival in Putney, VT, at the Festival Internacional de Teatro de Papel in Mexico City, in Charleville-Mezieres, France, a city known for its huge bi-annual puppetry festivals and its Institute for the study of puppetry.
Past touring has included Dukketeater Festival, Bornholm, Denmark, the Jim Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater; Festival International de Théâtres de Papier, Trois, France; Barents Region International Puppet Theater Festival, Oulu, Finland; Fécamp Scène Nationale, France; The Suspense Festival, London, England; Castelliers Festival, Montreal, Canada; “The World Is Flat!” Festival, Chicago, Illinois; The International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut; and at numerous universities and independent theaters across the U.S.
Company members have participated in symposia about the history and revival of Toy Theater, its accessibility, and capacity for thoughtful and analytical content, and a vision for its future.
The Toy Theater of Terror As Usual
Most recent, Episode #14: The Swamp– the latest in a news-based series born during the countdown to the Gulf War in 1991. Great Small Works members , inspired by Walter Benjamin’s notion of culture in a permanent “state of emergency,” and by the political photomontages of Weimar artist John Heartfield, began performing a surreal news serial, entitled The Toy Theater of Terror As Usual. Using excerpted texts and cut-out images from current newspapers, magazines, and philosophical works, the series, now in its fourteenth episode, has dealt with issues ranging from the Gulf War and the Los Angeles Uprising to the condition of New York City real estate and American gun culture. Performed by five visible puppeteers hovering around a tabletop proscenium stage, Terror As Usual has become the company’s signature piece. Queens Museum of Art, Terror As Usual exhibition.
We Love Trees
A production created by John Bell and Trudi Cohen in collaboration with musicians Marji Gere and Daniel Sedgwick, and premiered at Mystic Public housing learning center in Somerville, MA, in 2019.
Living Newspaper–Sidewalk Ballet
This production was about the 1963 struggle between developer Robert Moses and community activist Jane Jacobs. Created by John Bell and Trudi Cohen.
Tales from the Anthropocene
Stage design and direction by Roberto Rossi and Mark Sussman, with puppets by Stephen Kaplin and performed by Jenny Romaine and the company. A toy theater production following the tales of four endangered animals who escape their home habitats to travel the globe in a submarine, finding common cause in cross-species assemblage.
Eisler on the Go
Great Small Works joined forces with new music group Ensemble Pi for the premiere of Eisler on the Go – an animated puppet show on the life and work of German/Jewish composer Hanns Eisler.
The White Pajamas
The White Pajamas, a puppet film commissioned for “They called me Mayer July, painted memories of a Jewish childhood in Poland before the Holocaust.” Directed and designed by Jenny Romaine and Meyer Kirshenblatt with Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2009, Jewish Museum, NYC).
Soil Desire People Dance
A production directed and designed by Mark Sussman and Roberto Rossi, with performances by Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Jesse Orr, and Max Kelly. A multi-part series of tabletop shows that experimented with the format of toy theater, exchanging the proscenium for a combination of flat and three-dimensional elements, live video capture and projection, and pre-recorded video, and lip synch. The project took themes and inspiration from the writings of German novelist and literary theorist W.G. Sebald.
Definitely Maybe
Definitely Maybe, Based on a novel by Soviet science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, which questions the limits of scientific knowledge in the modern world from the perspective of a handful of 1970’s Soviet scientists. A collaboration between John Bell, Larissa Harris and Jessica Rylan through MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
BB in LA
BB in LA, is about Bertolt Brecht’s war exile years in Los Angeles (2000-2003).