The twentieth anniversary of the La MaMa Puppet Festival starts its three-week run on all four stages of La MaMa ETC later this month, but the festival is just the largest offering in two months full of puppet beasts and visual feasts on New York stages. Many are for just one or two nights, some are free, a few strictly for adults. Below is a more or less chronological listing, starting tonight with “the weirdest puppet show you’ve ever seen” (that’s the subtitle), which is free at Lincoln Center.

Epidermis Circus: The Weirdest Puppet Show You’ve Ever Seen.
David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center
October 11, 2024
Free
Ingrid Hansen, puppeteer for the Jim Henson Company’s Fraggle Rock, makes her Lincoln Center debut with her award-winning spicy puppetry cabaret Epidermis Circus. Using only household objects, a camera, and her bare hands, Hansen animates cheeky vignettes in the palm of her hand to create a gloriously inventive and wickedly funny live puppet film
“*Please note: this production contains sexual content, profanity, depictions of suicide, and loud music. The show is intended for audiences 14+.”

The Beastiary
Ars Nova at Greenwich House
Now through November 9. Opening October 20
Taking the form of a medieval pageant play, this production by the On The Rocks Theatre Co. features medieval beasts who have taken over the Earth after the apocalypse. 

The Prince & the Magic Flute
Puppetworks
Now on weekends and October 14 (Italian-American Day) through November 17
An hour of comic melodrama, adapted from Mozart’s opera for Marionettes with simple songs from the score.

Shadowing Tradition: Tiger Tales and So Close and Yet So Far
Chinatown!Studio
October 19
Two plays that present a new take on traditional Chinese shadow puppetry, performed as part of the Chinatown Arts Festival

Dimension Zero
Jalopy Theater
October 21
A first read-through and sing-through of Boxcutter Collective’s “anti-capitalist sci-fi puppet filled musical spectacle” scheduled to premiere in Fall 2025. 

International Puppet Slam
Dixon Place  
October 23
Artists from at least seven countries show off their best short-form puppetry for adults! Recommended for 18+

Jump Start
October 24 – 27
La MaMa
Four works-in-progress from three countries: Hide and Seek. The Spinner. Cause and Effect. Human.

LOVO
La MaMa
October 25-27
Teatro Lafauna, an 11-year-old puppet theater from Spain, looks at the threat of animal extinction through the story of the last wolf of in Sierra Leone, who’s been poisoned. We see its fight to stay alive, both from the outside, and on a cellular level.

Moonlight Madness
The Green Room 42 
October 27, 1 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Leslie Carrara-Rudolph oversees a Halloween-themed cabaret in which the fortune teller Madame Velveeta starts the show off by predicting madness and transformation with lots of tricks and treats 

La MaMa Kids: Petit Mondrian
La MaMa
October 26 – 27
A 30-minute interactive multilingual (Spanish, French and English) and multimedia performance installation for very young children and their caregivers, which mixes dance-theater with the language of object theater, interactive video animation, live music, and Bunraku style puppetry.

That Paradise Place
Abrons Arts Center
November 1 – 2
An erotic puppet musical about the love, sex, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities, created by the Pussypaws puppet troupe.

The Scarecrow
La MaMa
November 1 – 3
Anthony Michael Stokes traces the origins of the character from Oz to the lynching of an African-American man in the 1900s

Secrets History Remembers
La MaMa
November 1 – 3
Evolve Puppets explores the culture of fear with a  seven-foot-tall doll serving as the stage for a vaudeville act.

Kindred Widows
La MaMa
November 1 – 3
A wordless portrait of a family at a dining room table, telling the story of a woman mute during the last 18 years of her life.

The People Vs Nature
La MaMa
November 7 – 17
Kevin Augustine tells the story of a death-row inmate in solitary confinement who reenacts a court trial based on true events, fighting to free a chimpanzee from medical captivity.

Shinnai Meets Puppetry: One Night in Winter & The Peony Lantern 
Japan Society
November 7 – 9
NYC-based artist Sachiyo Takahashi/Nekaa Lab presents two whimsical and spooky tales: a fable on the friendship between a shapeshifting tanuki trickster and a lonely old man; and a classical Japanese ghost story. Part of the Ningyo! A Parade of Puppetry Series, which includes an exhibition: Bunraku Backstage 

Out
La MaMa
November 8 – 10
The puppet protagonist ventures out of the house and its certainties to explore the world.

La MaMa Kids: Woods
La MaMa
November 9 – 10
Puzzle Théâtre, founded in Bulgaria in 1996,  presents a green leaf that grows on a dead branch, and pieces of wood that come together to form strange creatures, some hostile, some comical

Puppet Slam
La MaMa
November 10 – 14
Quick, condensed works of puppetry

The Harlem Doll Palace
Dixon Place
November 13 – 17
In this play written by Alva Rogers inspired by a true story, an entire world exists behind the pink door of a three story Harlem brownstone, one created by Lenon Holder Hoyte, affectionately known as Aunt Len, the founder of a doll museum, whose dolls seek to keep her alive before the outside world can invoke its realities of life, ashes and dust. 

Let’s not forget puppets on Broadway — Water for Elephants, which is scheduled to close December 8th, and The Lion King, which plans to run forever.