La MaMa Puppet Festival Is Not The Lion King
November 2, 2018 Leave a comment
Food for the Gods is about the killing of black men; Exodus addresses the current refugee crisis; Blind is a solo work about disability. These may not sound like typical subjects for puppet shows, but little about the La MaMa Puppet Festival fits most audiences’ preconceptions about the art form, as I explain in my article on the festival for TDF Stages, These Puppet Shows Aren’t For Kids. Below are photographs from some of the 27 puppet shows in the festival, some as short as five minutes, none longer than 75.
Click on any photograph to see it enlarged
Food for the Gods
Exodus
Federico Restrepo with his first-ever puppet, Loca 7
puppets in storage at the La MaMa archives
Ralph Lee, puppet artist
Blind
Everything Starts From A Dot by Nekaa Lab / Sachiyo Takahashi
Don Quixote Takes New York
Food for the Gods
Tian Wen: Heavenly Questions for Modern Times
Wunderkammer
While You Are Out
Advertisements
Last year, James Franco’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to a theater that was going to present Kevin Broccoli’s play “James Franco and Me,” insisting they stop marketing the movie star’s name. The theater canceled the production. Yet here it is a year later, being presented at FringeNYC through Sunday with a slightly altered name: “James Franco and Me: An Unauthorized Satire.”
A man stands in front of the army tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests. A woman helps topple a dictator, with surprising results. A man tries to rescue a child in a plane crash. Another man shoots and kills a group of children, in what he considers – just as much as the other actions — an act of heroism.
Kristina Grosspietsch and Devin O’Neill, the creators and cast of this funny hour-long Fringe show, aren’t content to present the sisters trading insults and trying to upstage one another at the two simultaneous one-woman shows — although I would certainly have been. They create six more characters who are also in the theater that night, in scenes that rapidly alternate with one another.
Edward Einhorn’s latest play is based on the jaw-dropping true story of a quack doctor who became rich and famous in the 1920s by implanting goat testicles as a cure for male impotence, and then in the 1930s ran for Governor of Kansas. It seems apt that “The Resistible Rise of JR Brinkley” was the first play in the first full day of the 21stannual New York International Fringe Festival, because it fully reflects both the promise and pitfalls of a Fringe show.
“I am tall when I’m young but short when I’m old. What am I?”
