Great Small Works
Through puppetry and toy theatre, Great Small Works productions reanimate the public sphere and participation in democratic life.
Since 1995, the collective has engaged audiences with political and avant garde work. They take the stage in theaters, clubs, schools, galleries, streets, and other community centers to address contemporary issues, such as the culture of fear, fundamentalism, and conceptions of evil.
Based in New York City, the company continues the twenty-eight year-old tradition of Spaghetti Dinners, variety evenings (founded on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s by veterans of Vermont’s Bread & Puppet Theater) that include music, live performance, political discourse, and vegetarian spaghetti.
Their Rapture Project (2007) is a serio-comic epic spectacle about fundamentalism and American culture and politics. Inspired by rough-and-tumble Sicilian marionettes, current events, popular End Times literature, The Rapture Project brings together tabloid newspaper stories, popular literature about Armageddon, and fundamentalist iconography to create an epic spectacle following an unlikely cast of characters from the USA to the Middle East and beyond.
