The Puppet Cycle: Small World Stories

Commissioned by Arts Brookfield

Produced by Octopus Theatricals

THE PUPPET CYCLE: Small World Stories is the latest from Phantom Limb Company, the New York City-based partnership known for its distinctive storytelling, social engagement and sophisticated visual style. 

As in all of Phantom Limb’s productions, THE PUPPET CYCLE brings an environmental focus to bear, but in a departure from the scale of more recent work (the critically acclaimed Environmental Trilogy), the vibe here is intimate, interactive and entirely local. Working in collaboration with playwrights Jen Silverman and Dipika Guha, Phantom Limb has created a family-friendly bill of marionette plays performed on a solar powered movable stage—a specially adapted cargo bike—that will tour selected locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Each playlet is a snapshot of living in this precious, precarious moment. Jen Silverman’s Frown Town looks at the upside of feeling down, and Dipika Guha’s Elephantasia features a pachyderm who dreams of flight. With characteristic humor and a tinge of darkness, THE PUPPET CYCLE: Small World Stories locates hope in the shadow of so much uncertainty.

CREDITS

Conceived by Phantom Limb Company

Direction & Set Design Jessica Grindstaff

Telescopic Puppet Theater Alayne Kaethler &
Design Eckersley O’Callaghan

Original Music

& Puppet Design Erik Sanko

Playwright, ELEPHANTASIA Dipika Guha

Playwright, FROWN TOWN Jen Silverman

Puppeteers Rowan Magee
Leah Ogawa
Erik Sanko

Barker Matt Dallal

Voices for FROWN TOWN Andy Grotelueschen
Teresa Avia Lim

Voices for ELEPHANTASIA L Morgan Lee
Adrianna Mitchell

Sound Design Darron L West
& Charles Coes

Costume Designer Henrik Vibskov

Barker Consultant Zachary Fine

Props and Scenic Artisan Camilla Dely

Puppet Costumes Erin Black

Technical Director Aaron Gonzalez

Dramaturg Janice Paran

Assistant Director Natalie Nicholas

Stage Manager/
Producing Associate Aubrey Elenz

For Octopus Theatricals:

Mara Isaacs, Executive/Creative Producer

Michael Francis, Business Manager

Bryan Hunt, Associate Producer/Production Coordinator

Taneisha Duggan, Associate Producer

Adam Hyndman, Associate Producer

Rob Laqui, Associate Producer

Kendra Holloway, Executive Assistant

Kelly Letourneau, Producing Associate


For Arts Brookfield

Elysa Marden, Senior Vice President

Courtney Whitelocke, Events Director

Ariana Hellerman, Events Director

Tara Davis, Marketing Director

Abigail Clark, Marketing Manager

Alexandra Axiotis, Marketing Manager

Rebecca Zuber, Senior Production Director

Emily Rolston, Production Manager

Cat Maliha, Assistant Production Manager

Rachel Calter, Seasonal Production Manager

Brandon Vensand, Technical Director

Claire Waggoner, Assistant Technical Director

Dalis Wilson, Senior Financial Administrator

Lindsey Arora, Executive Assistant

Hayden Hane, Executive Assistant

Natalya Degrasse, Administrator

Puppet Cycle Fabrication Caliper Studio

Special Thanks: Cheryl Henson and The Henson Foundation, Josh Luxenberg, Freya and Lark Sanko, and Geoff Sobelle.

COMPANY BIOS

Jessica Grindstaff (Founder, Director, and Set Designer) is a New York City-based visual artist, playwright and director. She has been committed to making a concrete difference in all aspects of her artistic career from visual to collaborative. 

For the past decade, Jessica has committed herself almost exclusively to the work of creating a trilogy that explores human relationship to nature or the environment, through several different lenses with her creative partner Erik Sanko. This work has taken her to Antarctica, on an expedition to discover the oldest living tree in the world and finally to Fukushima, where the tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown of 2011 have devastated a tremendous area of Northern Japan to this day.

Her writing process has been image and collage based until 2019 when she created her first text based play, an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men.  She is currently at work on a new commercial piece of theatre centered on climate injustice and live action philanthropy as well as the 2022 release of Th Puppet Cycle for Brookfield place and a move towards film/television directing. 

Jessica is co-founder and artistic director of Phantom Limb Company.

Erik Sanko (Founder, Puppet Designer, Composer, and Puppeteer) is best known as a fixture of the NYC downtown music scene, having recorded and toured with John Cale, Yoko Ono, Gavin Friday, Jim Carroll, James Chance and the Contortions among others as well as being a 16-year veteran of The Lounge Lizards and his own band, Skeleton Key. In 2006, his first complete puppet play, The Fortune Teller, debuted at HERE Arts Center in New York City. The Kronos Quartet commissioned Erik to co-create “Dear Mme.,” an original music composition and marionette play for the 25th Anniversary of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2007 Erik formed Phantom Limb Company with Jessica Grindstaff, under which all of their subsequent projects have been created, with Erik serving as composer and puppet designer/builder.

With Phantom Limb he has collaborated with Ping Chong, Lemony Snicket, and Danish Theatre Director Rolf Heim though the majority of his work has been focused on creating The Environmental Trilogy. 69 Degrees South, Memory Rings and Falling Out were performed at BAM in 2011, 2016, 2019 with subsequent tours.

Erik has also released two solo records under his own name titled Past Imperfect, Present Tense and Puppet Boy. 

He has taught Puppetry and Performance and Biomimicry and Puppetry at Rhode Island School of Design and Puppetry/Object Manipulation at NYU and The New School as well as workshops in lectures at NYU Abu Dhabi, CalArts and Dartmouth College. When not creating his own work, he is working  as “puppet doctor” for The Lion King on Broadway. He holds a B.F.A. from Cooper Union and has been a closet puppet maker since childhood.

Dipika Guha (Playwright, ELEPHANTASIA) was born in Calcutta and raised in Russia and the UK. Her plays include Yoga Play (South Coast Rep, SF Playhouse, Playmakers Rep & others), The Art of Gaman (Theatre 503, London) and Unreliable (Kansas City Rep). She was the inaugural recipient of the Shakespeare’s Sister Award through the Lark, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and the Venturous Fellowship for her play Passing. She is currently writing plays for Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, and Berkeley Rep. For TV, she’s written on American Gods, Sneaky Pete, projects at AMC and Netflix, Black Monday and currently The Marvelous Mrs Maisel on Amazon. She’s currently writing pilots for FilmNation and A24/Fruit Tree. Dipika is a proud member of New Dramatists and the Ma Yi Writers Lab and is an alumnus of the WP Lab, Ars Nova’s Playgroup, Soho Rep W/D Lab, the Geffen Writers Room, Playwrights Foundation and was a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center. Dipika received her BA in English Literature at University College London, was a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded her MFA from the Yale School of Drama under Paula Vogel.

Jen Silverman (Playwright, FROWN TOWN) is a playwright, novelist, poet and screenwriter. Jen’s plays include COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN 5 BETTIES (Woolly Mammoth, MCC, Southwark Playhouse London); THE MOORS (Yale Rep, Playwrights Realm); THE ROOMMATE (Humana Festival, Williamstown, Steppenwolf, South Coast, Long Wharf) and WITCH (Writer’s Theatre, Geffen, Huntington). Jen’s plays have been produced internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Spain, and elsewhere. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) and the poetry chapbook Bath, selected by Traci Brimhall for Driftwood Press. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, the Yale Review and elsewhere. Jen wrote THE MIRANDA OBSESSION as a narrative podcast for Audible/ Vice, starring Rachel Brosnahan. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Space on Ryder Farm, and the Playwrights Center. Honors: The Helen Merrill Award, the Yale Drama Series Award, the Lilly Award, Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Jen is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for Prose and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for Drama. Jen also writes for TV and film. Education: Brown, Iowa, Juilliard.

Charles Coes (Sound Design) Broadway: Associate on 20 shows including this season’s Junk (Vivian Beaumont Theater) and Lobby Hero (Helen Hayes Theatre). Off-Broadway: The Servant of Two Masters (Theatre for a New Audience), For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday (Playwrights Horizons), The Robber Bridegroom (Roundabout Theatre Company). Regional: Little Black Shadows (South Coast Repertory); Animal Farm (Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Baltimore Center Stage); The Christians (Baltimore Center Stage); Assassins, Passion Play (Yale Repertory Theatre) Tours: Into the Woods (Fiasco national tour); Peter and the Starcatcher (second national tour). Recipient of Craig Noel Award (tokyo fish story), Connecticut Critics Circle nomination (Accidental Death of an Anarchist). Teaching: Yale School of Drama. Education: MFA, Yale School of Drama; BA, Swarthmore College.

Aubrey Elenz (Stage Manager) is a Producer, Performer and all-around Collaborator based in New York City and Austin, Texas. She has a passion for new play development and has worked on a number of workshops and productions of new scripts including Catch As Catch Can (Mia Chung), Dance Nation (Clare Barron), and Sisters on the Ground (Max Posner). Aubrey trained with Fiasco Theater Company and holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, studying with Playwrights Horizons Theater School, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and Stonestreet Film Studios. Her most recent projects include producing and performing in Ranch Water, an indie feature film which premiered at Austin Film Festival and working with Octopus Theatricals as the Line Producer / ASM of Theater for One at the Signature! www.aubreyelenz.com

Zachary Fine (Artistic Consultant) Broadway China Doll with Al Pacino. Off-Broadway includes The Acting Company, Mint, Pearl, Red Bull, Fiasco, TFANA. Regional: Guthrie, Shakespeare Theater, Folger (2x Helen Hayes Award Winner/Nominee), Playmakers, and many more. Directing Credits Spanish language world premiere of El Bien Del Pais (Our Country's Good) at Teatro Helenico, Mexico City; So Please You, Sea Maid's Music, Comedy of Errors (HVSF); Tony nominee Bryce Pinkham's Between The Moon and Me (Birdland); Bewilderness (Playmakers Repertory Company), Dignity, Always, Dignity (Long Wharf), Dennis (Bedlam); TV/Film “New Amsterdam,” “Person of Interest,” “BlackBox”. He teaches clown and games for the Fiasco Theater Conservatory, NYU and around the world. He is the co-founder of Recess (www.letsgotorecess.com), a company committed to building community through play.

Natalie Nicholas (Assistant Director) is a nonbinary, multimedia performance artist living in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Using quirk and playful perversity, Nicholas builds visual experiences that encourage unrepressed expressivity and divine authenticity. Nicholas’ work is both spectacle and heart. Incorporating video installation, clown and live performance, their work pushes back on society’s view of normalcy. Nicholas is now combining their love of film and theater by pursuing an MFA at CalArts with a métier in Interactive Media for Performance and a concentration in Integrated Media.

Janice Paran (she/ her/hers) (Dramaturg) is a Massachusetts-based dramaturg and consultant supporting new work in theatre, opera and dance. She has worked closely with numerous writers and artists, including Annie Baker, Nilo Cruz, Christopher Durang, Beth Henley, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Emily Mann, Ife Olujobi, Dael Orlandersmith, Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, Polly Pen, Regina Taylor, Mfoniso Udofia, Stephen Wadsworth, Tracey Scott Wilson and Doug Wright.  A former Director of Play Development at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton NJ, she also worked for several years as a dramaturg and program associate for the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, both in the U.S. and internationally. She is a Civilians Associate Artist, and the first dramaturg to be invited to collaborate with New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute. This is her third collaboration with Phantom Limb Company.

Henrik Vibskov (Costume Design) The Transparent Tongue, The Spaghetti Handjob and The Shrink Wrap Spectacular are just a few titles of shows Henrik Vibskov has produced lately, each title referring to a different but equally mesmerizing world and set of logic. As a fashion designer Henrik Vibskov has produced over 30 mens (and later also women’s) collections since he graduated from Central St. Martins in 2001, and as a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Mode Masculine he is currently the only Scandinavian designer on the official show schedule of the Paris Mens Fashion Week, which he has been since January 2003. Henrik has frequently been invited to and participated in festivals, contests and talks and throughout his career his designs have won him prizes such as the Becks Student Future Prize 2000, New Name of the Year 2003, the Danish Design Council Award 2007, Brand of the Year DANSK Fashion Awards 2008, an award from the Danish Arts Foundation in 2009, the 2011 Söderberg prize, the highest value design prize in the world, as well as the Jury Prize at the Danish Fashion Awards in 2012. He has exhibited at PS1 – MoMA in New York, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, ICA and The V&A museum in London, The 21st century museum in Kanazawa, Japan, MAD museum in NYC, NAI Nederlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, Holland, The Textile Museum in Washington, USA, just to name a few. He is currently Professor at DSKD and has published four books, including a 2012 monograph of his work to date (published by Gestalten).

Darron L West (Sound Design) is a TONY and OBIE award winning sound designer whose 30-year career spans theater and dance, on and off-Broadway. His work has been heard in over 650 productions all over the United States and internationally in 17 countries. nationally and internationally on Broadway and off. Additional honors include the Drama Desk, Lortel, AUDELCO, and Princess Grace Foundation Statue Awards, among many others.

PUPPETEERS & ACTORS

Matt Dallal (Barker) Off Broadway: Darling Grenadine (Roundabout Underground), Saturday Night (Second Stage); Regional: Fiasco Theater’s Measure for Measure (Actors Theatre of Louisville); Love’s Labor’s Lost (Folger Theatre); Borderline (Eugene O’Neill Theater Center), Three Sisters, Adam and Evie (Living Room Theatre). TV: “Have You Seen This Man” (Hulu), “FBI” (CBS), “Emergence” (ABC). Training: Circle in the Square Theatre School.

Andy Grotelueschen (Frown 2, FROWN TOWN) Broadway: Tootsie (Tony Nomination), Cyrano de Bergerac. Fiasco Theater's Into the Woods, Cymbeline, Imaginary Invalid, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night (at Classic Stage). NY/Regional: Row (Williamstown), The Odyssey (Public/Delacorte), Taming of the Shrew (TFANA), Tumacho (Clubbed Thumb), 13P, Ars Nova, The Glass Contraption, New Vic, McCarter, Guthrie, Old Globe, Trinity Rep, Yale Rep, the Acting Company. Film: Here Today, Coin Heist, Ordinary World, Still on the Road, Tumorhead. TV: "Driven," "Lincoln Rhyme," “Elementary," "The Good Wife," "The Good Cop," "The Knick." MFA Brown/Trinity, Fiasco Theater core company.

Teresa Avia Lim (Frown 1, FROWN TOWN) Broadway: Ayad Akhtar's JUNK at Lincoln Center. Other works: Shakespeare in the Park's all female production of Taming of the Shrew, NAATCO'S Awake and Sing, Macbeth, and Call and Response with the Mobile Shakespeare Unit at the Public Theater. Teresa originated her roles in Peerless, Water by the Spoonful, Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them, and Concerning Strange Devices From the Distant West. TV: “Monsterland” (Hulu), “The Code” (CBS), “Ray Donovan” (Showtime), “Group,” “Blue Bloods” (CBS), “Limitless” (CBS), “Unforgetable” (CBS), “LAW & ORDER: Criminal Intent” (NBC). Film: Dispatched, Take Me with You, All Rise. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and an inaugural Recipient of the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Scholarship.

L Morgan Lee (Bebe, ELEPHANTASIA) is an Obie Award-winning storyteller who most recently made her Broadway debut in A Strange Loop, for which she received Tony Award®, Antonyo Award, and Drama League Distinguished Performance Award nominations. Previous work includes playing the titular role in a musical adaptation of The Danish Girl being developed in London. Recordings: Joe Iconis' album (Ghostlight Records); The Rainbow Lullaby Album (Broadway Records); Sugar Maple Series (Osiris Media). L Morgan is dedicated to being a part of work centering women and underrepresented voices on both stage and screen. For more: lmorganlee.com

Rowan Magee (Puppeteer) is a puppeteer, designer, and educator from Troy, NY, and a curator for the Object Movement Festival, a winter residency and spring showcase of experimental puppet artists in NYC. He has puppeteered on international tours with Phantom Limb Company, Robin Frohardt, Nick Lehane, and Dan Hurlin, and in NYC for Chris Green, Spencer Lott. In 2018, Rowan performed in the National Theater’s Tony Award winning Broadway revival of Angels in America and in 2019, he operated the titular reference puppet for the film Clifford the Big Red Dog. Rowan has designed puppets and props for MCC Theater, Bard Summerscape, Trusty Sidekick, The Dalton School, St Mark's School and Lincoln Center Education. His own work One Night in Winter was co-created as part of Sachiyo Takahashi’s Shinnai-Meets-Puppetry series, has received a Henson Workshop Grant, and is looking for venues! @rowanmagee

Adrianna Mitchell (Elle, ELEPHANTASIA) is a New York City based actor, director, writer, and teaching artist from Atlanta, GA. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Spelman College and a MFA graduate of the American Conservatory Theater. Adrianna can currently be seen in the New York premiere of the 2022 Pulitzer-prize-winning hit comedy FAT HAM at The Public Theater. She has also worked Off-Broadway at Playwrights' Horizons, New York Theater Workshop, and regionally. In 2020, Adrianna booked her first series regular role on ABC's network pilot "Harlem's Kitchen," but you can see her work on Season 4 of “Snowfall” (FX), where she recurs as love interest "Tanosse" opposite Damson Idris. Other Television: “The Blacklist” and "Lincoln Rhyme" (NBC), “Little America” (Apple TV+), “Bull” and "The Good Fight" (CBS), and "Queens" (ABC). 

Adrianna served as a guest lecturer for a Show Business and Self-tape Audition Workshop she designed for graduate students in A.C.T.'s MFA program. She made her directorial debut with SF Bay Area Theater Company (BATCO) where she co-created and staged Jerrie Johnson’s (Star of Amazon's Harlem) one-woman show The Crooked Room, with the National Queer Arts Festival 2019. Adrianna also co-directed the pilot episode of the web series "Life on P.A.U.S.E."

Leah Ogawa (Puppeteer) is a mixed race artist, puppeteer, dramatist, self-detective, and model based in New York City. Raised in Yamanashi, Japan, Leah has worked with puppeteers, artists, and companies including The Metropolitan Opera, Phantom Limb, Dan Hurlin, Tom Lee, Nami Yamamoto, Loco 7, and others. She has performed across the US as well as at the Quai Branly in Paris and across Asia. Leah is a recipient of the Jim Henson Foundation’s workshop grant for her original piece, Growing Not Dying, which was performed at La MaMa Puppet Festival in October 2021. She was a LMCC Artist-in-Residence at the Arts Center at Governors Island until May 2022 and currently a resident-artist at FiveMyles in Brooklyn with the support of Hanne Tierney. For more information, visit leahogawa.com and follow her on Instagram @leahogawa

About Phantom Limb Company

Phantom Limb Company (PLC), New York City-based, creates iconic stories that are built on an intersection of innovation, social change and visual art, with a particular focus on the climate emergency and environmental injustice.  Collaging puppetry, movement, multi-media storytelling and design, this unique integration of social impact and aesthetic is essential to their work. 

They are truth seekers, storytellers and deep believers in the power of collaboration to inspire engagement and action.

Best known for The Environmental Trilogy, over the course of the past decade, PLC developed three works for Brooklyn Academy of Music that grappled with human relationship to nature and climate change through several different lenses. The first, 69˚S. (2011) was inspired by Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The second, entitled Memory Rings (2016) focused on the world’s oldest living tree, the Methuselah and the stories that have emerged over the course of its lifetime (almost 5000 years).  The final piece, Falling Out (2019) is a cross-cultural collaboration with butoh dancer Dai Matsuoka that listens to and learns from the residents of the Fukushima region of Japan from their stories of loss and hope.

In 2019, in collaboration with the students of NYU Tisch, PLC created an epilogue to the Environmental Trilogy, an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men.  This work is a dark comedy entitled 12 Angry Animals wherein masked performers representing 12 endangered species debate the innocence or guilt of the last surviving human in a future dystopia using language and dream movements.

Phantom Limb currently has several projects at varying stages of development. Next up is The Puppet Cycle: Small World Stories commissioned by Brookfield Place. Be on the lookout for a roving solar powered stage mobilized by bicycle that can be seen on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn this August 2022.

The company is most often comprised of a large rotating cast of friends, collaborators, artists, dancers actors and puppeteers.  They have collaborated with Tony Taccone, Lemony Snicket, Danny Elfman, Jim Jarmusch, The Kronos Quartet, Gavin Friday, Ryan Heffington, Jeffery Zeigler, Dai Matsuoka, Henrik Vibskov, Sophie Hunter, Jen Silverman, and Dipika Guha among other luminaries.

PLC could not exist without the generous support and grants from the Jim Henson Foundation, The Rubin Foundation, New England Foundation for Art (NEFA), Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Jerome Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the National Science Foundation Artist and Writers Program, The New York State Composer’s Grant, the MAP Fund, Edith Luytens and Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund, New Music USA,  the Asian Cultural Council and the Japan Foundation as well as being Hermitage Artist Residency Fellows, Robert Rauschenberg Residency Fellows and Recipients of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award.

About Octopus Theatricals

Octopus Theatricals (Producer) Founded by creative producer Mara Isaacs, Octopus Theatricals collaborates with artists and organizations to foster an expansive range of compelling theatrical works for local and global audiences. We eschew boundaries—aesthetic, geopolitical, institutional—and thrive on a nimble and rigorous practice. Current projects include: Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell (Broadway, 8 Tony Awards including Best Musical; Grammy Award, Best Musical Theater Album); (…Iphigenia), a new opera by Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding; In The Same Tongue created by choreographer Dianne McIntyre with music by Diedre Murray; Social! The Social Distance Dance Club conceived by Steven Hoggett, Christine Jones & David Byrne; Dreaming Zenzile by Somi Kakoma; And So We Walked by DeLanna Studi; Theatre for One (in person and virtual) and many more. Octopus Theatricals is also home to the Producer Hub, an online resource supporting independent producers in the experimental and performing arts sectors. www.octopustheatricals.com

JULY 28 – 31 & AUGUST 3 – 7
3-6pm (four shows daily on the hour)

AUGUST 10 – 14
11am - 2pm (four shows daily on the hour)

AUGUST 17 – 21
11am - 2pm (four shows daily on the hour)