Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls

All audiences, 13 years +

🎟️  Tickets for March 5th at 7 p.m.

🎟️  Tickets for March 6th at 1:30 p.m.

The show you had in mind is sold out? Try your luck at the door!
Arrive early. If reserved tickets are cancelled at the last minute, we will gladly to put them up for sale.

 

In English and Yiddish
Some elements in French surtitles
French synopsis available

 

Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls is a puppet show inspired by the life and work of Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, two talented and radical American book illustrators who came up with the idea of creating a Yiddish puppet theatre, the Modicut Puppet Theater, in 1925. They were an immediate success in New York’s Lower East Side, merging Jewish tradition, high art, and left-wing politics. Their hilarious plays were subsequently performed to sold-out audiences across the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Using Maud and Cutler’s original images, songs, and scripts, this show is a meditation on their incisive satirical work and on historical models of robust embodied practices for changing social power relationships.

 

Running time: 75 minutes

Techniques: hand puppets, rod puppets, projections, panoramic scrolls, handmade lighting instruments, flat cut-outs, and live actors, with an original music score performed live.

Video

 

Photos

Photos: Erik McGregor

Company

Great Small Works is a collective of six theatre artists – all alumni of the Bread and puppet Theater – that was founded in 1995 to create original performances and to keep theatre at the heart of social life. Great Small Works productions seek to renew, cultivate, and strengthen the spirits of their audiences, promoting theatre as a model for participating in democracy. Drawing on puppet, avant-garde and popular theatre traditions, the company addresses contemporary issues in productions varying in scale from huge outdoor community pageants to miniature Toy Theatre shows in living rooms. The company is invited to major puppet festivals around the world to perform its shows and lead paper theatre workshops.

Credits

Story and set design: Great Small Works

Stage direction: Jenny Romaine in collaboration with GSM, and with the thoughts of many

Music: Ira Temple and Jessica Lurie

Lighting: Meredith Holch 

Technical director: Miguel Flores

Historical guide: Dr. Eddy Portnoy

Puppeteers: John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi, Joseph Therrien, and Sam Wilson

Musicians: Ira Temple and Aani Kisslinger

 

Great Small Works gratefully acknowledges support for this project from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Jim Henson Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Scherman Foundation, the Doctorow Foundation, and the Mental Insight Foundation.

This engagement is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.