Physical Plant Theatre

Petite-Petite, or Bright Misgivings (TBA 2008)
A puppet show in which Paris reaches accidental perfection while the world beyond unravels. God and Voltaire share a flat and fight about the dishes. Teams of identical Hemingways play water polo in the Seine. Joan of Arc is giving up smoking. Baudelaire runs an opium den. And a wide-eyed walrus arrives in the middle of the nuit.

Kneeling Down at Noon (November 2006)

Physical Plant teams up with St. Edward's University to present this original play about Islam -- or, more particularly, about the lives of a handful of Muslims struggling to find, share, and live their daily faith. From the devout wife of an atheist activist, to the doubting son struggling with prejudice in America, to the secret policeman twisting Islam to his own ends, each character is a lens onto this complex and much-maligned religion. But more than that, the play folds these characters into remarkable stories that undermine, amplify, and invigorate the ways they understand God -- and the will of God on earth.

Frieda & Stanley (April 2005) Two New York talents share an evening of mesmerizing solo performance. Stanley roams the streets in a purgatorial daze, looking for Blanche in cheap hotels, back alleys, and Parisian restaurants. Frieda does her chores and considers leaving her husband; a stranger appears and gives her something she was trying to steal.
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Not Clown (originally Oct. 2004, revived Mar. 2006) photo:KennethGall.com In a time when clowns are tortured and circuses banned, a renegade troupe enacts the story of a girl who longs for their outlawed life -- even as her father commits atrocities on the State's behalf. Limbs rebel against the body. The cram car bolts for the border. And a round, red nose is a dark souvenir.
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The Fever (July 2004) Doubled over in the bathroom of a foreign hotel, a man remembers his privileged past… But as the night wears on, the bathroom floor becomes a battlefield on which an internal struggle rages. Perched on top of a downtown parking garage, Matt Hislope sent this chilling one-man play to the audience's car radios over a low-watt FM radio transmitter.
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The Kindermann Depiction (May - June 2002) From eight feet above the action, the audience observed characters who never spoke but sometimes sang, whose currencies were ice, blood, books, and grieving, and whose engine was the death of a nameless child.
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Anna Bella Eema (May - June 2001) In a trailer park slated for demolition, a girl brings a playmate to life from the mud. Part fairy tale, part rite of passage, the play is a hyper-articulated dream voyage across teh gulf of adolescence. A poetic tour-de-fource by Obie-award winner Lisa D'Amour, directed by Katie Pearl.
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Fatigue (September - October 1999)

A somber and brutal conversation between an embittered piano player and an urgently hopeful lecturer, each in flight from grief. A puppet world--set in motion for the purposes of demonstration--blows a socket into the world of its creator, and offers a fleeting, doomed chance for redemption. Magnified muscle on the walls, blood in the aquarium, and Shubert on a borrowed piano.

The Whimsy (March 1998)

A puppet-and-human play with live music where the artifacts of dreams arrived in the pockets of the wide-awake, where hearts attached on the outside of the body, where the yard-bird spoke and the Moon sang. Pink letters from the past and telephones in the present prompted a search for fish, a longing for fishermen, and an articulation of the ancient urge to die. The live band with original music, the puppets, and the mixture of a confentional plot (in the puppet world) with our more standard cavalcade of images (in the human world) appealed to audiences of all ages.

1414 Fairyland (February 1997) In this one-day-only performance, audience members roamed at large on the grounds of an enormous art house in East Austin. Armed with a hand-drawn map, they exchanged bottle caps with the score of performers for pieces of a tale in which Snow White falls too deeply in love with the evil Queen.
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(once.) (October - December 1996)

Alfred's love of the playpus leads him toward and away from a gazebo (which is ever on fire), where he meets and falls in love with Agnes -- who gathers up the fallen pieces of the sky in her wheelbarrow. In an old Hyde Park toolshed for seven weeks, never for more than fourteen people each night, and always for free, we performed this strange, quiet, lyrical play.

barber, tallman, Cora, clown (November - December 1995) In this joyfully obscure and bizarre mass-collaboration, the tallest man in the world goes for a haircut at a barber shop whose blue barbicide fluide serves as a portal to an invisible, unsteady circus world. An echo chamber of symbols and language as pure and complete as a dream.
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Tiller (January 1995)
Two fates hang in swings above a doomed ship whose captain has steered it into a sea of dreams. The oarsmen pound out language like a heart pounding blood, as the navigator frets and sings. With this play we discoved a space between what is visible and invisible, possible and impossible, and the fates are seized and made to answer for the unearned ill-luck of the ship and her crew.

Digi-glo (FronteraFest 1994)

A single actor moves between three "spheres" onstage to recount a mysterious car trip to Seattle. In one sphere, a driver picks up a hitchhiker who is the incarnation of the driver's failed romantic relationship; in another, a lecturer postulates about that relationship's history and future; and in the third, a miniature clown version of the driver panics, rambles, and represents a variety of inner upheaval.

Plant Number One (April 1994) An imagistic, highly choreographed comedy set in a Draconian office of the future. Inadvertently, one afternoon Employee #16 drops a staple that by morning has come to life and learned to type. The play tracks the staple's meteoric rise to power in the corporate world.
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