About This Show
Amanda Maddock’s Mrs. Wright’s Escape is a full-length puppet show regaling some of the history of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, his wife Olgivanna, his family, and his architecture school known as the Taliesin Fellowship. The show features tabletop puppetry, a few shadows, object manipulation, and live music all presented from the perspective of the Taliesin “apprentices.”
Multiple playing spaces are created during the show using saw horses, wooden planks, wood cubes and rectangles, and fabric, and are constantly rearranged throughout performance by the puppeteers playing apprentices. At the crux of the show is the conflict between what an artist must do to realize a dream and the sacrifices that those around him must make for that realization. Within the show is a struggle for domination between husband and wife, teacher and student, parent and child. The creation of the Fellowship was a struggle itself, created at the height of the great depression, and the resulting dynamic was certainly a boundless source of creativity, but also one of power struggles, jealousies, and personal loss. The show features 4 puppeteers and 3 musicians.
This production is part of the 2nd Annual Voice 4 Vision Puppetry Festival presented by Theater for the New City to celebrate the work of a unique group of New York artists who have been creating dynamic puppet theater for many years but who are not widely known to New York audiences. Theater for the New City is dedicated to presenting cross-disciplinary theatrical works and to developing audiences that support local New York artists; this festival is wonderfully suited to that mission.
Appropriate For Ages: 13 and up