Great Small Works will perform a selection of their miniature puppetry “toy theater” works: two short pieces, bookending a live music segment. The daytime Mainstage performances will include We Love Trees, live music, and Lyzer The Miser.

We Love Trees is a paper theater play about a  magnificent copper beech tree growing in East Somerville, where the musical Hadley family lived in the early 20th century. This show celebrates the beauty and value of trees, and warns of the decline in our urban tree canopy.

Lyzer the Miser is based on a Yiddish story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, told on a simple tabletop with flat cut-out figures. A poor yet clever family tricks a rich and greedy miser into parting with his riches, and with the help of the wise Rabbi, teaches us a lesson in generosity.

Daytime performances: all ages welcome, recommended for 4+

Miniature puppetry

About the Artist

Great Small Works is a visual theater collective created in 1995 in New York City, whose six members share roots in Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont; the collective draws on puppet, avant-garde, and popular theater traditions to tell contemporary stories. Great Small Works productions seek to renew, cultivate and strengthen the spirits of their audiences, believing in theater as a model for participating in democracy. Its members are now dispersed, with outposts in Brooklyn, New York’s Hudson Valley, Montreal, and Cambridge, MA.

John Bell and Trudi Cohen are founding members of Great Small Works, and anchor the New England base in Massachusetts. They are both theater makers, puppeteers, musicians, and organizers of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, MA. John is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut. He received the 2011 Research Prize from the Institut International de la Marionette in Charleville-Mezieres, France; and the Puppeteers of America's 2019 George Latshaw Award for puppet scholarship. Trudi has performed as a puppeteer in productions directed by Peter Schumann, Janie Geiser, Amy Trompetter and David Neumann, and was a full-time member of Bread and Puppet Theater's resident company in Vermont for 10 years. She was the director of Great Small Works' International Toy Theater Festivals for a number of years and has curated dozens of the company’s Spaghetti Dinner events.

Together John and Trudi received Puppet Showplace Theater's 2014 Paul Vincent Davis Award for artistry and mentorship; and New England Foundation for the Arts' 2017 Rebecca Blunk Award for outstanding New England artists.

Marji Gere (violin, puppetry) and Dan Sedgwick (piano, puppetry) first played music together at the Apple Hill Summer Chamber Music Festival in Nelson, NH, some time around the turn of the millennium. In the ensuing decades they have collaborated on numerous artistic projects, performing chamber music with ensembles large and small, creating original pieces of chamber music theater, co-piloting the music and puppetry collective known as An Exciting Event, and directing Around Hear, a free concert series and educational program in the Mystic River Development, a public housing facility of Somerville, MA. They are currently co-directors of the music program at Dublin School, Dublin, NH.