GREAT SMALL WORKS was founded in 1995 as a collective of artists who keep theater at the heart of social life. Drawing on folk, avant-garde, and popular theater traditions to address contemporary issues, the company performs in theaters, clubs, schools, galleries, streets, and other community centers. Based in New York,
they produce performance works on a wide variety of scales, from outdoor pageants with giant puppets and hundreds of performers from diverse communities to miniature “toy theater” spectacles. At a variety of New York venues, the company continues to produce the forty year-old tradition of Spaghetti Dinners, variety evenings (founded on the Lower East Side by veterans of Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater) that include music, live performance, political discourse, and vegetarian spaghetti.
Great Small Works has been influential in the North American revival of the toy theater genre and has produced ten international festivals, presenting performing and visual artists working with the form, most recently in 2015 at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The company has offered toy theater creation workshops to groups ranging from kids to adults, incarcerated youth, professional puppeteers, graduate students, and teachers. The company’s members are John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi, and Mark Sussman.
