Toy Chest:

In Toy Chest we invited the audience into an immersive, interactive environment filled with living toys. As the audience played with the toys and solved their puzzles, they unlocked the story of the Toymaker who built these toys, this room, his prison; a story of lost love, creative madness, and bound passion. The puzzles were of an emotional nature and structured to ask progressively more of the audience as the story developed. Thus, in order to reveal the Toymaker's story and set him free, the audience was called on to unfetter themselves, their emotions, and desires as well.

The Big BIG Benefit

Having been given a day to use the Duncan YMCA Chernin Center for the Arts before it was closed down, we decided to make use of the facilities and put on a show for our friends, families, and fans. The night began with food and drink, as people milled about in the lobby, bidding on items in a silent auction and musing over riddles. When the performance began, the audience was treated to an encore presentation of "Mysteries," the piece we performed at the Around the Coyote Festival in late summer of 2006. Next, we showed a preview of our upcoming production, "Toy Chest," which consisted of an interactive game and a short scene. After an intermission for people to stretch their legs and check their bids, the audience was treated to the premier concert of the Tantaband. This newly formed group, featuring members of TTG and other artists who have worked with us, dazzled the audience with new arrangements of songs from Tantalus. At the end of the night, we announced auction and raffle winners, unveiled the answers to the riddles, and sent the audience on their way with a hearty thank you and a smile. Such a great time was had by all that hopefully this will become an annual event.

Quest Fest 2006

This October, we participated in Questfest, a day long celebration of puppets, drums, and dancing. Andre, our giant skeleton from The Serpent Woman made an appearance, marching in the procession, picking a fight, and dancing up a storm. For more on Questfest, see www.questensemble.org

The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular:

In a mythical kingdom long past, a child emperor ruled his land by telling his people stories. Stories about who they were and where they had come from. Stories about the good things he saw in all of them. The people heard their emperor’s stories and aspired to the nobility he saw in them. But one day, a lie corrupted the emperor’s stories and soon, the land fell into dismay.

The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular told the story of this land—of its birth in the mind of a child, its fall into grayness and isolation, and its eventual salvation through basic human connection—in a three-night, fifteen-story mosaic. We experimented with telling a story through a mosaic narrative, as well as simplifying theatre to its most basic part: the simple magic of a story well told.

Waters Elementary School Garden served as the setting for this epic project.

Mysteries

Mysteries was a musical rite of obsession, pursuit, and loss, inspired by the myth of Orpheus. Featuring original music, and highly physical, the piece explores love, art, and our need to lose that which we desire. This was created for the Around the Coyote festival and remounted at our fall benefit.

The Serpent Woman:

By combining elements of commedia, fairy tales, a classic love story, and giant puppets the Tantalus Theatre Group has created a new and exciting production of a classic Italian commedia script.

The original production of the Serpent Woman by Carlo Gozzi was popular in its time but the years, and subsequent translations, had not been kind to its audience appeal. Devin Brain (director and Tantalus Theatre Group company member) adapted the script to both simplify the overly complex plot lines, and to further explore the darker, more frightening side of the fairy tale archetypes.

The project really got off the ground when Brain teamed up with veteran puppet maker Marc Chevalier. Marc wasn’t daunted by Devin’s artistic concept; take a very small theatre (the Side Studio with a capacity of about thirty people) and place the largest, most technologically advanced puppets he could into it. Marc has created larger than life, fully articulated puppets of mythical creatures that take up to four actors to control.

The combat sequence between the main character Farruscad (played by Andy Kirtland) and the 12 foot tall skeletal giant posed a particular challenge to Lindsey Noel Whiting whose influence can also be seen in the hypnotic fire dance inspired by traditional Indian candle dancing.

Plot Abstract:

Farrascad is a mortal man trapped in a fairy kingdom who must overcome his own nightmares to be reunited with his true love, despite the efforts of the mischievous fairies Farzana and Zemina who long to keep her for themselves.

The Pizza Box Project :

A series of short dream like acts of guerrilla theatre with the intent of giving people the surreal sensation of life suddenly becoming art. This work was both playful and illuminating, giving us opportunities to explore the boundaries of what is and isn't theatre as well as playing with and learning from people's expectations of what belongs in a public space. We performed these pieces around Chicago throughout the summer and brought the project to the Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins and the Around the Coyote Festivals. We were also featured on WGN news.

Slide:

Somewhere between a rock opera and a bar act, Slide enters a world of factory-made beauty, where the inner workings are oiled with blood and agony. It is a journey through hope and horror into the infinite possibilities of humankind.

Springboarding off of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Slide follows an immigrant family’s arrival in an amazing new land of unbounded beauty. But that beauty comes at a terrible price. As the inner workings of the new land's all-purpose factory are revealed, the family discovers that it is their very lives that are greasing its wheels. Broken and alone, one of them begins an impossible journey to make peace with the machine.

Ragnarok:

An end of the world party thrown for a group of mortals by Odin, lord of the Norse pantheon on the cusp of Ragnarok. For this production, we converted the Holy Covenant United Methodist church into a Norse mead hall. The audience was seated around a giant table which doubled as a stage. Odin’s players performed tales from the mythology for these special guests as Loki, a trickster god, sometimes antagonist of the Mythos, and gatecrasher for the evening vied for the audience’s attention and favor, in so doing, disrupting the planned performance. As the night progressed, it became clear that this was not so much a party preceding the final battle, but was in fact the initial skirmish. In the end, the world was destroyed, leaving only the audience unscathed. We wrote the piece as a company, taking great liberties with the surviving myths.

24 Hour Theatre:

On Friday night at 8:00, two writers and a director sat down and began brainstorming ideas for a play at the Munki Haus, a Wicker Park loft and performance space. 24 hours later, we presented a production with full lights, costumes, sets, ect., for audiences. This is thanks to the tireless efforts of a great group of dedicated theatre practitioners who worked through the night and following day to create an exciting new piece of theatre.

Sinister Puppetmen of the Fabrication Gallery:

This was presented for free in parks throughout Chicagoland. The piece explored the ways that a polulace can be controlled through the manipulation of their fears by those in positions of Authority. This took the shape of a playful political parable featuring broad physical comedy and giant puppets. We also performed this at the annual “Around the Coyote Festival”

Dreadful Penny’s Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights:

In this vaudevillian grotesquerie we explore the concept of horror, of experiences so overwhelmingly alien to our sense of what is right and good in the world that they threaten the mind, the spirit, the body. This took the form of a series of skits and acts by a company of the monstrous lorded over by Dreadful Penny, an ancient, sinister and cruel MC intent on drawing the hidden monster out of each audience member, thus bringing them under her dominion, and ultimately devouring the world itself.

Evildoer:

A guerilla theatre piece performed on the streets of Chicago for an unwitting public. In this short public act, we explored what a public will allow to take place before them in the name of safety. An unnamed man, accused of acts of terrorism is chased down on the street, captured and ultimately executed by agents of an organization that may or may not be governmental.

Xeros:

In workshop, we used a series of physical processes to examine the question, “what is it to know a person?” We filtered the byproducts of this work through the story of Eros and Psyche to ultimately create a loose narrative for a performance presented in the Striding Lion Summer Interarts festival.

Agamemnon 02:

Using Charles Mee’s adaptation of Agamemnon as a starting point, we then continued the adapting, including original texts by the performers. In an intimate setting, the chorus of actors took on the principal roles to explore the roots and repercussions of violence on both a large and personal scale. It was for this production that we took the Tantalus name. (Agamemnon was a direct decendant of Tantalus)