FAMOUS PUPPET DEATH SCENES Coming to Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in December

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has announced that the Old Trout Puppet Workshop will bring Famous Puppet Death Scenes to DC this December. Since its premiere in January 2006 at the PuSh International Theatre Festival in Vancouver, the show has enjoyed over 150 performances, playing to sold-out houses from Calgary to Seville. Woolly is thrilled to offer Famous Puppet Death Scenes as a darkly comedic alternative to more typical seasonal theatre fare.

Curated and narrated by puppet Nathaniel Tweak, the show features a collection of 22 grisly snippets from puppet dramas including The Ballad of Edward Grue by Samuel Groanswallow, and The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frot. According to the Old Trouts themselves, "the effect...is like viewing a painting in a gallery, finding an old photograph, or being parachuted into an opera, just at the climactic bit." Famous Puppet Death Scenes incorporates marionettes, hand-puppets, rod puppets, deconstructable puppets, inflatable puppets, metaphysical puppets, and a host of other styles of the art form in a kaleidoscopic showcase of puppetry's many variations.

"I was enthralled when I saw Famous Puppet Death Scenes a few years ago, and now the Old Trouts have agreed to re-mount it especially for Woolly's audiences," says Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz. "This is most definitely a puppet work for adults, and the parade of psychologically complex and original characters is nearly overwhelming. Knowing that they will meet their end-each more unexpectedly than the last-allows us to effortlessly project our own hopes and fears onto their artfully hilarious forms."

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop was founded in 1999 on a ranch in rural Alberta, Canada, by friends Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes, and Judd Palmer. Since then, the company has produced a multitude of highly acclaimed puppet shows, touring them across Canada, the United States and Europe. Among their most cherished productions, Famous Puppet Death Scenes is hailed as "weird and wonderful...by turns comic, macabre and sublimely surreal" by the Globe and Mail (Canada). From The Calgary Sun: "Someday very soon there will be a style of puppetry that will come to be known as 'Old Trout-like'-it's just too good not to be imitated."