Students at Emerson College will present a cornucopia of innovative and occasionally outrageous experimental new works for puppet theater in the "Low-Budget Love Fest of Puppet Doom!" on Friday and Saturday, April 28 and 29 at 8 p.m.

Performances are at Emerson College's Greene Theatre in Emerson's Tufte Performance and Production Center at 10 Boylston Place (off Boylston Street between Tremont and Charles Streets) in the Theatre District. Both performances are free and open to the public.

The students of Emerson College's Puppet Workshop, under the direction of puppet professor John Bell and with the guidance of Sara Peattie of Puppeteers' Cooperative and Stephen Kaplin of Great Small Works, will premiere new works for handpuppets, toy theater, and object theater on a variety of stages and in an assortment of entertaining forms.

"Low-Budget Love Fest of Puppet Doom!" includes such new works as:

• The Cat Who Came to Dinner, in which handpuppet humans and animals play "get the guest."
• Yo! Yo! RoJo!, in which bluesman Robert Johnson's artistic crisis is solved by a Faustian bargain with hiphop devils.
• Child Soldiers in Uganda - a docu-puppet fantasy contrasting the realities of present-day war in Uganda with the idyllic life of children in North America.
• The Same Old Story, the Boston toy theater premiere of Italian playwright Franca Rame's gothic folktale about a girl and her foul-mouthed doll.
• Ginsberg on Democracy, in which Allen Ginsberg, Donald Trump, Teddy Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi meet in a cafe to discuss life and art.
• Gay Pirates on Ice, a handpuppet love story about a pirate Elephant who discovers love in Antarctica.
• The Cry of a Mermaid in Love, an autobiographical toy theater version of a family history of emigration across the Mediterranean.

The members of the Emerson Puppet Workshop include: Brendan Boland, Shannon Clouter, Nick Fenster, Leslie Guyton, Juliet Olivier, Susan Perkins, Katherine Perry-Lorentz, April Ranger, Colin Summers, Corrie Tritzand Julianna Zarzycki. 

For information, call 617-599-3250.

-- OnStage Boston

04/27/06