Toy Theater Festival at St Ann’s Warehouse
One of NYC’s most treasured cultural hubs, DUMBO’s St Ann’s Warehouse presents: the Toy Theater Festival, an eclectic mix of international and local theater miniaturists, both classical and experimental! Don’t be confused: with some programs for the breeder units, it’s primarily aimed at a quirky adult audience. There’s a late night cabaret and everything. There’s also… um… Kamp…
An enormous scale model of Auschwitz fills the stage, brought to life by thousands of 3” tall handmade puppets enacting the greatest mass murder in history, committed in a purpose-built city. The actors move through the set like giant war reporters, filming the horrific events with miniature cameras; the audience becomes the witness.
Even though Nazi-stuff is edgy this year and all, this is squirm-inducing. A toy theater production of a Holocaust work camp brings up the uncomfortable notion of moral subject-to-medium limitations. But, as a conceptual experiment and a toy theater piece, this will play over very interestingly. If Kamp sounds or looks to be in bad taste, look a little harder.
Toy Theater Festival, May 30 – Jun 13, St Ann’s Warehouse, DUMBO
Editor-in-Chief:
The concentration camp theme sounds fascinating to me. They are using scale as part of the show in a most interesting way. Think of yourself sitting in front of the television watching on-the-scene footage of the suffering of earthquake victims, or bombings in the Middle East. You are a world apart watching these tiny figures, trying to comprehend that it is all real, and not a movie. I was a child watching TV when Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on live TV. Was also watching when the first tower went down on 9/11 when the world witnessed people jumping to their deaths and then the collapse. To this day, it feels "unreal" that I witnessed a murder as a child and then many murders as an adult. How many people today can watch newsreel footage of what they found when the concentration camps were liberated and bear witness to that reality when it's so hard to comprehend the horror that happened downtown?
When Art Spiegelman was asked in an interview 'Do you think it's in bad taste to have done a comic book about the Holocaust?' he said: 'No, I think the Holocaust was in bad taste'". This piece of theatre is supposed to be amazing.