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$18 per person
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About the Show
Great Small Works’s We Love Trees celebrates activism, the power of the people, and the beauty and wisdom of trees — using their signature blend of powerful DIY aesthetics, paper tabletop puppets, and dynamic live music.
Watch community organizers score a victory over urban developers. Trace the history of one Somerville tree and its kin, from 10,000 BCE to the present. Cheer for a poor but clever family as they trick a miser into parting with some of his riches.
Lead performers are local legends John Bell and Trudi Cohen, alumni of Bread and Puppet Theater and among the co-founders of the HONK Festival in Somerville, in collaboration with musician-puppeteers Marji Gere (violin), Dan Sedgwick (piano), and Gregory Corbino (accordion).
Daytime Program, for family audiences:
- Lyzer the Miser
- Spectacular Superlatives
- We Love Trees
- Plus musical interludes performed on piano, violin, and accordion
All ages welcome, recommended for 4+
Evening Program:
- Living Newspaper, Episode Two: Sidewalk Ballet
- Spectacular Superlatives
- We Love Trees
- Plus musical interludes performed on piano, violin, and accordion
Recommended for adults & teens 13+, but all ages are welcome.
Lyzer the Miser
Based on a Yiddish story by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Created by John Bell & Trudi Cohen
In this comic tale, a poor and clever family tricks a rich and greedy miser into parting with some of his riches and, with the help of the wise Rabbi, teaches a lesson in generosity.
Tabletop paper puppets / “toy theater”
Afternoon shows only
Living Newspaper, Episode Two: Sidewalk Ballet
Created and performed by John Bell and Trudi Cohen of Great Small Works
A paper theater play inspired by the conflict in the mid-1960s in New York City between developer Robert Moses and community activist Jane Jacobs. The words of biblical Moses himself help us understand the importance of public space. Spoiler alert: community activists win, and Washington Square Park is saved!
Tabletop paper puppets / “toy theater”
Evening shows only
Spectacular Superlatives
Created by Gregory Corbino
A participatory celebration of the living wonders of the earth! Sing along with appreciation for the fragility and beauty of the world as this “crankie” — a traditional scrolling picture puppetry form — introduces us to some of the fantastic animals & plants that populate our planet.
Scrolling image / “crankie”
Afternoon and evening shows
We Love Trees
Created by John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Marji Gere and Dan Sedgwick
Trace the history of one Somerville tree and its kin — from 10,000 BCE to the present! This story of a magnificent copper beech tree and the importance of the urban canopy was inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, Stevie Wonder’s 1979 album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, and the Somerville Public Library archives.
Tabletop paper puppets / “toy theater”
Afternoon and evening shows
About the Artists
Trudi Cohen and John Bell are theater makers, puppeteers, festival organizers, musicians, and founding members of Great Small Works, a visual theater collective created in 1995 in New York City, whose six members share roots in Bread and Puppet Theater. Its members are now dispersed, with outposts in Brooklyn, NY's Hudson Valley, Montreal, and Cambridge, MA. Bell and Cohen anchor the New England base in Massachusetts.
John Bell is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut. He was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1976 to 1986; and received his doctoral degree in theater history from Columbia University in 1993. He is a respected scholar in the field of puppet theater, whose writing includes American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000). He edited Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT Press, 2001), and co-edited with Dassia Posner and Claudia Orenstein The Routledge Guide to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014). He is an editor of Puppetry International, the publication of the U.S. branch of the Union Internationale de la Marionnette; an organizer of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts; and a trombonist in the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band. He received the 2011 Research Prize from the Institut International de la Marionette in Charleville-Mezieres, France; and the Puppeteers of America's 2019 George Latshaw Award for puppet scholarship.
Trudi Cohen was a full-time member of Bread and Puppet Theater's resident company in Vermont for 10 years, and has performed as puppeteer in productions directed by Peter Schumann, Janie Geiser, Amy Trompetter and David Neumann. She was Director of Great Small Works' 2008, 2010, 2013 and 2020 (online) International Toy Theater Festivals and has curated dozens of the company’s Spaghetti Dinner events. She plays bass drum with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and is a founder and organizer of the HONK! Festival in Somerville, MA. She was secretary of the Board of UNIMA-USA for 6 years.
Together, Bell and Cohen received Puppet Showplace Theater's 2014 Paul Vincent Davis Award for artistry and mentorship; and New England Foundation for the Arts' 2017 Rebecca Blunk Award for outstanding New England artists.
Marji Gere (violin, puppetry) and Dan Sedgwick (piano, puppetry) first played music together at the Apple Hill Summer Chamber Music Festival in Nelson, NH, some time around the turn of the millennium. In the ensuing decades they have collaborated on numerous artistic projects, performing chamber music with ensembles large and small, creating original pieces of chamber music theater, co-piloting the music and puppetry collective known as An Exciting Event, and directing Around Hear, a free concert series and educational program in the Mystic River Development, a public housing facility of Somerville, MA. They are currently co-directors of the music program at Dublin School, Dublin, NH.
Greg Corbino (Brooklyn, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist, puppeteer and educator whose work investigates how object performance crafted from plastic detritus and engaged by community can create queer ecologies of care and action in public space. His work is deeply invested in nature and aspires to be an act of repair, creating puppets from materials collected from New York shorelines to draw attention to the calamitous environmental impact of the plastics industry. Gregory is a long-time collaborator with Peter Schumann and Bread and Puppet Theater and has also worked with Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok, Reverend Billy, Savitri D and The Stop Shopping Choir, Xaviera Simmons, Sanford Biggers, Cecilia Vicuña, Amy Trompetter, and Cathy Weis, among others. His work has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the High Line, the Queens Museum, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Smithsonian Institution. Residencies have included QueerLab (Rome), Isadora Duncan Dance Center (Greece), and Togo Village Art Museum (Taiwan). He graduated from Emerson College in 2007.
Great Small Works’ programs are made possible by support from the Somerville Arts Council, the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
