The Service Road
2013 · World premiere · Voorhees Theatre at New York City College of Technology
A violent storm transforms a peaceful service road in Prospect Park. Lia, a nature guide, sets out to find a lost child and meets the strange denizens of one of the few natural places inside a large city. The company described her as a modern-day Hercules attempting to make amends for a terrible act committed while she was out of her mind.
The production
Written by Erin Courtney and directed by Meghan Finn, The Service Road played in January and February 2013. Its theatrical language joined a spare text with a highly visual environment. Inclined planes curled across the stage. Branches moved and dropped in the storm. Live sound effects created birds, wind, mechanisms, and sudden weather. Stop-motion animation opened further layers inside the park.
Two puppet systems gave the landscape its most unusual inhabitants. The Tree Children appeared as projected faces on three large egg forms resting among the branches. A giant toddler puppet carried a face animated from a head-rigged live camera, linking the puppeteer’s expression to a clearly constructed stage figure. A skeletal dog puppet and a pedal-powered carousel added other scales of motion. These devices did not function as isolated demonstrations. They entered Lia’s journey as characters, obstacles, memories, and companions.
Creative team
- Erin Courtney — playwright; stop-motion animation with Claire Moodey
- Meghan Finn — director
- Mike Riccio — set designer
- Tilly Grimes — costume designer
- Sue Brandt — lighting designer and production manager
- Mark Bruckner — sound designer, composer, and music director
- Cory Einbinder — video and puppet designer
- Maria Sideris — stage manager
- Erin Grabe — special projects
- Claire Moodey and Erin Courtney — stop-motion animation
- Natalia de Campos — assistant video designer
- Alice Tavener — associate costume designer
- Andy Buck — talk-back moderator
Cast and live sound
- Cory Einbinder — cast
- Kalle Macrides — cast
- Claire Moodey — cast and live sound effects
- Caroline Tamas — cast
- Mark Bruckner — live sound effects
The production record describes Cory Einbinder playing several men encountered along the route, Kalle Macrides as Lia, Claire Moodey operating puppets and contributing sound, and Caroline Tamas working with the large toddler figure and the Tree Children imagery. These assignments explain how a compact cast could populate a park that felt crowded with human, mechanical, and spectral presences.
Development and response
Before the full run, the company presented a preview at the 2012 Prelude Festival. The video puppet also had a public outing at Maker Faire. Those events document a work developed through staged scenes, discussion, display, and technical testing before the completed production.
“...brimming with design talent ...outstanding.”
NYTheatre.com
The company’s selected review excerpts repeatedly emphasized the connection between intimate writing and visible stagecraft. That balance also links this production to the larger Adhesive history: collaboration did not decorate the story after the fact. The designers, technicians, performers, and objects built the conditions through which the story could be told.
For the full chronology, return to Projects & Events. For general rehearsal-room practice around large puppets, moving scenery, and long technical sequences, read The Physical Side of Multimedia and Puppet Theater.
A park assembled from cues
The setting depended on coordination across departments. A branch movement changed the visual weather; a live sound answered it; an animation opened another image; a performer adjusted to an inclined plane; and a puppet entered on a scale unlike the human cast. The sequence could feel fluid only when each contributor knew the shared cue. That makes the production a direct example of the mission: separate fields were not simply represented but bound together inside the same action.
The park also gave the technical devices a coherent reason to exist. Projected faces could belong to Tree Children because their egg forms sat among branches. The large toddler could be both an encountered figure and a piece of live image machinery. The skeletal dog, carousel, lift, fallen limbs, and soundscape all emerged from Lia’s route. Spectacle followed the geography of the search, so the audience encountered each construction as part of a changing landscape.