Inside Adhesive

Welcome to the workbench. Adhesive Theater Project made theater by binding forms together: a line of text to a shadow, a performer to a puppet, live music to moving scenery, and the familiar world to an unexpected stage image.

This page is a short way into that work. It does not repeat the full chronology on the main page. Instead, it points toward the qualities that recur from one production to the next. The company’s productions were built from collaboration across fields and from a willingness to let unlike materials meet in public. In Chantecler, actors, puppets, masks, illustrators, and a band shared the event. In R.U.R., a classic robot drama became a folk opera with movement and sculptural design. In I, Object!, belongings seemed to keep their owners. In NOIR, frames, shadows, movement, and live music did the work of a movie camera. In The Service Road, a Brooklyn park became a stormy landscape of branches, sound, animation, and projected faces.

A few words from the review record

“Nothing short of extraordinary”

NYTheatre.com, on Spring Awakening

“Ingeniously designed”

BackStage, on NOIR

“...shape-shifting visual feast and fresh surprises emerging in each scene.”

NYTheatre.com, on I, Object!

“especially memorable... creative, interesting... witty...”

New York Times, on Chantecler

These excerpts are kept short because the point is the productions themselves. The fuller Reviews page organizes the company’s own selected excerpts by show without reproducing complete articles.

Choose a doorway

Readers interested in craft can begin with the puppet and live-video systems in The Service Road, then move backward to the animal allegory of Chantecler or the shadow-puppet action of The Battles of Coxinga. Those following music can move from the live band in NOIR to R.U.R. and then out onto the stoop with the Brooklyn Jugs.

The complete Projects & Events index also includes smaller works and gatherings: Hysteria: HYSTERIA, Figaro Gets a Divorce, The Devil’s Parole, the IRS Training Video, the Robot Parade, the Farmyard Puppet Workshop, stoop sales, and the company’s tenth-year event. Each is written in the past tense and placed by year, so the site reads as the company’s production history rather than an announcement board.