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Past Performances
 "The Box Show" is a fantasy about fantasy. A silent clown, dissatisfied with herself and her environment, is encouraged by an "outside voice" to use her imagination. She imagines a world of boxes, colorfully wrapped and inviting, but also a bit intimidating. The boxes are all closed. The clown opens the boxes, and finds in each a fantasy world, some of which grow and lead her on to other boxes and other worlds. Her journey into fantasy is encouraged by a tantalizing mailbox, but discouraged by an authoritative telephone. They are, of course, the two voices in herself: the one which urges her on to adventure, and the one which emphasizes safety and stasis. Through her fantasies, our clown finds a stronger sense of her own identity, copes with her loneliness, expands her limits and courage, and sorts out some of the conflicting voices within herself. She also reduces the size of some problems which seem bigger than they prove to be. Zeller Bass' clown is a kind of comic Pandora. The boxes she opens contain a tango-dancing snake, a mouse which grows biger and bigger as it eats everything in sight, a small clown who has, literally, lost his head and hopes to find one to fit, a magical parrot, a storm and even a box of laughter.Conceived and Designed by Ines Zeller Bass
 Sandglass Theater came together around "Sand," the first piece of the Heaven Trilogy of pieces dealing with the weight of history on our lives. "Sand" is a dream play, in which the bringer of dreams, the proverbial Sandman, takes many faces. "Sand" is the very stuff that these dreams are made of: sand, like the sands of the hour glass, or the sands of Time itself. And in this dream world of sand, two lovers see their relationship and their self-images played out, and thereby altered. Written and Designed by Eric Bass
 "Dwarf Longnose" is based on the German fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff. It is a literary story, not a folk tale, but, like the Sleeping Beauty of Perrault or the Little Mermaid of Andersen, it has become a respected member of the tradition to which both literary and folk fairy tales belong. Like many fairy tales, it is a story of transformation; in this case, a young boy is transformed into an ugly dwarf. The ugliness is important: heroes, like the rest of us, need to meet their "dark sides" in order to integrate them and become whole human beings. Like the beast in "Beauty and the Beast," our Dwarf Longnose must lose himself to find himself. Conceived by Ines Zeller Bass
 Invitations
to Heaven (1990) "Invitations to Heaven" is the second piece of the Heaven Trilogy: a comedy, bitter and sweet, with music, dance, and Yiddish song. A grandson seeks to redeem the memory of his grandparents, whose unpleasant marriage left many unanswered questions about the darker side of their lives. They were married by arrangement, perhaps did not even meet until their wedding day. He was an artist, a dreamer. She was a practical, ambitious woman. Her money was stolen. Then her jewels. She claimed he was a thief, had a mistress, wanted her dead. He said she made his life miserable. She died. He could not live without her. They had five children. It is Passover. The grandchild questions his grandparents about Elijah, the angel, who turns the hearts of the children to the parents and the hearts of the parents to the children. His questions have no end. He imagines himself to be Elijah, to be the healer of these poor people's damaged dreams. Angel and grandson merge, become one. On the threshold of heaven, he meets his grandparents, and finds the answer to his questions... Conceived and created by Eric Bass
 The Village Child
(1992) "The Village Child" is the third and final piece in the Heaven Trilogy. It is a metaphysical mystery, a blend of old vaudeville and Jewish supernatural tales. It is the story of a man caught between the glare of public life and the dark world within him, the story of an obsession with flying machines and a child who speaks with birds. And it is about what happens to us when we build a ghetto, even within ourselves. "The Village Child," continues the theme of integrating the voices of history in our lives. "The Village Child" is the story of a puppeteer who is trying to build the ultimate puppet -- one which will fly. His puppets range from Da Vinci-like flying machines to metaphors, "flights of the mind." One day a large bird flies through his window and, as he wrestles with it, it transforms into a child, a girl. The man builds a sandbox for her, and she, in turn, builds a village there, out of sand. Birds come to live in the village. It is as if the child and the birds were all recreating some life in their past, and perhaps in the man's past, too. But as much as the man is fascinated, he hates the birds, and can only value them insofar as they further his work. He is caught between his public persona and the call of some other voice -- perhaps the voice of our cultural memory."The Village Child" is full of vaudeville-style theatricality as well as dream-like imagery. Created by Eric Bass
 In "Never Been Anywhere," Sandglass Theater adapted two stories
by Vermont writer Conceived and Directed by Eric Bass
A puppet play for the whole family, "Moth and Moon" is a story of a child alone on a small world, self-sufficient but yearning for something else. It is not until the Moon sends him a friend, in the form of a Moth, that he realizes what he has been missing. Their friendship grows quickly as the child shares his world with his new friend. But, while the child is asleep, the Moon calls the Moth back. This abrupt ending to an all-too-brief friendship sets a chain of events in motion that leads to mistakes, forgiveness and, ultimately, self-awareness. There is no spoken language in "Moth and Moon." The story is told through images and action, with a tabletop rod puppet, shadow puppets and objects, enhanced with original music. Created and performed by Sandglass Theater artists Finn
Campman and Barbara
Whitney,
 In the moment when all is lost, when the ground is pulled out from under one's feet, one thinks of survival. One turns to a risky act, an act which, each time it is performed, becomes more and more dangerous, less reliable, pushing one further outside to the margins of existence. On what then can the soul survive? "The Pig Act" poses this situation in metaphorical imagery and through black humor. The world is a circus tent. In this world lives a small being. It comes into the world with a talent to play a haunting concerto on two sticks. The instrument's unexpected destruction forces the small being to create a new act in order to survive. This is "The Pig Act," a humorous and unusual circus performance, which develops to the point of life and death. Each of us has a "pig act" which we perform, juggling some aspect of our lives in order to survive. It can be just in that moment, when our most desperate act seems to fail, that we find the strongest sense of being in this world.Conceived by Ines Zeller Bass
 "One Way Street" deals with themes of time, memory, cultural history, and the sense of life's mystery. Using texts from Walter Benjamin, the 1920's & '30's German Jewish literary critic, Bass and members of Sandglass Theater create a world of images, in which "a key has been irrevocably lost, but the desire to search for it remains." This is a state of longing, a search for that which cannot be found. It is the search which matters, not the object of the search. The world of "One Way Street" is populated by figures who are fragments of dreams, of childhood, of poems. These characters emerge from Benjamin's texts: the Angel of History, the Little Hunchback of nursery songs, and someone who suggests Benjamin himself but who might be any searcher, any collector of the timeless objects of history and culture. These characters inhabit the remains of cities, the buildings of which are themselves only fragments. Somewhere within these fragments is a key, but one can only wander and hope to encounter it.Conceived by Eric Bass
 An Almost Victorian Christmas (1997) Shadow puppets, sock puppets and a table full of vegetables join musicians and puppeteers to celebrate the Christmas season in the Sandglass way. A trio of vignettes includes the beloved German Christmas story of the Christmas Goose Augusta, in which the opera singer Lowenhaupt looks forward to eating a goose that his family falls in love with and cannot bear to see slaughtered; Saint George and the Dragon is performed in the old style of Potato Theater (see a dragon of celery and romaine hack to piece the potato saints of France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Spain). George (the Sweet Potato) vanquishes the dragon and it is salad for everyone; the Nativity is told in delicate shadows in a historic style for all audiences. Past Almost Victorian Christmas performances have also included vignettes of the story of Hoppelpoppel, Hugo and Claude, and various songs sung by Mr. Punch and other puppets. Performed by Sandglass Theater artists and
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