Trouble Puppet's The Jungle

The Trouble Puppet Theater Company returns with a fully realized production of its award-winning adaptation The Jungle. Funded by a Jim Henson Foundation Project Grant, this season’s production promises to outshine the production that received such accolades as these:

B. Iden Payne Awards for Award for Outstanding Director of a Drama, Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Sound Design, and... [read more]

The Trouble Puppet Theater Company returns with a fully realized production of its award-winning adaptation The Jungle. Funded by a Jim Henson Foundation Project Grant, this season’s production promises to outshine the production that received such accolades as these:

B. Iden Payne Awards for Award for Outstanding Director of a Drama, Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Sound Design, and Special Certificate for Puppetry.

Places on three “Best of 2009” lists in the Austin Chronicle. Reviewer Robert Faires said “Connor Hopkins distilled Upton Sinclair's novel of immigrants ground up by the meatpacking industry into a sepia-tinted tone poem, made hauntingly human by puppets of paper and string.”

The Trouble Puppet Theater Company’s production of The Jungle is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking novel about immigrant laborers in Chicago. The novel’s portrayal of the unsanitary and inhumane practices of the meat-packing industry, as well as the brutality of working conditions in turn-of-the-century America, shocked the nation.

With family and others from his Lithuanian village, Jurgis Rudkos arrives in America in 1886 ready to work and build a good life. He finds himself in a grim underworld, where the meat-packing industry consumes workers and families as it does cattle. His family live their lives to the rhythm of work—their weddings, births, and deaths never interrupting the grind and churn of the machines, animals, and workers in the packing plants. Jurgis and his family struggle to maintain their humanity and survive in an urban jungle, where the law is not justice but the law of competition and strife.

The concerns of Sinclair’s Jungle remain timely and compelling today; a century after the novel was published, America is still struggling with issues of food quality, industrialized farming and slaughter, immigration, labor, and social justice.

The production employs tabeltop puppetry (inspired by the Bunraku tradition), human performers, and large-scale puppets, supported by an original score and layered sound design.

Group sales welcome! Director/cast talkbacks available for student groups on Wednesday nights. The show will also have American Sign Language interpretation at Wednesday performances.

Those under 17 must be accompanied by adults. No children under 11 admitted.

Weds-Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Sundays at 5:00 pm, Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd., Austin 78722

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