Wrapping around a corner in Times Square, the storefront had been hidden in plain sight since the tail end of winter, when so much of the city’s creative life shut down, locked up and headed home to wait out the coronavirus. The playwright, director and puppet designer Robin Frohardt, best known for a delectable little piece of puppet theater called “The Pigeoning,” had been putting the finishing touches on a new show inside. Part art installation, part immersive puppet play, “The Plastic Bag Store” was meant to open in March, its space tricked out to look like an eco-warrior parody of a well-stocked grocery. Audiences would have been welcome to touch the faux merchandise (brightly colored replicas of fruits and vegetables, bakery items and more, all made from plastic waste), and invited to help arrange the seating at performance time. Puppeteers would have crowded close together to enact Frohardt’s wry dreamscape of a comedy, with shadow puppets to tell the bit that takes place in the ancient past, and bunraku puppets for the parts set in the contemporary world and the far-off future.

Source: New York Times November 01, 2020 19:56 UTC