Innocent When You Dream by Zeb L. West, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, October 25 and 26, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

Innocent When You Dream just shrieks festival piece—simple set design, simple-looking props, simply costumed performer sleeping and dreaming on-stage as the house opens. All these things have to be in place and removed quickly in a sequence of similar performance pieces performed in one evening. Then all of it has to be crated up and shipped to the next festival. After the curtain call, Zeb West, the creator and performer of Innocent When You Dream thanked his Kickstarter contributors for supporting the piece’s travels so far.

But that was later. When the performance lights went up at the beginning of the performance, there was a waking man telling us we’re all in the belly of the whale together with him, and his name is Jonah. OK, now we knew this was a piece about insanity, confirmed by Jonah’s incessant talk of the crackers that he lived on that all got soggy so he can’t share any with the audience.

Where could anyone go with this insane premise? Mr. West/Jonah showed deftness in taking us with him with his sweetness, friendliness, and a lot of encouraging talk directly to the audience. The audience was with him from the git-go. He showed a certain boldness as well, spinning engaging material out of the two probably mossiest, most hidebound but eternally fascinating works of literature found lying about inside whales, Don Quixote and Moby Dick. West merged their stories into a lament for all lives and relationships gone wrong. Yes, this show was about love and loss.

Trouble Puppet’s creations always have the quality of imagination in their fabrication, color, and concept. The human touch gives them life. And puppeteers, good ones, know the character they want to give each puppet. All of Zeb West’s puppets were hand puppets, their characters keyed distinctively by West’s character voices. Their stories meshed into a satisfying whole, and the stage was inhabited by a number of fascinating characters, without any use of ventriloquism.

Trouble Puppet Theatre Company member West has taken a slightly different tack with Innocent When You Dream, His one-man show, but he retains their commitment to innovative puppetry, heightening the band's reputation for skillful and efficient production. The audience was happy to render its standing ovation in appreciation. The show ran only one weekend, October 25 and 26 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre studio space. My only wish for this worthy show would be for a longer run and a printed program to give due credit to the producing staff, designers, and the 98 supporters who kicked in $4240 -- 125% of Zeb's goal -- through his Kickstarter page to make possible his production and summer 2013 tour across Canada and the United States.

Video for upcoming: INNOCENT WHEN YOU DREAM, Zeb L. West at the Salvage Vanguard, October 25 and 26, 2013

Zeb L. West is back in Austin for two nights only after touring California and Canada with his one-man presentation as Jonah, Don Quixote and Captain Ahab. Kickstarter supporters and everyone else, here's you chance to see him in action. Two nights only!

Innocent When You Dream

by Zeb L. West

presented by Trouble Puppet Theater Co. in an intimate studio venue

October 25 and 26, 2013

Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd., 8 p.m.

Tickets available via

This play takes place inside the belly of a whale! Jonah has been swallowed and driven mad by having only two books to read - Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. This solo adventure uses puppets, masks, animated projections, physical comedy, and sea shanties to smash two literary epics into an hour of shameless antics!

It's about that rock bottom moment after a tragedy (in this case, Jonah's broken heart) when you decide how you're going to think and how you're going to treat yourself.

About the Artist: Zeb West is a writer, performer, and director currently living in Austin. He is a member of Austin's Trouble Puppet Theater Company and Brooklyn's Alphabet Arts. Recent work includes co-directing and co-writing Physical Plant Theater's play "Adam Sultan." Bottled In Bond, which Zeb co-wrote and starred in with Physical Plant Theater, won an Austin Critic's Table Award for Best Theatrical Event of 2012. 

Innocent When You Dream from Busy Mind Productions on Vimeo.

Zeb graduated from The Dell'Arte School of Physical Theater in Northern California. In the past 15 years, Zeb has worked in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Austin and has toured across Canada, performing with masks and puppets.

""A strange and disarmingly delightful mashup using puppetry, songs, and some appropriately goofy, often ingenious props . . . the play keeps smiles on everyone's faces throughout."    The Visitorium

"West is an engaging performer with a creative, honest and cleverly metaphoric story about being in love with someone who used to love you back. West's heart is so epically broken and the wounds so fresh you can't look away. The pain inspires a ukulele song at the end, which is unquotable but brutally funny."    The StarPhoenix Saskatoon

Funding Appeal: Zeb L. West Takes Don Quijote and Jonah to Canada with 'Innocent While You Dream,' Appeal Closes June 9

Zeb appeals for help via

 to take his show to seven Canadian festivals this summer. Click on the Kickstarter logo to go to the information page to learn more and check on the progress of the campaign, which closes on June 9.

Innocent When You Dream

by Zeb L. West, directed by Steve Moore

 

Don Quixote spends most of this comedy adventure re-telling the story of Moby Dick! See Sancho Panza (as Ishmael) and Ahab battle the white whale windmill! This solo adventure uses puppets, masks, old-timey stagecraft, physical comedy, and sea shanties to smash two literary epics into an hour of shameless antics!

"I'm taking this work up to 7 fringe festivals in Canada this summer! This play takes place inside the belly of a whale! A castaway has been swallowed and driven mad by only having two books to read. It's an irreverent and silly one-man comedy about getting dragged along rock bottom and figuring out how to get out of the belly of the beast, told through masks, puppets and sea shanties."

Zeb West studied physical theater, clown and mask-making at the Dell'Arte School in California, and is a member of Austin's Trouble Puppet Theater Company and Brooklyn's Alphabet Arts.

Innocent When You Dream by Zeb L. West, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, May 24 and 25, 2013

Posted on Facebook by Zeb L. West:

Innocent When You Dream 

by Zeb L. West

May 24 and 25, 2013, 8 p.m.

Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd., - click for map

 

Don Quixote spends most of this comedy adventure re-telling the story of Moby Dick! See Sancho Panza (as Ishmael) and Ahab battle the white whale windmill! This solo adventure uses puppets, masks, old-timey stagecraft, physical comedy, and sea shanties to smash two literary epics into an hour of shameless antics!

Come see the Austin premiere of the show I'm taking up to 7 fringe festivals in Canada this Summer! Two nights only in the small space at SVT. This is my first go at this thing, so the paint is still a bit wet - I have another month for changes and fixes, so I'd love the feedback and support of my Austin community to make this play as good as it can be! Directed by my constant companion Steve Moore.

This play takes place inside the belly of a whale! A castaway has been swallowed and driven mad by only having two books to read. It's an irreverent and silly one-man comedy about getting dragged along rock bottom and figuring out how to get out of the belly of the beast, told through masks, puppets and sea shanties.

Zeb West studied physical theater, clown and mask-making at the Dell'Arte School in California, and is a member of Austin's Trouble Puppet Theater Company and Brooklyn's Alphabet Arts.

Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/373628

Where: Salvage Vanguard Theater
When: May 24th and 25th at 8pm
How much: $10 General (higher price tickets available for those who want to help with the dream)

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Adam Sultan by Steve Moore and Zeb L. West, Physical Plant Theare, March 28 - April 13, 2013

(poster design: Jennymarie Jemison)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


For the committed theatergoer, this was a long-awaited premiere. The blended live-action and puppet play previewed at the 2012 Fusebox Festival. The preview tantalized audiences with its potential for taking many different directions.


The premiere at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre on March 28 satisfied our aroused curiosity with a long sequence of wise story choices. They took us through some surprising ways yet never strayed from its emotional heart. Sure, it was about death, and innovative puppetry sustained all its moods and action; at the same time the production remained light, humor-filled and entertaining. 
 A demanding ticket buyer couldn’t ask for much more.


The play follows the character of Adam Sultan, played by the artist Adam Sultan, through to the far distant future of A.D. 2052 (not quite forty years from now). 

 Aged and infirm, Sultan sees and feels the loss of his artist friends all around him. Seemingly despairing, he collects mementos of their lives and seals those objects into glass jars. His bookshelf fills with the jars. Then one day a half-scale doppelganger puppet enters his apartment, drinks heavily and passes out. Sultan doesn’t know what to make of it; he never does know what to make of it. What’s sure is only that from this point forward puppets carry equal weight with human actors in conveying the story and its meanings.

(photo: Physical Plant Theatre)

The Physical Plant team of Steve Moore and Zeb L. West wrote and crafted the show. In addition to makiing unerring choices in a mature story revolving around death, they incorporated advanced concepts of new puppetry that took Adam Sultan to the edge of theatre and puppetry. 

Completely black-garbed puppeteers were visible onstage. In conventional theatre, anyone wearing black is a technician and therefore invisible in the sense of operating the play and not figuring in the scripted action; technicians are merely making it happen.


The Adam Sultan puppeteers pushed this envelope or bent this frame in several ways. First and most fundamentally, the puppeteers manipulated and changed the human actors throughout the play; they did so subtly and tellingly when they reshaped the postures and stances of the living to reflect advancing age, as for example in the touching moment when they placed wedding rings on the fingers of the lead characters. In addition, the puppeteers removed their black headgear to speak narrative voice-overs at a microphone stand at stage left. With this, the audience no longer held the puppeteers comfortably framed in invisibility as helpers for the story. Attention, audience: they might do other things, so be ready.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .