In 2004, The Glass Contraption held a series of training labs at Gowanus Arts, a community-based arts space in Brooklyn. Interested in how the clown’s playful abandon could serve as the basis for actor training and as a springboard for creating original theater, we began to train, to teach and to create shows together.

While not all our shows are clown shows, we use this spirit to thrust the performer into the rehearsal room or onto the stage. We seek to capture the immediacy, simplicity, openness and abandon of the clown inside our work -- adapting elements of this form into an approach to training and to creating new material.

Our shows are drawn from elements of our lives and our culture, from discovered texts and found objects, and from playful explorations into the nature of human interaction: a character’s hopes are revealed as a tiny puppet show inside a lunchbox; an opera develops out of gasps and sighs of discovery over the beauty of ordinary things; a collection of mismatched ceramic toy animals and a houseplant become a dreamscape for both performers and audience to lose themselves; everyday stories of triumph and disaster are transformed into a power-ballad gospel musical; an act called “Waiting for Love” becomes a daring feat of bravery.

We lead audiences inside theatrical worlds that look almost like our day-to-day socialized world, but elements are abstracted, softened or distorted, elevating the raw material of everyday life to lyrical, poetical, comical and sometimes epic proportions.