INTERVIEW: New puppet play documents business closing in changing neighborhood

The creative team known as Eat Drink Tell Your Friends are set to premiere a new puppet play as part of The Tank’s Flint & Tinder series in New York City. Photo & Supply follows Phyllis, a woman who works at a photo development shop and sees the neighborhood around her changing and disintegrating.

Photo & Supply begins performances Thursday, March 16 at The Tank on West 46th Street and runs through April 2. The production is the brainchild of Andy Manjuck, Rachel Schapira and Ashur Rayis, the three creatives who make up Eat Drink Tell Your Friends. All three are credited with creating the show, while Manjuck directs the piece.

“The show takes place almost entirely in our main character Phyllis’ photo development shop and starts out kind of business as usual, and then we start to see a little bit of a change as she finds out that her business is closing not by any choice of her own but just as part of a larger change happening in her neighborhood,” Rayis said recently in a phone interview.

Through intricate puppetry, the audience will be able to follow Phyllis’ tribulations and see how the neighborhood is not the same old neighborhood anymore.

The changes, Rayis said, are of the realistic and magical kind. The shop closes for economic reasons, but the boxes in the shop protest and begin to unpack themselves. The pressures of the outside world and the long-forgotten photographs of her shop begin to combine into one narrative about community and collective memory.

“It was important for us to try to find a way to illustrate those complicated themes, but it was easier than it might have been, mostly because of it taking place in a photo shop, which is really interesting to us as a place where these physical memories exist kind of in a moment where photos and media are turning into intangible things,” Rayis said. “We were really interested in the stuff, like the things you can touch and feel, and what happens when one person is left with a lot of that — that people haven’t even claimed. Like how are they responsible for that, and how do they deal with that. So that’s where I think we really had fun getting into that and finding ways to animate and take audiences through that sort of process both externally and internally with the character.”

Schapira said the process of creating Photo & Supply was extensive and took years to develop. When the team had an original idea that they wanted to explore, they would begin building the puppets from scratch.

“We built Phyllis, the main character, pretty much right away from some sketches and some ideas we had about the kind of person that she was, and also what she needed to be able to do because when you make a puppet it’s about the way you want them to feel and also about the actions that they need to be able to take physically,” Schapira said. “We made Phyllis and a couple of other characters that were very exciting to us first, and then, for the most part, everything else has come from development and play both in writing, discussion and in workshopping and rehearsing.”

Eat Drink Tell Your Friends is a non-hierarchical company in which ideas are shared and receive equal weight. Inevitably duties are divvied up according to each of the creatives’ unique skill sets. Along those lines, Schapira designed the physical objects, while Manjuck focused on the performance aspect. Rayis took the helm of the story and tech side. “We all kind of fill in those gaps with each other and check on each other and help each other,” Rayis said.

Schapira added: “Because it’s a small company and because we like to work with performers and technicians who we know, we end up having a lot of trust with them and using a lot from the other puppeteers that we bring in because they have a lot of great ideas.”

Scenes from Photo & Supply have been performed over the years, but this will be the premiere production of the entire show. For these puppeteers, it’s always a difficult choice to mount a show and say it’s complete. “It’s never ready,” Rayis said. “We could work on it forever, so it’s ready when it has to happen when we get a chance to do it. And then we do it. … I think we figure out what seems like an honest, finished product for the situation we’re in.”

The artists behind Eat Drink Tell Your Friends are not exclusively puppeteers. They are involved in several media, but their common love for telling stories with puppets and masks binds them together.

“I think we’ve all been working in theater for a long time,” Schapira said. “So when I moved to New York, and I found this existing puppetry community, it made a lot of sense to work a lot in that medium because it combined my interest in theater and storytelling with this very beautiful visual and making medium. … Visual storytelling appeals to us and those things that can come through very vibrantly in puppetry.”

Above all else, for the team behind Eat Drink Tell Your Friends, there’s a hope that the audience will appreciate their careful handling of the main character, Phyllis. “We’ve been really trying to find a place where we can show her in these difficult situations while being careful with her and handling her in the moment she’s in really tenderly,” Rayis said. “We’re really interested in this idea of her business as a community space and a point of contact for her community, and looking around especially where we are in Brooklyn and New York, we see these small businesses closing constantly and these points of contact kind of disappearing from these neighborhoods. And I think if we manage to start a conversation with audiences and form our own artistic point of contact, that’s going to be a really good feeling for us.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Photo & Supply, a production of Eat Drink Tell Your Friends, begins performances Thursday, March 16 at The Tank at 151 W. 46th St. in New York City. The show is part of the Flint & Tinder series. Click here for more information and tickets.