CURIOUS CONTAGIOUS by Mind of a Snail. Factory Mainspace. July 8 at noon, July 9 at 4 pm. Buy tickets. Rating: NNN
If you upset Mother Nature, she’ll come back to bite you in the ass – and the assets.
That’s the important but rather simplistic message at the heart of the latest work by acclaimed shadow-puppet company Mind of a Snail.
When a unicorn gets the idea to build a donut store, he upsets the ecosystem of the land the big corporation is digging up to house the business, via a bite from some creature. Through inventive slide projections that show us what’s going on inside the unicorn’s body, we witness the spread of the disease and the attempts by a Dr. Agon (look at that name closely) to cure things… at a cost.
Writer/performers Jessica Gabriel and Chloe Ziner are multitalented, creating the puppets, playing live action versions of the viruses (the least successful element of the show) and scripting the show, which includes some funny things like a talking arrow. They also wrote and performed the accompanying music.
It all amounts to an imaginative, twee production that might work better as a straight animated film.
