Manual Cinema

Love, loss, and creation merge in unexpected ways as Manual Cinema presents its thrilling version of the classic Gothic tale Frankenstein.

Manual Cinema stitches together the classic story of Frankenstein with Mary Shelley’s own biography to create an unexpected story about the beauty and horror of creation. Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive visual stories for stage and screen.

LULA DEL RAY is performed with overhead projectors, shadow puppets, actors in silhouette, and live music. Told almost entirely sans dialogue, LULA DEL RAY is the story of a lonely adolescent girl who lives with her mother on the outskirts of a vast satellite array in the middle of the desert. After a chance encounter over the radio, Lula becomes obsessed with a soulful country music duo, the Baden Brothers. Inspired by their music, she runs away from home and into a world of danger, deception, and disappointment. Set in the mid-century American Southwest and inspired by the music of Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, and Patsy Cline, LULA DEL RAY is a mythic reinvention of the classic coming-of-age story.

An avowed holiday skeptic, Aunt Trudy has been recruited to channel her late husband Joe’s famous Christmas cheer. From the isolation of her Chicago apartment, she reconstructs his annual Christmas Carol puppet show – over a Zoom call while the family celebrates Christmas Eve under lockdown. But as Trudy becomes more absorbed in her own version of the story, the puppets take on a life of their own, and the family’s call transforms into a stunning cinematic adaptation of Dickens’s classic ghost story.

A dedicated team of workers in white-collar shirts and ties assemble each night for a serious purpose: to create and deliver dreams to an unseen Dreamer. Using old-school overhead projectors, fax machines, Xerox copies, and other analog technologies, they create handmade visions that beguile, enchant, frighten, and captivate. But as the night goes on, the Dreamer begins to lose their ability to dream, and the dream-workers find themselves threatened by a powerful new technology.