Directed by Laurie Simmons • 2006 • United States
Starring Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel, Tony Nation

An extension of artist Laurie Simmons’s photographic work, in which she stages dreamlike tableaux using puppets and dolls, this unclassifiable musical brings her singularly surreal world to life. In three acts, a cast of puppets, ventriloquist dummies, inanimate objects perched on human legs, and Meryl Streep(!) enact a curiously poignant song-and-dance cycle of jealousy, regret, love, and longing that imbues Simmons’s uncanny materials of choice—captured by acclaimed cinematographer Ed Lachman—with raw human emotion.