the Puppet Co.

Our mission is "to create and present professional puppet theater, especially for children and families, as an art form reflecting excellence in the performance and visual experiences." Our goal is to advance puppetry as a lively theater art in the Greater Washington community.

We present about 450 performances annually with age appropriateness ranging from "0" years through adults. We provide a broad interpretive program including on-going exhibitions in our lobby, classes for children and adults, Q and As (after performances, free to organized groups), and a puppetry research library. We also provide rehearsal and studio space at no or low cost to emerging puppeteers in the area as well as providing a meeting place for the National Capital Puppetry Guild. For over thirty years, the Puppet Co. has been an anchor cooperator in Glen Echo Park. We have entertained more than 2 million children from a myriad of community groups. We have developed one of the largest puppetry programs in the United States, and created a repertory of twenty-eight productions of classic children?s stories and original pieces. In the development of that repertory we have also engendered an enormous cache of intellectual properties with items ranging from character and scene designs to songs and full musical scores. Now we want to step outside of the ?box? of Glen Echo Park and our Playhouse and put those intellectual properties to work. We envision Whimsey Woods, a Story Book Park for young children developed in the mold of those created in the 1950?s and 60?s in the wake of the opening of Disneyland. We want to stress, however, that Whimsey Woods is an addition to our Glen Echo program and in no way signals our departure from Glen Echo Park.