PUTNEY-Vermont Suitcase Company (VSC) is back with yet another zany, fast-paced “winter tale for winter people,” as the theater troupe calls it. This time, following the first two years’ shows centered on the same main characters and setting, The Continuing Adventures of King Wenceslas and his Page Edith is touring the area through Sunday, Dec. 28.
The 45-minute romp features the same basic outline of VSC’s previous two King Wenceslas shows but with new scenes at the core featuring the King and his Page, Edith, traversing “the deep and crisp and even snow of Medieval Europe in their comedic search for meaning and goodness,” as described in a VSC press release — a play that “delves deep between the stanzas” of a favorite carol of the season.
The performers promise “quick-paced physical comedy, stage magic, and puppets, all performed by four actors.”
Matt Tibbs, who has been playing the King since the first Wenceslas show, is back; Saskia Bailey-de Bruijn plays Edith, and VSC co-Founders Dory Hamm and Shannon Ward play all the other characters, including several puppets.
“They’ve become such amazing puppeteers,” says Sandy Klein, a company co-founder, producer, and designer. In a lineup of six characters all conversing, Hamm and Ward work two puppets, each from the middle of each set.
As she did for VSC’s first two winter touring shows, New England Youth Theatre (NEYT) alumna Rosa Palmeri has written and directs the 2025 show.
“Without giving too much away, there’s a young love affair gone wrong, a couple of desperate Christmas cookies, and a giant, stubborn bird — all played by puppets and very skilled actors!” says Palmeri, an actor and multihyphenate theater person in New York City.
Surrounding the new scenes is the “original framework of the play.”
“A hapless King and his loyal Page, bullied by his power-hungry mother and brother, venture forth to bring food, wine, and pine logs to a peasant,” she says. “It’s the classic carol come to life, in the silliest way possible.”
“And there’s a new T-shirt every year, too,” says Klein, “which is cool.”
The Commons spoke with Klein, who happens to be Palmeri’s mother, in her shop at NEYT, where she has been designing costumes and filling other roles for years.
The VSC is not officially affiliated with NEYT, “but we’re a group of people who came up through [NEYT founders Peter Gould’s and Stephen Stearns’] training and Gould’s Get Thee to the Funnery program designed to introduce young people to Shakespeare,” Klein says.
Several involved in those programs as youth had grown into theater work elsewhere: A handful worked on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream with school-aged children.
“We didn’t have enough kids to play the lovers,” Klein recalls, “so we ended up using sock puppets. And we loved it so much that that evening we said, ‘You know, we’d always said, let’s start a small company, a comedy touring company.’”
That was the catalyst.
It was 2018 when VSC launched as a summer theater troupe. Four years later, VSC created a film of its Emperor’s New Clothes script on a shoestring budget in a small in-town apartment. That won a few awards, including two at the Vermont Film Festival.
“We became Vermont Suitcase Films and Vermont Suitcase Company,” Klein explains. “One is a touring company, and the other a film company. They’ll eventually be under the same nonprofit umbrella.”
Since then, with the exception of a season-long hiatus during the pandemic, the VSC has been touring Vermont every summer with a show similar in style to the Wenceslas plays — broadly delivered and bold with ample physical comedy, satire, spoof, and nutty characters — much in the vein of 17th-century Italian commedia dell’arte.
Starting with the first winter show in 2023, the Wenceslas tour, the VSC has been honing a niche in the regional line up of lively arts for the holidays.
This year, as with last, the VSC brings Heedless of the Gale, a seasonal vocal ensemble led by Arthur Davis, to “sing before two of our shows,” says Ward, adding that “we sing carols throughout.”
“Which is very funny in comparison with Heedless of the Gale,” she says. “They come out and sing this beautiful song, and then we come out singing pretty goofy.”
Is Wenceslas Christmasy? The spirit of it is, inevitably, “but there’s really nothing religious about it,” Ward says.
There are, though, Hamm, adds, “some references to Christmasy things that are not, you know, particularly commercial. Most of our jokes are written for the adults: We’re sending them over the heads of the kids. And then we have puppets and all sorts of silliness for the kids.”
“We’re finally starting to fill houses,” Hamm says, “which is exciting. It’s taken a few years to be known, but now we’re at the point where I’ll see someone on the street, and they’ll say, ‘Oh — you live in a Vermont suitcase.’
“We’re starting to have a fan base,” he continues. “The hope was to make it a holiday tradition” as audiences become “excited to see what changes” there are, one year to the next.
“It’s also very comedic, just to have the scenario be kind of standard, but mix it up, shake it up, put it upside down,” Hamm adds.
With a nod to holiday traditions like A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker, and Handel’s Messiah — “It’s the time of year when people want to see [and hear] the same thing — something familiar,” says Hamm, “but ours is not every year.”
He says the VSC is looking forward to “when we hit sort of a four- or five-year loop.”
“Then we’ll start to recycle some of the scenes, and it’ll be the kind of thing that you will remember: ‘Oh, my gosh — I remember the rabbit from year two!’” he says.
The Vermont Suitcase Company’s The Continuing Adventures of King Wenceslas and His Page Edith will be presented Friday, Dec. 19, at 7 p.m. at Next Stage Arts, 15 Kimball Hill, Putney. Tickets are $12 ($5 for those 18 and under), and are available at nextstagearts.org. Doors open at 6:15 p.m.
The VSC tour continues through Dec. 28 with performances in Wardsboro, Saxtons River, and Brattleboro. Admission to the other shows this season is by donation, which will go toward paying the company — a priority. For locations and times for the other performances, visit vermontsuitcasecompany.com.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.