a science-fiction myth for a post-human future
World Premiere · La MaMa Puppet FestivalNew York City · November 2026
What seeds of humanity survive each new form,
and what will we ache to remember?
In the next century, the human body is a cage. The state outlaws the technologies that could save Syx from the disorder slowly dissolving their bones — so half a mile beneath the city, in a club no one is watching, they unfold an illegal spider-limbed carapace and dance. But a body can only be carved so far. Syx’s hunger for a new form pulls them down into the last wild place on Earth — the deep Atlantic — toward a commune of the transformed and its ancient, many-armed prophet, who offers a wholeness that may cost Syx the only thing they cannot give up…
From Brooklyn puppet artist Monica Lerch and writer Jeshua Bratman, Endless Forms is a handmade science-fiction myth that uses tabletop and shadow puppetry, onstage transformation, and a pulsing electronic score to ask what remains human when the body is left behind — and what we will ache to remember.
There’s grandeur in this view of life
which first blew into one form or a few…
from so simple a beginning
forms most wonderful are being evolved
Part of the La MaMa Puppet Festival — La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York City.
Quiet colonies rooted
where others found unsuitable…
birthing new forms, new kin,
and new kinds of tenderness
Endless Forms grew from a collaboration between Brooklyn-based puppet artist Monica Lerch and writer Jeshua Bratman, who discovered they had been independently exploring strikingly similar questions about transformation, embodiment, technology, and myth. Lerch’s work as a director, performer, and fabricator investigates the expressive possibilities of bodies through puppetry and visual theater. Bratman brings a background in comedy, cognitive science, and speculative fiction to stories about intelligence, evolution, and the strange futures of being human. Together with a collaborative ensemble of puppeteers, designers, and fabricators, they create handmade science-fiction myth rooted in embodiment, live transformation, and the question of what remains human as forms keep changing.
A work-in-progress version was presented through the La MaMa Puppet Festival’s Jump Start Program in October 2024.