Duality

David Strassman continues to push the boundaries of ventriloquism in this psychological comedy play digging deep into the relationship between ventriloquist and dummy, exploring the clash of ego and alter ego, the conscious and the sub-conscious, and the contrasting sides of the self that exist between man and puppet, and ourselves. Strassman and his long serving accomplice Chuck Wood sit in a psychiatrist’s waiting room and debate the existence of each other, from the pornographic to the philosophical, the comic to the tragic, and the physical to the metaphysical with their trademark twisted humour and high tech stage effects, to answer the ultimate question: who controls who?

Last seen at the Fringe at Pleasance One during his Total Sell Out run 2005, David Strassman is one of the world’s most innovative ventriloquists, continually looking to explore new horizons within the art form. He has been working with robotics using his own self-designed Puppetronic puppets since the mid-eighties when he and a NASA engineer friend sneaked into a NASA laboratory at 2am to lathe the machinery that could switch Chuck from manual to remote control. . The early robotics that enabled Chuck Wood to “come alive” and talk to the audience once Strassman had left the stage in 1986 are developed much further here with cutting edge technology to animate Chuck live and independently as a separate character within the play.