Banana Bag & Bodice

Banana Bag & Bodice (BB&B) is an ensemble theater company, founded in 1999 by Co-Artistic Directors Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe, that has created a bunch of original shows. In each project original text and music composition are honed by the ensemble through the collective action of design, dramaturgy, staging and performance. We have performed at PS122, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Public Theatre, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick and The Playhouse and Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Centre. We have received 6 Best of San Francisco Fringe Awards, Best Production at The Dublin Fringe Festival, the Will Glickman Award in San Francisco, the 2011 Herald Angels Award in Edinburgh. BB&B shows have received critical national and international praise in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Variety Magazine, Village Voice, Backstage, The Irish Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF Bay Guardian, the SF Weekly. Our company has had feature articles in American Theatre Magazine, Theatre Bay Area and Theatre Forum. We have received funding from The Greenwall Foundation, The Mental Insight Foundation, NYSCA and numerous individual donors.

Each production varies in style and content, from a prison yard psycho collage (Gulag Ha Ha), to a futuristic costume drama (The Sewers), to a musical about killing animals (Sandwich), to a SongPlay adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf (Beowulf – A Thousand Years Of Baggage), to  a claustrophobic container tale (Space//Space, the film). Our passionate and outlandish aesthetic instincts create theater experiences that transcend this concrete time and this specific place. Our poetic yet contemporary voice moves beyond the quotidian and back to the animal. BB&B creates compelling, visceral, whimsical experiences that provoke and inspire our audiences with laugher, discomfort and self- reflection. We are known for intricate, intimate and complex design of set, sound and costume that “trashes even its big budget competition”. (Helen Shaw, Time Out New York). 
 
The ensemble is comprised of Co-Artistic Directors Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe and are joined by any one of these affiliate members depending on availability: Peter Blomquist (Performer), Mallory Catlett (Director/Dramaturg), Miranda Hardy (Light Designer),Alex Harvey (Director/Performer), Rod Hipskind (Director/Performer), Dave Malloy (Composer/Sound Designer), Heather Peroni (Performer), Feff Zezza (Performer/Musician).