Client 3: Pine Boy Puppet House

Pine Boy is a troupe of actors who bring a unique and reg­u­lar expe­ri­ence of pup­pet shows to the pub­lic with piz­zaz, mys­tery and charm. They spe­cial­ize in stringed and shadow pup­petry but also offer one– and two-man ven­tril­o­quism acts, out­door life-sized pup­petry as well as some Bun­raku and automata style pup­petry. The name of their com­pany comes from an inter­pre­tive trans­la­tion of Pinoc­chio, whose tale is cen­turies old and holds both a young appeal and a dark sen­ti­ment. They have a very tal­ented and devoted staff, a small work­shop, and a pup­pet house just out­side of an urban city. There are other troupes who do sim­i­lar things in the greater city area, but few who have an actual des­ti­na­tion place that solely per­forms pup­pet shows; their com­peti­tors are often trav­el­ing troupes who are tal­ented, but do not have a com­mit­ted space for their shows.

Pine Boy dis­tin­guishes itself by offer­ing a vari­ety of reg­u­lar shows. They develop shows for young audi­ences, but also per­form shows for adult audi­ences. Youth shows include fables, vignettes, and inter­ac­tive work­shops with chil­dren and teenagers. Adult shows include lewd vaude­ville, polit­i­cal satire and more grandiose exper­i­men­tal works with mature themes. They gen­er­ally have four week runs and want to encour­age reg­u­lar audi­ences by main­tain­ing recur­ring char­ac­ters, episodic adven­tures and sketch com­edy (or mys­tery). The goals of the com­pany are basi­cally to enable them­selves to con­tinue doing what they are doing; the mon­e­tary stress on their projects is begin­ning to out­weigh their abil­ity to per­form at the level they would like, and with more seats in the house to fill, they fear the com­mu­nity is not aware of their enter­tain­ment, is not inter­ested in their art, or their pro­gram­ming is too demand­ing on the troupe.

Pine Boy offers five words to describe their company:

• Whim­si­cal
• Won­drous
• Ram­pant
• Enter­tain­ing
• Devoted

Final logo:

Logo in “mar­i­onette” form:

Logo in “shadow pup­pet” form:

Logo with sup­port­ing typog­ra­phy, resid­ing at the top of the page, or bot­tom of the page:

In con­text, and sam­ple per­for­mance poster: