For more than 40 years, The Independent Eye has toured the USA, logging over 3,000 shows in big cities and tiny towns, from Off-Broadway to church basements, even in people’s living rooms. The magic of human connection can happen anywhere, and does.
As of 6/30/20, after 46 seasons, over 4,000 performances in 38 states, 104 productions and countless workshops, The Independent Eye is folding its tents.
We’ll continue maintaining this website as a rich archive, and Bishop & Fuller will do periodic performance, but the formal entity is no longer functional.
On this site, you can still find many things.
- Scripts: Click Chronicle. To the right, click on any red item, which has a page on the production and in many cases an original script. Download it for free. For information on production, email us at eye@independenteye.org.
- Radio: Click Media, and scroll down to “Audio.” Under Hitchhiking off the Map, all episodes—character portraits, features, and short audiodramas—are available for free listening.
- Video: Full production DVDs of our King Lear, The Tempest, Frankenstein, and Descent of the Goddess Inanna may be ordered from this website. Short pieces and trailers are at youtube.com/indepeye.
To keep posted, join us at our blogsite, DamnedFool.com, where we’ve posted weekly for eight years.
And click Print to check out our memoirs, our novels and flash collections, and our play anthologies.
It’s been a wild ride!
A 46-minute solo piece featuring Elizabeth Fuller as two halves of herself. As Lou, she’s a 77-year-old jack-of-all-trades in a denim jacket. Reading the daily news with its multiple threats of disaster—”Annihilation Awareness Day,” “International Apocalypse Week”—she can only slam down the newspaper in despair.
Coming to her rescue is an inner clown self, Bozo, a red-nosed optimist who scans how-to books and evokes gurus, conspiracies, and the patrons of Smoky’s Bar. She concocts diverse strategies: sorting socks, get-rich schemes, positive thinking, suicide and laughter.
Two actors. Twenty puppets. Shakespeare’s fiery text. Lear is the puppeteer of his own puppet show, the solo human in his motherless kingdom of power and commodity. Like Dante’s damned souls, caught in a perpetual hell particular to each, Lear obsessively plays out his loss of power, friendship, shelter, sanity, and at last even hope. The Fool is his withered soul, an acid clown who torments Lear, stage-manages his story, and finally disappears into Lear’s madness.
Sprung from The Independent Eye’s series of landmark actor/puppet stagings—Macbeth, The Tempest, Frankenstein, Descent of Inanna—this King Lear features Conrad Bishop as Lear, Elizabeth Fuller as the Fool, with Fuller’s music score in a warm, inviting setting that offers some shelter against the storm.
Production details, photos, reviews
For booking information, email us.
A duo show with Bishop & Fuller playing characters resembling themselves, plus puppets, objects, an electric sander, a steering wheel, and a pepper grinder. More information.
It is available free to hosts for house concerts and intimate venues. To date, it’s played 45 performances cross-country, to exuberant response. Contact us.
Adapted by Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller from Mary Shelley’s classic novel, this Frankenstein is the story of a man who, tormented by the death of his mother, seeks to conquer death by making birth obsolete. They have revisioned their 1998 adaptation for three actors, two dozen puppets, music and video creating an ironic clown-show as unsettling— and daffy— as today’s news.
A DVD of the live stage performance is available for purchase.
Six farcical meditations on mortality, created and performed as live puppet animations by Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller. Our repertoire of characters range from hand puppets and jointed dolls and masks to near-lifesize creatures.
A weed-maddened gardener attacks an intruder that just won’t stop growing, but has to cope with the fact that it loves him anyway. An unwitting housewife opens the door to two clown Messengers of Doom. And a man with five minutes to live races the clock to finish his “Five Stages of Dying” before the gong sounds. In “The Death of Howdy Doody,” an elderly lawyer confesses to carrying out the court-authorized murder of a marionette— a true story, in fact. Two elders, seeing their younger selves about to end their love affair, offer earnest but unheeded advice. And in “At the Prom with Kali,” a high school kid at the Senior Prom takes a roller-coaster ride through life with the goddess of Life and Time.
Shakespeare’s classic comedy/drama of redemption, newly envisioned as a live theatrical animation with puppets, masks, live actors, and a rich audio score. Directed and designed by Conrad Bishop, music by Elizabeth Fuller. Featuring Bishop, Anthony Abate, Jessica Bauman, Benjamin Stowe, and Jan Freifeld as the actor/animators of Shakespeare’s unforgettable panoply of magician, spirits, slaves, courtiers and lovers.
The full production from 2009 is now available on DVD! See Media for details. Here’s a 10-minute preview:
Written by Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller, Rash Acts was described by American Theatre Magazine in its earlier East Coast version as “a series of highly premeditated acts of imagination and intelligence.” A young couple trapped for life on the freeway, an aged widower beset by swarms of telemarketers, a dead queen resurrected in shadow, a magical baby who grows too big for his diaper, and a grown-up Alice who falls down the rabbit hole into the evening news. With thirty-two puppets, directed and designed by Bishop, with music by Fuller.
Created by Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller in an entirely new staging by The Independent Eye’s Mythic Kitchen ensemble. Based on a 5,000-year-old Sumerian myth from the land that is now Iraq, this live theatrical animation features 17 large puppets, 8 actors, music, video, and the dazzling richness, broad humor and erotic imagery of the ancient texts. A stunning tale of a goddess’s coming of age, mating, death and rebirth, it’s the earliest recorded resurrection story—and one for today.
Our solo clown nightmare featuring Elizabeth Fuller and her seven sisters, all named Elizabeth—the Developer, the Plumber, the Dreamer, the Inspector, the Gambler, the Slut—trying to build a workable identity out of wigs, ladders, and plumbing pipe. “It’s what Allen Ginsberg might have written had he been a woman.”—North Bay Bohemian
The ancient Norse equivalent of the Apocalypse. The Gods see themselves under dire threat of attack by the Primal Ones, and, in the name of security, methodically set up the means of their own self-destruction.
photos, scripts & notes from our 30+ years of work
touring shows, workshops & creative collaborations
- from Gifts
- from Frankenstein
- from Hands Up!
- from The Tempest
- from Rash Acts
- from Descent of the Goddess Inanna
- from Dream House
- from Ragnarok
- from Drake’s Drum
- from Long Shadow
