Who made this show happen?

Production by Brave Bucket Co.
Story, Script & Design by Marta Mozelle and Liz Hara
Consulting Director Brianna Sloane
Composer Jamie Cowperthwait

Performed by Marta Mozelle & Liz Hara
or sometimes the lovely and talented Sarah Nolen

About the Artists

Liz & Marta met at a puppet slam in 2009. Their collaboration and friendship is based on complementary skill-sets, driving ambition, and fart humor. They were inspired to created Help Save the Monkey! by their belief in the importance of intergenerational relationships and a desire to offer family audiences something extremely silly.

This show premiered in the 2015 New York Children’s Theater Festival, and was developed with the generous support of a 2014 Standard ToyKraft Artist Residency, and a 2014 Jim Henson Foundation Family Grant.

Elizabeth Hara graduated from Vassar College with a degree in American Culture, focusing on social issues in Children’s Television. She has written puppetry plays which have been presented at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, the New Orleans Fringe Festival, the National Puppetry Festival, Minneapolis’ CONvergence, and theaters across the U.S. Liz has toured internationally with Wakka Wakka’s production of SAGA, and she has a old-time radio podcast series based on her live object-theatre show Senseless! A Brick Foley Adventure.

Liz has also built puppets and costumes for Broadway and television. Her favorite projects include Sesame Street, Mirror Mirror (2012,) Avenue Q, The Lion King, and, surprisingly, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. She currently works for Sesame Street as a puppet and costume builder and wrangler.

Liz was on the Artistic Committee for the 2013 Puppet Festival (r)Evolution and acted as Workshop Director for the festival. When not working in the field of puppetry, Liz can be found eating candy and telling filthy jokes.

Marta Mozelle has performed as a puppeteer at The New Victory Theater, BAM, St. Ann's Warehouse, La Mama, PS 122, The Guggenheim, the Kennedy Center, the Studio Theater, the Smithsonian Institute, Berkeley Repertory Theater, and the windows Bergdorf Goodman Department Store. Theater Highlights include: Baby Universe (Wakka Wakka Productions), La Divina Caricatura (Mabou Mines), Lemony Snicket's The Composer is Dead (Phantom Limb Company), Puss in Boots (dir. Moises Kaufman, Gotham Chamber Opera & Blind Summit), and Banksy's Sirens of the Lambs. Her on-screen credits include: Sesame Street, Time Machine Guitar, The Warby Trace Show, and commercials for H&M and the Coca-cola Company.

Marta's short works have appeared at puppet slams across the city and the US. Her show for adults, Close to Decline, was presented in 2013 in the Tank Theater’s Flint & Tinder series, and was workshopped in Labapalooza! at St. Ann's Warehouse in 2012. Marta holds a degree in Puppetry and Music from UMass Amherst, is a many-time alum of the O'Neill Puppetry Conference, and served on the the Artistic Direction Committee for the 2013 National Puppet Festival.

Sarah Nolen (swing performer: Howard) is a puppeteer and filmmaker from Austin, Texas. She has performed at the Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival, with the Boston Pops Orchestra, EnvisionFEST Hartford, Out of Bounds Festival in Austin, TX, and the 2013, 2014 & 2015 National Puppet Slams. Sarah's children's television pilot, Treeples, has been screened at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah, the USA Film Festival, the AFI Film Festival in Dallas and the Atlanta Film Festival.

Brianna Sloane earned her MFA in Directing at UMass Amherst in 2014, where she was nominated for a University Fellowship. She is Co-Founder of TheatreTruck, a collaborative of multi-disciplinary artists crafting mobile and site-specific performance in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.Brianna directed the premier of The Emily Dickinson Project at the Emily Dickinson Homestead, which she co-wrote with Emma Ayres. Other TheatreTruck directing favorites include Commedia Grab Bag!and The Aspect of the Place. She directed Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors at Hampshire Shakespeare Company and has worked with New Century Theatre, Hartford Stage and Shakespeare & Co. 

Brianna graduated from Hampshire College with a focus on physical & devised theatre. Her interest in traditional performance forms applied to new work brought her next to Tuscany, where she studied Commedia dell'Arte, Danztheatre, clown and more at the Accademia dell’Arte (in Arezzo, Italy). Next stop was Chicagoland’s physical comedy specialists, Piccolo Theatre Ensemble, where she made her home for over four years. At Piccolo, she appeared onstage and directed multiple productions in addition to serving as Education Outreach Director; designing programming, launching a school and supporting the company's expansion into a vibrant cultural arts center.  She was an Artistic Associate with The Bricklayers, and toured with their masked production of Twelfth Night throughout the Midwest. She studied puppetry throughout her teens with Chicago Greats Redmoon Theatre, Blair Thomas & Co. and Clinard Dance Theatre.