Dimension Zero: All Judy, No Punch

Dimension Zero, the new sci-fi puppet musical from the Boxcutter Collective, arrives at HERE arts Center with all the ingredients for a wild downtown spectacle– extravagant puppets, scruffy political satire, a fuzzy 1970s rock aesthetic, and very stylish tin foil hats. Unfortunately, beneath the glorious weirdness, the show’s message is simultaneously too on the nose and too opaque, leaving us with no real idea for how we can move towards its utopic vision or even what that vision actually looks like. 

It’s no surprise that the Boxcutter Collective, whose founding members are alumni and spiritual descendants of the iconic Bread and Puppet Theater, delivers on charming and inventive puppets. Whether it’s a swarm of pizza slices reassembling themselves into a pie, an army of space-orphans, or a gorgeous and terrifying physical embodiment of capitalism, hegemony, and oppression itself, the puppetry is consistently delightful. The theater is transformed by painted cardboard that dances and shifts in new and surprising ways. But puppets alone can’t keep the spaceship airborne.

PC Richard Termine

The show’s critique of capitalism feels both overexplained and underthought. The premise, an alien lands in a strange world where everyone is obsessed with pizza and rent money (NYC), has the potential for sharp satire. Instead, the script settles for diagnosing capitalism as “bad” without offering much insight beyond what most of the audience probably already agrees upon. When the villain, a billionaire orphan-exploiting media mogul, is defeated with comical ease, the show ends up reinforcing the very simplicity it tries to skewer. 

There is a fourth wall breaking moment of audience participation, but it fails to inspire or rally. If the message is meant to be that absurdity helps us to see beyond capitalism’s chokehold, then why is the show awkwardly trapped in the uncanny valley between absurdity and realism? Why doesn’t it go further into the absurd? Instead the humor feels tired, (why are we doing pizza rat in 2025?) and overly earnest. 

PC Richard Termine

The lyric writing and musical performances don’t help matters. While the band, which features Kyle Morgan (guitar/piano), Rashad Brown (guitar/piano), Chris Schroth (drums), and Mary Feaster (bass guitar), sounds great, the songs themselves often feel overly simplistic. They rhyme for rhyme’s sake, deliver political points without wit or nuance, and never really develop a distinctive voice. The cast, which includes Joseph Jonah Therrien, Sam Wilson, Tom Cunningham, Darkin Brown, Jason Hicks, Lily Paulina, Ali Dineen, Jenny Romaine and Harrison Greene, is fine if somewhat subdued for the level of camp the piece seems to aspire to.

But my biggest complaint with Dimension Zero is that I have seen shows all too similar to this one before. Just this year I saw similar political puppetry pieces by Bread and Puppet, by Vape Kid Jr. and crew, by my friends in public parks and basements. In my opinion, Dimension Zero does not distinguish itself enough from these other pieces to warrant its placement in an off-Broadway theater for a run funded by a slew of hard to get grants. Shouldn’t we demand more from our political theater? That it builds on its tradition rather than endlessly recreates it? That it offers us some new perspective that we can’t get from scrolling social media or simply existing in the capitalist hellscape we now find ourselves in? That it be nuanced and not heavyhanded? That if it’s to be idealistic, at least let it be specific?   

Dimension Zero is bursting with ideas, political, visual, theatrical, but too many of them remain half-formed. The puppets soar, but the script, lyrics, and structure can’t keep up. There’s no question the Boxcutter Collective has vision and craft when it comes to building worlds out of cardboard and cloth. But for Dimension Zero to reach its true potential, it needs sharper writing, deeper thought, and a storytelling engine strong enough to propel its puppets into something more than quirky spectacle.