Idiot String is a collaborative theatre company led by Joan Howard and Rebecca Longworth. Idiot String is dedicated to creating new works of ensemble theatre that are accessible to a broad audience and inspire creativity, engagement in the physical world, and connection between people.

Idiot String hosted the Physical Theatre Salon at Main Street Theatre throughout 2013, and has created new plays for the 2013 San Francisco Fringe Festival, and aboard our moblie stage, FluxWagon, since 2014.

Idiot String creates plays featuring music and ingenious low-tech theatrical magic, including mechanical props and scenery and inventive physicality. Each summer since 2014, we have performed our shows on outdoors on FluxWagon, our mobile stage that folds up to look like a circus wagon and can be towed from location to location. Designed by Joan Howard, FluxWagon features a trapdoor, a pulley system and a scrolling backdrop rig to add magic to its sets. On FluxWagon we have performed O Best Beloved, Aesop Amuck, and Shakespeare or Space Wars, all starring our eccentric troupe of travelling thespians, the Samuel Peaches Peripatetic Players. Our latest play, Elixir of Life, premiered on FluxWagon during Fall 2017, with a non-Peripatetic ensemble of eight. Shows on FluxWagon have toured to parks and public spaces around the Bay Area, including Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Alameda, Pleasanton, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Hayward and Port Costa.

Our work engages audiences with highly entertaining interactive performances that incite delight and spontaneous community wherever we appear. We seek to provoke audiences into a more complete engagement with daily life by disrupting the habit of taking public space and everyday objects and events for granted. Whether performing in a theatre, on the street, or in the open air, Idiot String creates opportunities for joyful shared experience and participatory fun.