As the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology from 2016-18, Pedro Reyes created the puppet play Manufacturing Mischief.

Reyes discusses the project in this short video filmed by MIT Audio Visual Production and edited by Heidi Erickson. In Manufacturing Mischief, the character of Noam Chomsky is pushed along a zany plot, meeting characters including Ayn Rand, Elon Musk, and Karl Marx who are brought into the play by a machine called the Print-A-Friend.

Manufacturing Mischief premiered at MIT in April 2018 and then went on to Carnegie Mellon University and The Tank in New York.

The New York Times reported that ‘Mr. Chomsky may be the hero of the play, but it’s Karl Marx who bats intellectual cleanup, with a 21st-century rap update of “The Communist Manifesto” that somehow rhymes “Tannenbaum” with “Amazon.” ‘