The Puzzle

A Note from Bill

Some of the most transformative moments in theatre happen when we are invited to see the world differently.

My time at Cirque du Soleil with David Shiner and Daniel Passer changed the trajectory of my life and career. There I was schooled in clowning, an art form that thrives on surprise, vulnerability, and the beautiful tension between joy and agony. Clowning disarms us and reveals truths we might otherwise resist. Returning to collaborate with David and Daniel on Juliette Dunn’s The Puzzle meant revisiting that language in service of a deeply human story.

Set in a surreal scrap yard, The Puzzle follows two clowns, Finneas and Quinton, whose ordered world is upended by the arrival of a young nonspeaking autistic man known as the Boy. A struggle over a jigsaw puzzle becomes a journey toward connection, challenging us to reconsider how we communicate and what it means to truly see another person.

At the heart of the play is a deceptively simple idea: the Boy is not the puzzle to be solved. The puzzle is life itself: our search for meaning, our desire for certainty, our assumption that happiness will arrive once all the pieces are in place. The Boy does not need to be fixed. He asks everyone around him to reconsider their own ways of being.

Juliette’s play is intensely personal, inspired by her son. Michael Stahler, an autistic actor, brought his own lived experience to the role of the Boy, essential to our commitment to authentic representation.

I was drawn to the play’s meeting of clowning and neurodivergence. Both invite us to question the rules we take for granted, and both remind us that connection begins when we stop controlling an encounter and meet another person on their own terms.

Perhaps the most important discoveries happen not when we put all the pieces together, but when we stop trying to solve one another and begin to connect.