It’s the end of the world as we know it and Ronnie Burkett is feeling just fine. That’s the impression adult audiences are left with after experiencing Penny Plain, the prodigious puppeteer’s 12^th full length project since launching Theatre of Marionettes a quarter of a century ago.

The distinctly distinguished solo offering, his shortest story to date running 1:40 minutes, takes place in a rooming house where an elderly blind woman patiently awaits the apocalypse unfolding outside the door. While there’s a notable absence of horsemen, there’s certainly no shortage of dogs.

Her comical guests include a book editor serial killer, a cross dressing banker and two fundamentalist survivalists keeping her company as the end of days draws near.

Penny Plain is wild, wacky, and wry. It’s precisely what theatregoers need to fend off the February blahs.

If there’s any visual shake-up in the newest creation, it would be that there’s 90% less Ronnie Burkett in the scenes.

“I just wanted to get out of the way and see if the puppets could hold the whole story,” he explains of the decision to maneuver high above the figures rather than imbed himself as he did in monumental offerings such as Billy Twinkle, Happy, Provenance, and Street of Blood. Instead, almost three dozen string companions work the stage as if it were there birth right to do so.

With the calendar year now reading 2012, Penny Plain seems like a purposefully timed project although the documentary junkie playwright insists it was a flippant remark by environmental activist David Suzuki that planted the hysterically dark storytelling seed.