Our mission is to create original comedic performances about current social issues, using humor and vulnerability to reach for a new understanding. 

Grackle Jack Productions is known for its inspired use of puppetry, clown, bouffon, drag, music, and text.  The company often works from incongruent historical events and literature as source material, blending and mapping divergent strands into multifaceted performance. Led by Artistic Director CB Goodman, Grackle Jack has examined and adapted events from Topsy the elephant’s public execution in 1903, the invention of the DARPA hummingbird drone, and the Apollo 11 Mission. From literature, the company has delved into works from Roxanne Gay, George Saunders, Gaston Bachelard, Tony Robbins, the Bible, and the Brothers Grimm.
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Generating each piece for Grackle Jack takes years of collaboration with an ever-evolving group of directors, actors, puppeteers, composers, and designers. Each project honors its own incubation period and requires new combinations of artists in order to keep the work alive and meet the specific needs of the show.

In 2023, Grackle Jack's show In The Beginning had an incredible two week sold out run in Austin, Texas and garnered multiple awards from New York Frigid Festival (Best Clown, Top Grossing, Jill Miersch Award), Atlanta Fringe (Producer's Choice Award) and Austin's B. Iden Payne Awards (Best Solo). The show was then remounted in April 2024 in Austin at the Fusebox Live Festival.

Sightlines Magazine reviewer Courtney Thomas said about In The Beginning, "a show that is both poignant and ridiculously silly. An immensely energetic performer, CB Goodman breathes life into everything she touches. Embracing live-ness and rolling with mishaps, she breaks the audience out of their assumptions and invites them to imagine new possibilities for both the theatre and their own narratives. Most of all, she makes them laugh."

In 2018, Grackle Jack and  En Route Productions co-produced *some humans were harmed in the making of this show, and was named to two of Austin’s top ten “Best of” lists. It was nominated for 10 B. Iden Payne Awards and won 4 for Featured Actor in a Drama - Delanté Keys, Featured Actress in a Drama - Kate Taylor, Best Media Design - Lowell Bartholomee, and Best Sound Design - Lowell Bartholomee. 

The show was described by Broadway World’s Frank Benge as “Theatre that takes you unexpectedly to another place…”, and by the Austin Chronicle’s Robert Faires as a performance “…staged with gleeful verve as a circus, and a sobering meditation on actions and consequences. Amazingly, it managed both and bonded its audience as much in silence as laughter.”