A question for our young readers out there.

You know those vending machines, the ones found near the checkout at supermarkets or outside bodegas that, for a coin or two, deliver, through metal chutes, handfuls of brightly colored candy or minuscule toys encased in a bubble of plastic? Have you recently found yourself tapping your foot beside such a machine as a dark-haired, shortish man shoved quarter after quarter into the slot?

If so, you may have met theater artist Dov Weinstein, the 29-year-old founder and artistic director of Tiny Ninja Theatre. Those trinket dispensers are casting central for Mr. Weinstein. His company – as the name might suggest – is almost entirely made up of tiny plastic ninja warriors, the sort that can only be purchased in the vestibules of select Duane Reades and Rite Aids. Since 2000, he has paced these fierce lumps of molded plastic through productions of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. The latest of these, “Tiny Ninja Theatre presents Hamlet” premieres as P.S. 122 on October 28.

“You have to do Shakespeare,” explained a straight-faced Mr. Weinstein. “One of Tiny Ninja Theatre’s powers is the contrast between the enormity of the play and its place in our canon and the minuteness of the performers. Grand tragedy on a tiny scale. You have to do the best plays. You cannot do a second-rate play. I wouldn’t even want to do a second-rate Shakespeare.”

He adds, needlessly, “A Tiny Ninja theater doing comedy would be gilding the lily.”

It is safe to say that most of the uninitiated go into a Tiny Ninja performance with a bemused smirk, much as they might upon entering a flea circus. “A circus, yes,” goes the thinking, “but a circus performed by fleas.” That changes inside. For one cannot hang back at a Tiny Ninja show, but, like a jeweler, must hunch forward in fixed concentration. Soon, the hothouse intensity of the spectacle – Mr. Weinstein’s nimble fingers, his affirmed way with the verse, the swift storytelling and, yes, the unironic seriousness of the ninjas – melts all smirks.

Tiny Ninja Theatre burst upon the scene at the 2000 New York International Theatre Festival, where Mr. Weinstein invited 10 people per performance (opera glasses in hand) to witness a 40-minute version of “Macbeth.” Under a pinpoint light, Weinstein, clad in long black gloves, played God, voicing all the roles and maneuvering the ensemble about the minuscule stage. A quick scan of the program’s cast list re vealed: “Banquo, a general in the King’s army…Ninja; Macduff, a nobleman of Scotland…Ninja; Lennox, a nobleman of Scotland…Ninja,” etc.

The show won positive reviews and became the unlikely breakout hit of the festival. Since then, there’s been a “Romeo and Juliet”- played out on an ironing board and side table and in a first aid kit – and engagements at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast, Prague, and Stockholm. It’s gotten so that Weinstein makes a living off the little midgets.

One suspects that there’s a mildly interesting story behind the genesis of such troupe. “Well, we started…” Stop there. Who’s we? “We is me and the ninjas.” Mr. Weinstein’s deadpan does not crack. He expands: “A lot of people do solo theater: ‘I am blank, feel my pain.’ I don’t think of myself as a solo performer in that sense. It’s not about me. Tiny Ninja Theatre is a much more successful enterprise than is Dov Weinstein.”

Mr. Weinstein, a philosophy major who grew up Jewish in Madison, Wis., was a disgruntled actor when the ninjas first caught his eye. “I was getting very frustrated, feeling I wasn’t accomplishing much, and what I was accomplishing I didn’t have enough investment in. I wanted to do something I could really own. Then, in 1999, I noticed the ninjas and I thought: ‘Nobody’s using them to do classical theater.'” Pause. This was his first thought? “Well, My first thought was, ‘Wow, for 25 cents these guys are amazingly detailed. There are six different colors and six different body positions and they’re all unique.'”

With nothing other than a fanciful and somewhat preposterous concept, Mr. Weinstein and his new colleagues applied for the NYC Fringe, halfway house for the fanciful and preposterous. The application was written longhand on a piece of notebook paper. To his shock, he was accepted. Then passed a fervid period of rehearsal and design, not to mention the matter of giving the Bard a little trim. “There’s no incentive to cut like knowing you have to memorize the entire script,” observed Mr. Weinstein.

Consistent with his unpreparedness, Mr. Weinstein opened cold, without benefit of dress rehearsal, previews, or critical feedback. “No one had ever seen the show before,” he told. “And people started laughing. Characters would die, people would laugh.” But, one might argue, the actors are plastic figures. “Yes, now you say that! But I was a little offended. I just thought, ‘Don’t you see that this is ‘Macbeth’? Don’t you see the tragedy of it?’ But after I thought about it for two seconds, I did see that the juxtaposition was comic.”

“Hamlet” – which runs under an hour – was commissioned by P.S. 122’s legendary artistic director Mark Russell before he announced his resignation from the influential East Village nonprofit last December. The engagement marks a considerable step up for Weinstein. Appropriately, the new show is also a significant benchmark for the ninjas, for “Hamlet” is the first show in company history in which an actual ninja headlines a production. (The main Dane is, of course, a blackclad ninja, dagger ever at the ready.) Romeo and Juliet were enacted by huge-eyed, small-bodied figures called Chris Head and Melanie Hipchikz. And Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were essayed by slightly bigger objects with bulbous yellow “Have a Nice Day” noggins called Mr. Smile and Mrs. Smile.

“I don’t like to cause trouble among the camp,” said Mr. Weinstein, letting us in on a company secret, “but the Smiles are 50 cents.”