You’ve heard of Houdini, but have you overlooked the world’s tiniest magician Smallini? This tiny figure appears inside P.T. Widdle’s “Suitcase of Wonders,” in a performance at the Great Small Works’ Seventh International Toy Theater Festival, which runs through Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Peter Ross has a day job as a computer teacher at Columbia Prep in Manhattan. Inspired by flea circuses, he turned an old Roebling suitcase into a miniscule stage on which Smallini performs illusions such as levitating a doll. With an iPod providing music, Smallini makes a toy elephant disappear. Mr. Ross even employs a shot glass in re-creating Houdini’s water-torture escape.

“Toy theater,” said historian John Bell, a member of Great Small Works theater company, “is a 19th-century home entertainment form we have sort of revived.” Traditionally, he said, this kind of theater was cheap and mass-produced, a way of staging classic drama in miniature: “a giant spectacle on a small scale.” Toy theaters emerged with the rise of mass printing. Enterprising businessmen started printing figures, and people would collect them and perform at home as parlor entertainment.

The festival occurs roughly biennially: “It takes us two years to forget how hard it is to do this,” said puppet designer Stephen Kaplin, who describes St. Ann’s as its largest space yet. Theater for the New City, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, and Here Art Center have hosted the festival in previous years. “This year is a big jump,” Mr. Kaplin said.

Three stages show toy-theater versions of “The Pirates of Penzance,” a play about Moby Dick and lawsuits, a Wizard of Oz show, and more. Some involve adult subjects, such as the life of transsexual Christine Jorgensen or the tale of a grieving widower whose dead wife starts visiting his bed at night.

Jewish-themed shows include one based on an I.B. Singer story and another involving an 89-year-old painter’s recreation of scenes from the small town in Poland where he grew up. Other works include a Palestinian toy-theater show about a prince, a play inspired by Italo Calvino, and the adventures of a distressed cyclops who swims with his therapeutic cheese grater through “three suitcase universes” in a search to live without walls.

Do you long to see Laurence Olivier perform Hamlet in the Old Vic theater? In the museum, artist Tony Banfield has reproduced Act III, Scene 2 – a toy theater play within a toy-theater play.

Alternatively, one can take in children’s shows. Mr. Kaplin, who co-authored “Theater on a Tabletop” with his wife Kuang-yu Fong, said, “One of toy theater’s advantages is that it is perfect for teaching children the creative process.” The adjacent Temporary Toy Theater Museum displays many exhibits, including some created by Jennifer Romaine and others created by ninth-graders in Bushwick. They made toy theaters on such weighty themes as the Neolithic Period or the fall of Rome. “You can do phenomenally large ideas with the simplest of tools that can be scrounged cheaply,” explained Mr. Kaplin.

Mr. Kaplin said that creating a toy theater is liberating for an artist. You don’t need much money or many supplies. Janie Geiser, a California Institute of the Arts professor, said its small size makes toy theaters a portable medium with low shipping costs. But other things about toy theaters are smaller, too: “It pays so much less,” puppeteer Mike Nelson said.

At a symposium led by Mr. Bell on Saturday, the distinctive characteristics of toy theater were discussed: the intimacy of the medium; the privacy of the performance; the shifts of scale between puppet and performer. Ms. Geiser said toy theater employs a kind of “haiku narrative”: A few key elements suffice to supply the narrative, and each small detail can suggest something larger.

One topic discussed was how, during toy theater shows, the “behind the scenes” lay exposed, as the audience watches the puppeteers manipulate the puppets. Ms. Gieser said the audience could then see that the show was not real. Fellow panelist Abd El Salam Abdo said the audience “starts to forget that I’m there and starts to look at the puppet. They look where I’m looking.”

A panelist quoted actor George Bartenieff, who likened watching toy theater to being in the top row of the Metropolitan Opera, looking down upon the proscenium far below. Audience member Susan Vitucci drew a contrast: “When you go to the Metropolitan Opera, you don’t see the stagehands: The seams don’t show at the Met.”

In between shows this week, stroll around the toy-theater museum. One toy theater is a mail slot in a door. Also in the exhibit are photographs by Sam Hack.Asked the difference between photographing puppets as opposed to people, Ms. Hack replied, “Puppets stand still longer.”