By Simi Horwitz
"The theatrical avant-garde has been experimenting with puppets for ever. But I believe what we did was lace together the experimental with crowd-pleasing elements seamlessly. The two elements cannot be separated. We have raised the bar of what people expect in theatre." The speaker is Michael Curry, co-designer of the striking masks, puppets, and creatures in director-designer Julie Taymor's "The Lion King." Taymor's past productions--from "Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass," produced at Lincoln Center following an Off-Broadway presentation, to her "Green Bird" at the New Victory--employed puppets and masks. These theatrical devises are Taymor's signature. There's been no shortage of publicity surrounding the marriage of the Uptown and the Downtown in Disney's big-budget megahit. And nowhere is that merger more evident than in the show's production values, which combine Indonesian shadow puppetry, European miniatures, Chinese bird kites, Japanese Bunraku, and African masks.
The presence of these masks and puppets places an unprecedented set of demands on the performers and forces them to think about their craft in a new light. Max Casella, who plays Timon, a meerkat--it's not unlike a prairie weasel--sports a giant animal puppet that is both separate from him and an extension of his body. Indeed, the puppet becomes a part of him, literally.
"I wear tennis shoes with poles that are connected to the puppet's full-size feet, which are directly in front of mine," Casella explains, adding that the puppet's convex body, billowing from his own body, is attached via a harness worn over his shoulders. The puppet's animal head, reaching just below Casella's chin, is held upright with strings that extend downwards from Casella's temple's to the puppet's temples. "The puppet weighs about 45 pounds; my back is out frequently, and it's physically grueling," Casella admits frankly. "It's a very unforgiving role. I cannot relax for one moment. If I do, the puppet whose head I'm continually manipulating with rods looks like a plastic stick. I got the role because I can bring the puppet to life. I'm the soul of the character--the puppet--and I fill in the emotional blanks. At the same time, I'm clearly visible. In the Bunraku tradition--and that's what we're inspired by--puppeteers are never concealed. There's a fine line between me the actor and me the puppeteer." Bunraku is a highly theatrical, sophisticated form of Japanese puppetry that has its roots in the sixteenth century. There are many variations, but a consistent element is the visibility of the puppeteers, oftentimes cloaked in black, and on occasion competing with the puppets for the audience's attention.
"The Lion King" 's Zazu, played-puppeteered by Geoff Hoyle, presents this actor with a set of challenges, too. Zazu, a nervous comic bird, is, in fact, a totally separate stick puppet that Hoyle operates, again visibly on stage. "I operate the puppet's body with my left hand; the neck and head I work with my right hand, thumb and forefinger manipulating the eyes and mouth." The mime-trained Hoyle says, "It took me hours of mirror work with the puppet to develop the bird's vocabulary--the way he tilts his head, or closes an eye. I'm still eyeballing the bird to see if what I think I'm doing is actually happening. The bird's movements are minuscule, so if an eye closes at the wrong moment or in the wrong way, he can look like he's sleeping or supercilious. This becomes a special problem if the bird is not speaking, but still has to be part of the scene and reacting.
"I'm a reflection of the puppet and the puppet is a reflection of me," Hoyle says. "There's only one moment when I lose the bird puppet and become the animal myself. For the rest of the time, if someone says, 'I don't know where to look--you or the bird,' then I feel I've succeeded."
SUB: Cutting-Edge Commedia
"The Lion King" was not the only Broadway production this past season to employ puppet-like creatures in new ways. In a very different vein--satiric, monstrous, and mean-spirited--there was "Jackie--An American Life." To underscore the carnival, absurdist existence that Jackie found herself in, throughout the piece she was surrounded by both rod and hand puppets, and giant heads--representing historic figures and members of her family. The most memorable was a mammoth, 18-foot-high Joe Kennedy head that floated onto the stage, eyes rolling, mouth opening and closing, hands moving, and not necessarily at the same time. The "cast" also included a Ron Galella--the infamous tabloid shutterbug--vulture and a Hugh Auchincloss (Jackie's stepfather) hand puppet who was manipulated by Jackie's mother. Get it? Nobody said this was subtle.
All of these grotesques were the brainchildren of Erminio Pinque, who heads the Providence, R.I.-based Big Nazo, an international performance group and creature-making studio. The intermingling of visual (painting, sculpture) and performance styles--"We're Bunraku meets vaudeville meets stand-up comedy," says Pinque--is the wave of the future. "But anything that we call cutting-edge today can be traced to the past."
No one would agree more than Wayne Specht, artistic director of the Axis Theatre in Vancouver, Canada, which recently presented its award-winning production "The Number 14"--awash in masks--at the New Victory Theater. "The socially satiric piece that takes place on a bus ride in Vancouver was contemporary commedia dell'arte," explains Specht. "We had six actors playing 60 roles; most of these roles were represented by commedia masks. The difference is that traditional commedia has its own stock characters--Pantelone, Harlequin. We created stock characters for our time, like a gang member wearing a mask with a nose ring, eyebrow ring, and forehead ring. Some of the elderly characters wore three-quarter masks that could also evoke, if the head moved in a certain way, an infant." The exaggerated comic-strip-like masks, by Melody Anderson, helped create a circus universe that included swashbuckling sword fights and somersaults, intended as commentary on an urban bus ride that makes stops in a business district, skid row, and a university setting.
The nonprofit West 42nd Street New Victory, which frequently presents children's theatre that also appeals to adults, played host last year to Mabou Mines' "Peter and Wendy." The latter, a revised "Peter Pan," utilized puppetry in yet another way. The narrator, played by Karen Kandel, collaborated with three puppeteers who manipulated the puppets while she, Kandel, served as the puppets' respective voices. The puppets interacted with each other and the live actors on stage. Mabou Mines, under the direction of Lee Breuer, has been incorporating puppetry in its theatrical pieces since 1978.
SUB: Archetypes and Abstractions
So what's it all about? And why now? Among the dozen-plus, largely New York City based, experts we talked with, the answers run the gamut. Some suggest that the influence of high-tech movie wizardry which, in fact, takes masks ("Star Wars") and puppetry ("Jurassic Park") to state-of-the-art levels, plays a significant role. Others talk about the impact of MTV's frenetic look and sensibility. All agree that high theatricality on stage is a reaction against realistic, psychologically based dramas. The puppet proponents suggest that realism is ultimately a departure from larger truths. Puppets and masks represent a return to origins.
Ralph Lee--whose striking 40-year retrospective, "Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures & Theatre Designs," now on exhibition at the Main Gallery at the Library for the Performing Arts--talks about how his own troupe, Mettawee River Company, based in Salem, New York, uses puppets and masks in retelling classics, myths, and legends. "When you're dramatizing a myth with its spirits, demons, forces of nature, and archetypal humans, puppets and masks offer a purer form. A human face reflects a range of nuance and emotion, and that's not what you're looking for in an archetype."
Lee, an Obie award-winning artist, says that in his "Tempest," for example, "all of the leads were maskless-puppetless actors on stage who interacted with the mythic figures in order to undergo change. Ariel, Caliban, and the comic figures, by contrast, wore masks, which were extensions of the characters and allowed those characterizations to be specific."
Lee's new show, "The Woman Who Fell From the Sky," an Iroquois creation tale, will be produced in the New York Botanical Gardens, every Saturday and Sunday in May, at 1 pm.
"Puppetry has its roots in both political and religious ritual, and in a curious way taps into what people are most concerned about at any given moment," says John Bell, a theatre professor at New York University and Rhode Island School of Design. "It is the oldest form of theatre," adds the New York-based Stephen Kaplin, mask-maker and scenic designer, whose numerous credits include co-designing "The Lion King" 's shadow puppets. "Plato talked about shadow puppets and for centuries the Peking Opera used them. Japan's Bunraku goes all the way back. Western countries had Punch and Judy as early as the 16th Century. At the same time Turkey had a Punch-like figure, a trickster."
Puppetry is an elastic form and can be used in a range of venues, although in the United States it's largely identified with hand-held puppet shows for children's birthdays. Still, in all fairness, America has helped shape the genre. "Ventriloquism is an American form of puppetry and was first seen on the vaudeville circuit," Kaplin points out. "Part of its appeal was that you could get a dummy off a stage quickly. Frank Paris was a famous ventriloquist of the 1920s. In the '40s and '50s Bob Barker made a name for himself in nightclubs with a marionette act. Winchell Mahoney was a famous ventriloquist of the '60s, who had a TV show." And let's not overlook Shari Lewis and Lambchop, and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and, most memorably, Jim Henson's Muppets, that were seminal in advancing puppetry's popularity in this country.
All those we interviewed agree that nobody put puppetry on the map more than the late Henson, making it mainstream and at the same time opening up a host of possibilities for the art. "What distinguishes Jim's work--and it goes all the way back to his 1955 late-night puppet show, 'Sam and Friends'--is its appeal to both children and adults. And that was a real departure," says Leslee Asch, producing director of Jim Henson's International Festival of Puppet Theater and executive director of the Jim Henson Foundation, both in New York City. "Jim's puppets work on several levels. They're always lovable, accessible, and slightly irreverent. But Jim was equally important in the way he used the medium of television. He loved TV technology, but the quality of performance always came first. The two served each other."
Adds John Tartaglia, a Muppet puppeteer with the company: "The sets are built onto a platform and we are operating the muppets beneath that platform and over our heads. The camera is filming the Muppets in their world. The whole set is their world. And we're checking the monitors that are visible from where we're standing--as opposed to checking our hand motions--to see if it's working. Before Jim, this had never been done."
Both Tartaglia and Asch emphasize that Henson was interested in opening up new areas of experimentation. "His foundation gives seed grants to puppeteers who are stretching the boundaries beyond the commercial," says Asch. And in 1992, a year after Henson's death, the foundation launched the International Festival of Puppet Theater. "What we're seeing is a broader range of artists involved in puppetry, from sculptors to dancers to actors. Puppetry has entered the age of multimedia; the emphasis is on the visual. Texts are not necessarily linear, assuming there are texts at all. Puppetry has become darker and more abstract." Indeed, she says some new puppeteers are not using puppets at all--at least not the familiar kind--but rather objects like forks and knives dancing around a stage and taking on a range of metaphorical meanings. She cites the work of Paul Zaloom as an example. He is a proponent of what is now being dubbed "object theatre."
Says Stephen Kaplin: "Puppetry has always oscillated between folk pop forms and refined theatrical entertainments. Haydn wrote puppet operas for the king. At the same time, puppetry has appealed to the avant-garde. It was central to such radical theatre men as the turn-of-the century's Gordon Craig, Maeterlinck, and the symbolists of the '20s."
Master puppeteer Basil Twist based in New York City also talks about puppetry's appeal at both ends of the cultural spectrum. "The Salzburg Marionettes is a company that's very traditional in its artistry. It attempts to accurately recreate the characters and sets of famous operas and ballets, although on a small scale. Philippe Genty, a contemporary French artist is, on the other hand, an existential puppeteer who has become nonobjective," Twist says. "Early on in his career, he'd interact with clever little puppets to determine who was manipulating whom. Now his 'puppets' are enormous pieces of fabric that fill a stage and dance around creating shapes. And that's the kind of thing I'm working on, a nonfigurative piece that uses shapes--circles, diagonals, lines--to evoke certain feelings. There is no narrative, but there is music, Berlioz 'Symphonie Fantastique,' which is also the name of the work."
Twist says there is another central element in his new production. "The entire piece will take place in 500 gallons of water. The puppeteers will be above and behind the tank, working the fabrics and plastics." The world premiere will be mounted Downtown in New York City, at HERE, May 20-June 27.
SUB: Downtown Denizens
In New York's downtown scene, the most significant puppet force--indeed, he's been labeled by insiders as puppet Mafia chief--is Michael Romanyshyn, executive director of Los Kabayitos Puppet Theater, on the Lower East Side. "We're the only New York-based year-round puppet theatre that presents other companies and we're also in the process of creating our own resident puppet company." For the most part Kabayitos productions are more interested in the visual than they are in text. Still, the company has presented classics--15-minute versions in miniature. And most recently, Los Kabayitos produced "The Symptoms," a spin on "The Three Sisters," that combined an old-fashioned proletarianism--lots said about the bourgeoisie need to romanticize labor--and an experimental vision: Handmade dolls represented the sisters and motionless silent dummies stood in for the men. "This focused the audience attention on the three sisters and made it see the play in a new light."
Other major downtown players on the puppet scene include Theodora Skipitares, sculptor turned performance artist turned puppeteer; The Elementals, which blends low-tech sorcery and rapid-fire comic surrealism; and Janie Geiser's dark work that often combines film noir with expressionistic nightmare imagery with feminist politics. "I'm not didactic, but there's a political aspect in what I do," says Geiser. "All puppetry has a political element. By its very nature--a dead and live object in one--it's mocking tradition and many church teachings."
In varying degrees, many of the downtown puppeteers are political and influenced by the world-famous Bread & Puppet Theatre with its origins firmly rooted in an East Village, '60s sensibility. Founded in 1963 on the Lower East Side, by Silesian-born sculptor and choreographer Peter Schumann, the company was responding to social concerns--from conflicts with landlords to citizen-police encounters to the prevalence of rats in the community. In a street theatre-activist vein--with musicians, dancers, giant rod puppets, and masked performers representing an array of victims and oppressors--the company would march through the neighborhood noisily proclaiming and dramatizing its opinions.
"Since the beginning of time puppets have always represented the voice of social criticism," says Linda Elbow, Bread & Puppet's tour manager and long-time puppeteer. "But we've also always had an educational wing--early on we worked with kids on the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the South Bronx--and we present a yearly summer event that has broad appeal." Indeed, the two-day outdoor circus in Glover, Vt., where the company is now based, attracts 40,000 visitors. In the spirit of participatory theatre, four to five hundred audience volunteers are included in a ritual pageant across the hills at sunset in the wake of musicians, masked figures, and life-size puppets. The pageantry is inspired by the old Christian Passion play, but there's always a political element. For example, last year the subject was twofold: a look at maximum security democracy in general and the dangers of privatization of prisons in particular.
"In Sarajevo we presented a show about the International Monetary Fund's destruction of third world agriculture," Elbow recalls. "In one scene, we had puppeteers inside giant cardboard cutouts, representing stacks of grains, spread across the stage floor. A character dressed in a business suit and wearing a papier m‰chƒ mask with the word 'teeth' written where the mouth would be, wheeled an 'implementation' machine across the stage. The machine made strange noises and all of the grain stacks tilted backwards. The puppeteers in the grain stacks then crawled out, and the stacks fell completely flat."
From April 29 to May 17, Bread & Puppet will be performing at Theater for the New City. The piece, titled, "City of Brotherly Love," looks at Philadelphia's MOVE family, a group of radical African-Americans, now in jail following bloody encounters with the police. "We've helped redefine concepts of puppetry," says Elbow. "Although we're most identified with giant rod puppets, we also recognize the fact that anything you can pick up and manipulate can be incorporated into the show and viewed as puppetry."
Great Small Works of New York City is a cultural descendant of Bread & Puppet. "We are political--although I prefer the word socially conscious--but our politics focus on city issues as opposed to international issues," says Mark Sussman, one of its founding members."We are not didactic and, unlike B&P that uses very large masks and puppets on stilts, we usually work on a very small scale." Indeed, Great Small Works is perhaps best known for its toy theatre productions inspired by a German and English 19th-century form of story-telling that staged classics in the home using miniatures. Great Small Works' "miniatures" are, in fact, two- to three-feet-tall two-dimensional cardboard cutouts with moving parts, manipulated by wires and strings and rods. Whether the company is mounting a classic--"We've done 20-minute versions of 'Hamlet' and 'Faust' "--or its regular series, "The Toy Theatre of Terror as Usual," the creatures' faces are made up of photocopier-enlarged reproductions of newspaper photographs or relevant pictures lifted from books. In its terror series, "The company uses current events, quoting from newspapers [that's the script], while "refiguring images from news events in a surreal way."
SUB: Broadway-Bound?
How puppetry will evolve Uptown and Downtown is, of course, up for grabs. Is "The Lion King" ushering in a new form of mainstream theatre, or is it an anomaly? And is "The Lion King" a good thing for the world of puppets? The answers vary.
"I'd love to see more puppetry on Broadway," says James Godwin of the The Elementals. "I've always loved Broadway and I don't think it will violate the art form's integrity."
Michael Romanyshyn doesn't agree at all: "I don't think 'The Lion King,' and 'Jackie' are positive developments. Puppetry doesn't require a high budget and it shouldn't be compartmentalized--one team creates the puppets, another operates them. This compartmentalization takes away from the great thing about puppetry."
On the other hand, Michael Curry of "The Lion King" can't wait to see more puppets and masks--in all their permutations--on Broadway. "I have my hand on the pulse of the downtown world. But the most creative freedom I've ever had has been in commercial projects like 'The Lion King.' " Curry's puppets have been seen at the 1996 Olympic Opening Ceremonies and Disney theme parks.
Stephen Kaplin believes the future of puppetry is in films and the avant-garde. Still, he thinks at some point down the road "It will burst through mainstream theatre."
ENDIT