For at least the last two seasons, particularly at the Puppet Showplace Theatre's "Puppets at Night" series and at their bimonthly Puppet Slams, Boston audiences have seen a wide variation of puppet theatre presentations. Many have used a techniques where not only are the puppeteers visible but part of the performance, sometimes as characters in their own right. The puppets used have ranged from exquisite sculptures to household objects, from symbolic figures to flat paper cutouts from magazines, as well as traditional forms. Other performers have explored techniques where human actors and puppet representations alternate in creating roles in the drama.
As the final import of its season, the Showplace recently presented Great Small Works, a New York collective of visual theatre artists, showing two works in "Toy Theater" style from their repertory as centerpieces of their program. The group has been the instigators for an annual Toy Theater Festival in the City. The sixth was held at HERE in January 2003. This evening began with Emerson professor John Bell's "Short Entertaining History of Toy Theatre" a somewhat improvised musical number backed by the rest of the company on assorted instruments. These were Trudi Cohen, Jenny Romaine,Michael Romanyshyn, Roberto Rossi, and Mark Sussman, all with interesting backgrounds variously connected to Bread & Puppet traditions.
GSW's first Toy Theatre piece "A Walk in the Street", inspired by vignettes from Italo Calvino, designed and directed by Rossi, was very much in the modern continental mode exemplified by Robert Poulter's work, with its intimate action confined to a traditional proscenium space, but with almost constantly changing and moving backgrounds, large and small figures, and a complex soundscape. This piece seemed designed for presentation in an even smaller space than PST's storefront. Third on the program was Romaine as Pirate Jenny in street performance style doing "The Ballad of Georgio Bushwack", a rowdy political satire with changeable drawings by Scotty Heron exhibited in a box around her neck.
The final piece of this program, a recreation o f "B.B. in LA", originally performed at the 1998 Henson International Festival in NY, was largely a table top presentation of small-scale epic theatre, with Sussman from narrating atop a stepladder supporting a base drum, the rest of the company functioning as both the band and puppeteer/actors. The script follows Brecht from when he left Germany during the rise of Hitler, through his marginal theatrical career in the States to his return to Berlin one day after testifying before H.U.A.C. Puppets were mostly three dimensional dolls and objects. The F.B.I. bureau chief was a flashlight, for example, and Brecht's recorded testimony was played with his cutout figure backed by a collage of small radios. The first song of the show was a setting of his poem about the radio he took with him when fleeing Germany. The piece opened with a spirited rendition of "Kanonensang" and ended with the band marching off to "Useless."
As an addition to the Showplace's season, the following week, two MFA candidates from UConn, Faye Dupras from Canada and Andrea Rubenstein from Brazil, touring as "Foreign Landscapes", presented their luminous version of an Eastern European fantastic tale, "By the Willow". Costumed as travelers and pulling a two-wheeled covered cart, the pair used exquisite direct contact figures and shadow sequences, the latter projected on the inside of the cart, on a framedrum symbolizing the moon, and on an inflatable which started as the weeping heroine's voluminous underskirt. These two able performers shifted easily between portraying the main characters in their story, and manipulating various puppets and the scenery. During the second half of their 75 minute piece, the cart itself was moved into a variety of orientations to achieve interesting viewpoints. This show was created with coaching from Julie Goell, seen earlier this season doing her one woman "Opening Night: Carmen" at Longy, and represents one of the more interesting trends in international puppetry. It also featured original live music and sound performed by Yann-Gael Poncet
In the same final days of April, a visiting Mexican troupe, Teatro Tinglado, performed their signature piece, "The Repugnant Story of Clotario Demoniax" by Hugo Hiriat at the Center for Latino Arts, part of the Jorge Hernandez Cultural Center in Boston's South End. A continental variation on the old Punch and Judy show, the company; Alejandro Benitez, Leticia Cavazos, Pablo Cueto, and as the title character, Rolando Garcia, has created a singular picaresque tale. With bearded Cueto as the Narrator, puppeteer, and a horny widow, Clothario's fantastic story unfolded with Garcia shifting from manipulating a garish Punch figure to playing that role himself in whiteface. There's a touch of Dario Fo in the company's clowning approach, and a bit of the same anarchic attitude toward society and its predators. Hiriat's script probably owes a bit to Garcia Lorca's "Don Cristobal" pieces as well. Cavazos was pert as Marcelina, a Chinese handpuppet pursued by Clothario and his rival, Isidoro, dressed in white, another Commedia style character with echoes of Pulcinella or Pedrolino. Benitez plays the latter, appearing also as a humanette version of a radio host. Using a simple but effective three level tall booth, crowned with a echo of the one immortalized by Cruikshank, the four puppeteer/actors raced through 90 minutes of lust and mayhem, shifting between their real and puppet selves, sometimes appearing simultaneously.
All three of these performing groups employ presentational techniques which allow them to seque between the modern theatre's penchant for representative realism and older symbolic traditions. The resulting aesthetic dissonance keeps their audience engaged in the process as well as the content of the stories being told. Theatrical audiences are becoming more used to such shifting viewpoints. It will probably become more commonplace to see such techniques used in more mainstream productions, though perhaps not so well integrated. Puppeteers make it look too easy.
For a last taste of the variety of puppetry for adult audiences. there's one last PuppetSlam of the season at the Showplace, Sat. May 8; 7 & 9:30 PM.