Essays

The life of a puppeteer is entirely episodic. The reception and circumstances of every show are endlessly varied. Meanwhile, the shows themselves differ markedly from one another in theme, cast members, and purpose. The following insights into the multi-faceted life of the puppet-maker and the puppeteer come in a flow of disconnected observations over time. These short essays reflect the moments in which these ideas occurred.  

Materials

Wood, leather, cloth . . . all those materials, once alive and now, reborn in the life of a puppet! It's a romantic notion, and probably more goofy than spiritual. Yet there's an inescapable, organic sense of material correctness that informs the making of puppets. Real puppets are made to last, to be tossed in boxes and carted from stage to stage. Real puppets, however light and flexible, are tough nuts. And so, ye who would become a puppet master . . . forgo the balsa, the papier-mâché, the wood filler – make real stitches in your cloth, put real leather in your joints, and take a few years to learn how to carve real wooden heads. A genuinely good puppet will outlive you – nicks and scratches, rips and all.

Thought

The most important thing a puppet does is think. Puppet thought – that very short moment of stage life when the puppet hesitates, to create a sense of awareness and consideration of the world before it – establishes a perception of theatrical intention. As the puppet thinks, the audience shares the illusion as they co-exist in the world of the play. 

Little People

I never really understood the attraction of puppets as little people. And though I appreciate the difficulty of making puppets do person things and somehow live  person lives, I am not very interested in the creation of miniature worlds.

Far better to see puppets as forces -- emotional, dramatic, and sentient entities. And better to let puppets be the metaphorical beings they are: agents of mythos.  An effective and modern use of puppets takes a play to an abstract plane, a turned page, a whole new narrative realm.  Given the proper structural support and the right moment, puppets enrich and deepen a play in just the way an illustration invigorates a story. 

Big Puppets

 It is a grand thing – playing the mechanical engineer.   So heady to plot with levers and pulleys and cords the life and motion of a Big One.  Twenty foot tall, ten-foot wings, a four foot snout!  All rise and raise hell!

But, do not get too lost in your puppet power trip. Size for size’s sake is not nearly enough.  For there is no dead thing like a really large dead thing.  Be assured, a large but sadly inanimate Big One is too easy to make.  Give me eight strong puppet movements and no more than two minutes of stage life.

That’s a proper blueprint for a truly huge puppet.  

Puppets Become

For all the puppet-maker’s best laid plans, the script writer’s fervent demands, a puppet is destined to become.  A slip of the knife or an errant brush stroke remakes an imagined face.  A mechanical transgression  redefines a character.  And, suddenly, this slightly altered character bursts in to demand a script change.  The puppet has become its own self and what you thought was a story about a town has become a story about the world. 

It is a fact we must not only accept but celebrate!   The puppeteer, the playwright, and the puppet-maker must serve the puppet, and --  the puppet is always right.

Eyes

Ninety percent of all puppet life originates in the eyes.  Either a puppet engages her fellow puppet, directly and convincingly, eye to eye or, like Romeo and Juliet, they fall over dead  on stage in each other’s arms.  In order to be animate, a puppet must always know exactly what she is looking at whether it is another puppet, the sky, a sound or in the default position, downward into her own thoughts.  The moment the puppet forgets this, she betrays all her wooden charms and becomes a blank presence staring into the void.  

And, no one knows all this better than Billy, sitting how far back in the tenth row.   As distant as he maybe, he has a miraculous ability of following those minuscule dots we call the puppet’s eyes.  And, for the play’s sake, those eyes better be on the beam. 

Script as Bio-Rhythm

A puppet script is different --  its very own animal.  And like a living thing, it exists within the perimeters of a bio-rhythm that begins in the feet of the puppeteer and proceeds to the leg, back, arms, and hands.   This is the rhythm that shapes the puppets speech.  It is the force that defines the length of lines and even influences the sounds of the words.  It’s the rhythm that joins puppeteer to the puppet and, thus, to the script.

The Vibe

There is no question about it.   The surprising moment, the tearjerker, and the guffaw  will always sell puppet plays.  And, amusing as they may be, they are sometimes in the way of the real magic of puppetry – the property that I have come to call  the vibe of the play.  “The vibe” refers to a shared mission between the audience and the puppet, the total buy-in of the ten-year- old and her mother in the third row to the unfolding world of the play.  In a great show, the vibe begins somewhere near the middle of the play.  The audience as settled, and a kind of pure theater sets in between the stage and the folks in the seats. Now we have entered the song, the realm of myth now.  That safe space between the verbal world and a higher plane.  The place where we learn things.

Big Light/Little Light

Puppets live for the light.  With stage lighting comes shadows, focus and drama.  Imperfections turn into character, wood and paint into flesh.  And under the spotlights, the abstract world of the puppet becomes, for the moment, real.

But, in our admiration of the eloquently lit stage, we blithely disregard  another more prosaic light— the light of the room -- the light of the day.  A mistake.  For with this light the puppet comes with his ever-present friend--- the puppeteer.  And together they present an entirely different kind of puppetry.  There in that simple light of everyday life a different kind of puppetry transpires.   Real life experiences, social interchange, occurs here between puppet, puppeteer and audience members alike. 

Cast and Collaboration

Puppetry--mercurial purveyor of music, literature, visual arts, and performance --the pure multi-disciplinary medium.   It is a meld of interrelated jobs, skills, and responsibilities, all adding up to an ultimate team effort. 

In the best of all puppet worlds, this team effort leads to the sacred core of  theatrical activities – creative sharing.  In this, the great irony is that the act of sharing ideas is often more important than the ideas themselves.  A purely devised collaboration is felt beyond the stage production itself and the unity of the cast.   It is  clearly felt by the audience.  And in the audience we find our ultimate collaborator -- theatrical transcendence.

The Role of Puppetry

Enter the contemporary play. That magical artifice in which the freshness and manner of  the telling is every bit as important as what is told.   What vital combination of conventions, technology, media -- feathers, horns and whistles will fit together to make this story exactly right, triumphantly new and effective?

 Among the many roles puppetry has to play in the current culture, it has no better calling than the needs of the modern theater.  The perfect partner, puppetry joins contemporary theater in the giddy search for new and amazing ways to tell the story. For example, puppetry’s power to shift a play into a dream sequence, a memory, or a parallel world has universal acceptance.  But let the user beware.  To enter the abstract or the mythic through puppetry is easy enough to do.  It is also easy to get terribly wrong.

Puppet Speech-Talking Bodies

Of all the things that puppets can do, the most uncanny, and yet, most challenging is convincing puppet speech.   It is an action that is often over-played or poorly played for one critical reason:  That is the assumption that puppet speech must primarily originate from the mouth! This may be true enough for a hand puppet, but for marionettes, rods, and Bunraku-like puppets, the illusion of speech can and should be more complex.  With these puppets we must consider the body of the puppet as the primary communicator of words.  That is, from nod, to shrug, to twist, to shudder, the puppet body flows into action to support the lines of the play. Joined by the occasional well-placed movement of the mouth, a puppet becomes comfortably real.

Contemporary Puppetry

Traditional puppetry generally depends on standard puppet forms - marionettes, hand puppets, rods, shadows, and Bunraku puppets.   With these, the puppet script must conform to the limitations of the puppet type.

Contemporary puppetry changes the rules of the game as it passes the creative wand over to the puppet-maker.  Here, the invention of original puppet types is the critical ingredient to creating  new puppet plays.  Huge, specialized puppets take the stage and shadow puppets are integrated with slides. Actors assemble puppet sets on stage as part of the script. In this way the puppetry is tailored directly to the needs of the story themes, action, and characters instead of making the story adapt to the limitations of the puppet type. All in all, contemporary puppetry can lead to a richer and more meaningful use of the medium.

Drum Set

Our marionette theater evolved under the influence of two prominent art forms - film and rock and roll.  The plays were written with an underlying pattern of motion and sound that supported the song of the play.   Edited like a film into sharp intervals  and punctuated crisply with music, actions, and entrances, our stage became a drum set -- our plays, at their best, a flow of coordinated movements.  That is, three- line monologue, puppet entrance, sound, music, four-line dialogue, sound, drop, music, puppet exit, prop down, five line dialogue, new drop, dance, exit puppet, three line monologue, sound, prop, puppet exit=  about two minutes of a fifty-minute play.   A way of writing.

Performer, Place, Audience

How accustomed we are to the notion that theatrical bliss awaits in the hands and hearts of a group of performers.  This assumption is about two-thirds short of the truth.  

A fairer idea of an amazing night at the theater would recognize how equally critical the theater space and the audience are to a successful production.  Imagine a performance space so supportive of the show that, for an hour or more, it becomes the only place on earth.  Envision an audience bringing a self-less flow of energy, wisdom,and good-will to that space.  Now- as the actors come on stage, may they have the wit, the will, and the creative spirit to do an expectant theater justice.

The Script Is All

Neither the puppets nor the puppeteers; neither the staging, the lights or the ten-piece band can save the play.  These elements, no matter how professional and brilliant they may be, are only servants to the script.  No amount of starry light and nuance that can save a poor script.  Puppeteers should be advised.  Take all those gilded tools back down to the basement until the time comes when a worthy script comes to hand.

Sing

The puppet is the instrument, the puppeteer the singer. And through the puppet, the words, the actions, interactions, scenery, tables and chairs, are all tuned, all of a common rhythm - They are all there to be sung.  Like a rooster to a meadowlark to the sky -sung. For the real puppet play is a duet between performers.  This is all you will ever need to know about puppetry. It is a thing  you cannot possibly understand until you and your stage mates experience it.

Marionette Action

Like a dancer, the flow of action generated by a marionette puppet begins in the belly of the beast.   Grounded at the feet, triangulated by the back string, the power of a marionette to shift, swerve, stop and address the world originates in the puppet’s stomach; its center of gravity.  The first challenge to the puppeteer is acquire an intuitive control of this central fulcrum of the puppet and its connection to the stage floor.  All other movements proceed from this relationship.