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.