“Every time we do the festival, we think, ‘That’s it, we don’t have to do it again.’ But there’s just so much good work out there, it’s irresistible. We have to present it.” That’s Eric Bass, co-founder/director of Sandglass Theater, a world-class puppetry troupe based in Putney, Vt. This week and next they launch, for the seventh time, the biennial Puppets in the Green Mountains, billed as “an international festival of unusual theater.”
International it certainly is. The festival, which begins on Saturday and runs through next weekend, boasts nine companies from six countries giving 20 performances in Putney, Brattleboro and three other southern Vermont towns. And unusual theater it undeniably is. Not only are the actors (mostly) not human, but these puppet shows are far from the Muppets, sock puppets and dancing marionettes that still occupy popular images of the genre.
For a start, nearly half the shows are intended primarily or entirely for grown-ups, not kids. And even those aimed at youngsters and their families stretch the boundaries of the genre in intriguing ways. Like “Panther and Crane,” by Heather Henson (yes, daughter of the Muppets’ creator), which adds animated sequences and kites to the puppets’ mini-world. And there’s the version of “Rumpelstiltskin” performed by Lille Kartofler Theater of Germany, with a cast of child-size puppets that create up-close relationships with the audience. As Bass describes that show, “It’s not just something you watch, it’s something you live in.”
One of the festival’s family-friendly shows isn’t a puppet play at all in the usual sense. “This World, the Next, and Then the Peach Orchard” is a sophisticated collection of vignettes by the Connecticut-based Masque Theatre Company, led by Larry Hunt, whom Bass describes as “a timeless artist” whose aesthetic grows from and expands on the ancient tradition of performance by actors in character-defining masks.
Puppets are magically irresistible not just because they appeal to the child in all of us, but, perhaps even more, because in their witty abstraction of real life they can summon a culture’s deepest hopes and fears and dreams. In the right hands a puppet becomes almost human—the all-but-breathing extension of a flesh-and-blood person.
One almost universal aspect of contemporary puppetry is seeing the puppeteer in full view manipulating the puppet. It’s inspired by the Japanese bunraku tradition, in which black-clad humans are semi-visible behind their puppets but not “seen” by the audience. A more explicit version of that convention has been developed in the West, with the human stepping out of the shadows to fully share the space. For many aficionados (including this one) that’s a plus—an acknowledgement of an intimate relationship. Ask any puppeteer, and she or he will tell you it’s not about operating a dummy, it’s a partnership—two entities becoming one performer, each informing the other.
Adults only
Three of the festival’s offerings are intended specifically for adults, though teenagers and mature older children will also relate. Blair Thomas, Bass says, “is my favorite American puppeteer for adult audiences. He understands better than any American puppeteer I know that the world of the puppet is the extreme sacred and the extreme profane.” Those distinct spheres are embodied in Thomas’s “Hard Headed Heart,” which blends Federico Garcia Lorca’s raunchy puppet farce “Don Cristobal,” the New Orleans blues “St. James Infirmary” and Wallace Stevens’ sublime haiku-esque poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
The media used to create this mix are as diverse as the texts: hand puppets, rod marionettes, shadow puppets and a one-man band. “The way his work sails from the profane into the sacred embodies the real essence of why the world of the puppet and the world of the actor are different worlds,” Bass explains. “The actor’s world can never be as deeply profane or as sacred as where the puppet goes. For me it’s what puppets really do best.”
The updated “Sleeping Beauty” by Colette Garrigan, a Liverpudlian by birth and now based in France, is described as “more a nightmare than a fairytale.” It’s the coming-of-age story of a modern English “princess” who travels from bruised innocence to maturity, including the discovery that sometimes the prince isn’t so very charming. Garrigan’s shadow play takes place in front of as well as behind a semi-transparent screen that hints at the mechanics of the presentation. She includes herself in the shadow-puppet tableaus, along with found objects that are both representations and metaphors for the story’s anti-fairyland, like a scary forest created by a cluster of forks.
“It’s a hard-edged show and a tour de force performance,” Bass says. “A great show for anyone who wants to look at gender issues, a great show for any father who has a daughter, a great show for any teenage woman whose experience may be validated by it.”
Perhaps the most unsual piece in this festival of unusual theater comes from Tabola Rassa of Barcelona. This duo’s whimsical version of Moliere’s satirical comedy “The Miser” turns the title character’s greedy obsession into a scarcity of topical significance: he’s hoarding, not gold, as in the original, but water.
“They do something that can only be done with puppets,” says Bass of the performers, who use plumbing fixtures and other household objects to bring some dozen characters to life. “The puppets are made out of water faucets. And what can hoard water better than a shut-off faucet?” Bass declines to divulge how the taps eventually get opened, but promises, “There is running water in this show.”
The festival also features the premiere of Sandglass Theater’s latest work, intended for adults and older children. “All-Weather Ballads: A Love Story” grew out of a piece Bass and his wife (and company co-founder) Ines Zeller Bass showed two years ago, then called simply “Ballad.” That show, a comically poignant slice of rural Vermont life, has been expanded and refined to focus on two characters, a boy and girl who grow from childhood to old age together over a figurative cycle of four seasons.
The piece, performed by Eric and Ines and musician Nick Keil, contrasts the full-size human performers with small-scale sets and puppet figures. It is still both funny and poignant, Bass says, and while “the characters are not always nice and not always smart, they’re very human.” The show is built around a cycle of original songs by Bass and composer Keith Murphy. “We’re working with that sense of the ballad of life,” Bass explains. “In a sense, our lives are a series of ballads just as they are a series of seasons.”
Puppets in the Green Mountains runs Sept. 18-26. Tickets and info at puppetsinthegreenmountains.com and (802) 376-7173.
