Theatre Review / Frank Episale
Puppets! Puppets! Puppets!
Tom Lee’s Ko’olau. Puppets and direction by Tom Lee. At La Mama Experimental Theatre (closed).
Drama of Works’s 7th annual Carnival of Samhain. At HERE Arts Center through Nov. 8.
While puppet theatre probably makes up less than ten percent of the theatre I see, it makes up a much higher percentage of the memorable theatre I see. Year after year, production after production, the “object theatre” community astonishes me with their extraordinary ingenuity, craftsmanship, and infectious joy in their medium. Despite bouts of enthusiastic cheerleading from myself and other small-time reviewers, though, the audience for this work remains small. Even as puppets make their way into more and more mainstream events, from Broadway shows to the Metropolitan Opera house, shows performed primarily by puppets have remained marginal even within the already marginal downtown theatre scene. It sometimes feels as if the field of puppet practitioners is growing at a rate much faster than puppet audiences.
There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I have written about elsewhere. Just as comic books have struggled for a perceived “legitimacy” in literary and visual arts circles, puppets are often seen as a subset of children’s theatre, and children’s theatre is often seen as an aesthetically uninteresting training ground for audiences. This work is more likely to be studied for its pedagogical potential than for its politics, its narrative strategies, or its aesthetic value. Exacerbating this bias is the fact that so many puppet shows play extremely short runs, even by the standards of off-off-Broadway. Because most reviews are written for potential audiences of shows that are still running, reviews of such short-lived productions are hard to come by.
This month, then, I will write about one show that has already closed (Tom Lee’s Ko’olau) and, more briefly, one that has not yet opened but will be closed shortly after this issue of the Advocate goes to press (Drama of Works’s 7th annual Carnival of Samhain).
The story of Kalua’iko’olau, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian man who died of leprosy (Hansen’s disease), is a very sad tale indeed. In Tom Lee’s Ko’olau, it is a very sad tale told with a great deal of joy and ingenuity. It is also a powerful refutation of the notion that revealing the mechanisms of theatre compromises theatre’s capacity for emotional impact.
In 1892, Ko’olau moved—with his wife Pi’ilani and their son Kaleimanu—to Kalalau, a remote area of Kaua’i in order to avoid being moved to a leper colony by the Provisional Government (the Republic of Hawai’i had not yet been formed, but Queen Lili’uokalani had already been overthrown by plantation owners, with the aid of the United States).When a local sheriff attempted to capture him, Ko’olau killed both the sheriff and the two Provisional Government soldiers who accompanied him. After first Kaleimanu and then Ko’olau died of Hansen’s, Pi’ilani quietly buried them both and the returned to her family home.
From here, the story might have faded into obscurity like so many other anonymous tragedies of the time. What rescued Ko’olau and his family from being just a footnote in the history of the Provisional Government was that Pi’ilani worked with journalist John Sheldon to record her story in Hawaiian. Because so few surviving texts document this period from a Hawaiian perspective, the resulting volume has become a key historical document, and has captured the imaginations of writers, painters, theater artists, and filmmakers. Most famously, Jack London’s Koolau the Leper and W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs tell two very different versions of the narrative.
Tom Lee’s puppet theatrical Ko’olau is a beautifully crafted, highly emotional iteration of the story that draws on a variety of puppetry and musical traditions; Lee focuses less on violence and disease than on the bond that holds this family together as they fight to live and die together, on their own terms. The puppetry techniques employed are divided into two spaces. The foregrounded characters, Ko’olau and his family, are represented by a variation on Japanese kuruma ningyo (cart puppets), a kissing cousin to bunraku puppets. Puppeteers sit on wheeled carts, the puppets’ feet resting on the feet of the puppeteers; when the performers move the cart around on stage by moving their feet, the feet of the puppets seem to be walking. While kuruma puppets are often elaborately painted and costumed, Lee has simplified the aesthetic of his characters with a rough-hewn style he says is intended to evoke the woodcuts and other crafts of Hawaii.
While the kuruma- based Ko’olau family occupies the foreground, the background is dominated by a large screen, onto which layers of shadow, light, and video are projected. As with the cart puppets, Lee has designed the shadows and projections to reflect the hand-carved elegance of Hawaiian prints. Unlike the cart puppets, the shadows and projections are not built on any particular tradition but are an amalgamation of techniques familiar to anyone who frequents contemporary New York City puppet performances. Even in the company of their accomplished peers, however, Tom Lee and his team are exceptionally inventive in their deployment of these techniques. Anyone who thinks of overhead projectors as good for nothing more than excruciating presentations from middle school science teachers has clearly not seen Ko’olau.
Indeed, much of the thrill of this performance, as with many puppet pieces, is that the mechanics of production are very much in view. The bodies and faces of the on-stage puppeteers, and the ways in which they manipulate their puppets are a part of why the kuruma ningyo are so fascinating to watch. Similarly, projections and shadows are primarily operated, in full view of the audience, by Lee himself and by his lighting designer, Miranda Hardy. The pair hunch over their projectors with transparencies, hand puppets, a glass of water, and a variety of other objects that result in an astonishing array of layered effects. On the screen, clouds float by, letters are written, villains raise their guns, and a young Maui casts his fishing line into the sea to raise a series of new islands. Against this larger-than-life backdrop, the small, very human story of Ko’olau and his family unfolds.
With little-to-no dialogue, Ko’olau’s aural elements come primarily from live musicians who line either side of small auditorium. As with the puppets, the instruments draw from a mélange of world-music traditions, mostly Asian, with a particular emphasis on Japanese sounds and the occasional nod to the music of Hawaii. Lee, like many of his contemporaries, borrows so gleefully and unapologetically from his contemporaries that he inevitably opens himself up to accusation of cultural appropriation. The subject of Hawaii, however, inoculates him from such charges to some extent; there is no ethnic majority in Hawaii, and while Ko’olau’s 19th-century islands were not quite the islands we know today, they were already a place where cultural influences from Japan, Portugal, and many other nations held sway.
There has long been a thread of theatre theory that claims theatricality must be as invisible as possible if the audience is to become emotionally involved with the narrative on stage. This idea has been perpetuated, in part, by misreadings of Brecht’s writings, and by simplistic statements like “Wagner turned the house lights off; Brecht turned them back on.” It is not my intention to enter into such debates here, but it is sufficient to say that the same audiences who smiled delightedly at Lee’s ingenuous craftsmanship could be heard sniffling back tears at the death of Kaleimanu.
One of my favorite puppet theatre companies, Drama of Works, have made a name for themselves both as creators of their own work and as curators and supporters of the work of others. The company’s Artistic Director, Gretchen Van Lente, produces the sometimes-monthly “Punch” puppet jams and, once a year, right around Halloween, puts together an even she calls the Carnival of Samhain. This year’s Carnival runs for only three days (November 6th through November 8th), and misses the more spine-tingling potential of both October 31st and November 4th, but promises to be an exciting event nevertheless. An eclectic mix of puppet and burlesque acts that run the gamut from the genuinely creepy to the semi-sexy gothic farce, the Carnival of Samhain may well be the best way to dispose of $15 in early November.
Ko’olau (closed). Puppets and direction by Tom Lee. Music by Yukio Tsuji and Bill Ruyle. Lighting by Miranda Hardy. Costumes by Kanako Hiyama. Additional projection design by Caren Loebel-Fried. Asssistant director Nao Otaka. Company: Matthew Acheson, Marina Celander, Frankie Cordero, Miranda Hardy, Yoko Myoi, Nao Otaka, Tom Lee. Understudies: Takemi Kitamura, Kiku Sakai. This production opened on September 18th, 2008 at La Mama Experimental Theatre (74A East 4th Street, NYC) and closed on October 5th. Additional information is available at www.tomleeprojects.com and www.lamama.org
The 7th Annuual Carnival of Samhain. Curated and presented by Drama of Works. Featuring Puppet State Players (“Mothra Memorial Junior High”), Drama of Works (Poe’s “The Black Cat”), Z. Lindsey Briggs, Evolve Company (“Becoming”), Marta Mozelle MacRostle, Chiara Ambrosio, Pinchbottom Burlesque (“The Mummies Curves”), Nasty Canasta, Jonny Porkpie, Amy Chen, Will Randall, Puppet Junction, and Bone Daddy. Thursday, November 6th through Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 7pm. HERE Arts Center (145 6th Ave, NYC). Tickets: $15. Running time: Approximately 90 minutes. Additional information available at www.dramaofworks.com and www.here.org
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