"The Way In": In Praise of Muppets.

How did I get here?  What was my “Way In” to theater and TV?  Simple: the puppets made me do it.

No, don’t run away.  I’m serious.  The reason I’m involved with theater or TV in the first place is because of… puppets. 

See, at an early age, my mom plunked me down in front of the TV and I watched things like Bugs Bunny, and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Underdog, Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Flintstones (also Nixon’s resignation – but that’s another story).  I loved TV, and I loved all those shows.  But back then my favorite show, my very favorite show of all… was Sesame Street. 

Oh, man oh man, I loved Sesame Street – mostly because of the Muppets.  As characters, they were colorful, hilarious, iconoclastic - and often anarchic in a way that spoke deeply to the preschool Ed (you know, the one that screamed “COOKIES!” and stuffed a box of oreos in his mouth. I wouldn’t do that now.  Really, I swear.) 

I loved how the human actors (Hi, Maria! Hi, Bob!) interacted with those puppet characters, too.  They all lived in this joyful world together, which was integrated both racially, and… well, species-wise.  On Sesame Street, everyone lived in harmony: humans and Big Birds and Snuffleupagi and Grouches and Monsters and Penguins and Chickens and even Slimy Worms…

Sometime at an early age, I realized that the puppets weren’t alive themselves, but were inanimate objects on peoples’ hands.  Somehow, though, this knowledge didn’t make them less interesting to me.   Nope, it made them even MORE fascinating: even as a little kid, I was delighted by the illusion.  Like great magicians, the people under those cloth bodies were doing something wonderful: they gave life to things that alone seemed NOT to be alive. 

So, yes, because of Sesame Street, puppets and objects grew very important to me; inanimate things seemed to take on life, if I could make them move juuuust right.  I was always making things move as if they were alive, and putting on puppet shows with puppets or things I had around the house.  (I remember one of my favorite gifts: Fisher Price’s very-well-made- “Rowlf” puppet when I was 6.  If that wasn’t the first puppet I ever had, it was the best-made and best-working one.  I was hooked.)

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By the time I was 7, The Muppet Show was my new favorite TV show. I loved the characters and the musical numbers.  I loved that Kermit and friends broke the fourth wall all the time, and seemed to know I was out there watching.  I loved how chaos could break out any time (and usually did).  But most of all, I loved the heart in the show: the characters seemed to be having so much fun putting on a show every week, and they seemed so happy together as a group – a family.  I knew I wanted to have just that kind of family feeling in whatever I was going to do when I grew up. 

So I became a sort of Kermit, myself: the 10-year-old writer/director/puppeteer/set designer/impresario of my own shows. I performed them with whatever puppets were around, in front of family members of varying degrees of willingness.  Eventually the plays I wrote had fewer and fewer puppets in them and starred just me and my sister.  (But mostly me.) 

It’s the usual story, right?  How many of us started performing, or loving theater?  How many parents have sat through godawful performances in the garage, or the living room, or on the staircase, while the kids figure out that they actually like doing this, even if they’re not doing it well?

What happened then?  Eventually I started acting in plays, and then that morphed into writing plays, and I left puppets and puppetry far, far behind.

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Or did I? 

This summer I had a big revelation: after my first season writing for The Fairly OddParents at Nickelodeon, I wanted to do something that spoke to me deeply - something both strange and meaningful.  I applied to and was accepted into the O’Neill Festival’s National Puppetry Conference in Connecticut, after being spurred on by a chance meeting with Leslie Carrera-Rudolph (the remarkable actor and puppeteer who plays Abby Cadabby on Sesame Street, who was also doing a voice on Nickelodeon’s TUFF Puppy).

Leslie had promised a life-changing experience – and the O'Neill was that, and more.  I hope to blog more about it very soon – as soon as I can process it more fully.  But let me just say for now that it was indeed a profound week and a half – and SO amazing in what it taught me about theater.

Specifically, I was reminded how little it takes to do theater: you need a couple of people, some figures made out of masking tape and cardboard, a table, a clip light.  I saw how powerful puppets can be as a tool for communicating human stories.  And I don’t mean just kids’ stories, either - no, I mean stories about very grown up things: illness, evil, cruelty – as well as kindness, love and intimacy.

But this is the funny thing: I realized that I hadn’t left puppets behind at all. I noticed that almost everything I’ve ever written has had, at its center, a strange, vivid, or sacred object:

• a strange glowing body under the desert sand (New Mexico)
• an exploding gingerbread White House (The First Lady)
• the very first American flag (Betsy Ross LIES!)
• an otherworldly baby with sharp teeth and bright blue skin (Dangerous Baby)
• a bloodstained white shag rug (Red Wine Stain)

Sometimes actual puppets themselves have found their way into my plays, without my ever intending  them to be there.  (Masks, too – which make the actors puppet-like, in a way).  Even though these weren't puppet plays, I realized that puppets were a technique I was often employing to tell my stories, with
• Victorian bird masks worn by Lizzie Borden’s jury (Lizzie, or Hatchet Hour)
• a dancing squid (Theater is the Thing With Tentacles)
• a crocodile-faced President (State of the Union)
• Lobster Billy, the carnival boy with his bright red hands (Lobster Billy)
• a dying Paul Bunyan, played by a giant shadow puppet (Bunyan’s Body)

Somehow, puppets have been in my work all along. My time at the O’Neill let me realize that there was a word for what I was doing: puppet and object theater.  And it let me recognize there is great grace, artistry, honor and tradition in following that road.

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For there’s something else I realized after the Puppetry Festival, something that really shocked me.  I thought I was going to 'puppet camp' to learn about puppets. But while I was there, I spent so much time thinking about how humans move, act, and feel.   I was constantly asking:

• Hmm… How would that puppet stretch his hand towards his wife if he were in love? 
• How would this puppet hold his head if he were stricken with grief? 
• How would this one stand if he saw something astonishing?  And…
• How can this inanimate object – a plastic toy shovel, say –convey sex or lust tenderly, without being obscene? 

So I guess I’m saying that I thought I was going to Connecticut to deal with objects…. but I left Connecticut with a much greater appreciation of what it means to be human.  Puppets let me see how beautifully, confoundingly, mysteriously complex we are.

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For me, then: remembering “The Way In” after a year in Hollywood has been a chance to rediscover both “The Way BACK” to what I loved in the first place… and to discover “The Way Forward.”

The O’Neill was a catalyst that caused a real change in me.  I left there ready to relaunch my theater company, Cardium Mechanicum, as a puppet and object theater company.  (After all, that title I invented is bastardized Latin for “mechanical heart.”  What better name for a company that gives life to the unliving – that puts the heart in the machine, or a machine in a living chest?) 

And I remembered what I used to know: that whether my plays have puppets in them or not, theater can be done with nothing but a person or two, a square of wood floor, maybe some cardboard, some masking tape, and a clip light.  Important in these times, don’t you think?

So I’m cogitating on what’s next for me, and I think I can promise it’s gonna be cool.  I’m on a new path with my work – or, perhaps, just more surely, more confidently on a very old path.  It’s something I’m looking forward to blogging and writing about more. 

So for the time being, maybe you can consider me your Chief Puppet Theater Correspondent here at Extra Criticum.  It’s not my fault, really: the Puppets made me do it.

Comments

[BHay]

1.

Great piece, Ed! The Muppets are one of my earliest TV memories too and I gotta say, my aim with every TV show or comic book I write is to hit that same perfect level of manic hilarity as the Muppets.