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THE SCRIPT
FALL & WINTER 2006- ISSUE NO. 20
Contents • Selections
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THE SCRIPT
"In the Beginning was the Word." And the Word was…"Boom!"?
"Om…"? "Yahweh."?
by Andrew C. Periale
One might well wonder: What worth words, when there
are no ears to hear? Still, there's plenty to ponder
in that sentence, which is, after all, a translation
and therefore an interpretation. Certainly Faust (as
the instrument of J. W. von Goethe) gives it a thorough
mulling in Act I, Scene I— an agonized internal polemic,
which Kathy Foley uses as a framework for her consideration
of Japanese puppet scripts.
There are lots of other words for you to ponder in
this issue of Puppetry International, dedicated, as
it is, to the puppet script. For this endeavor, we've
enlisted the aid of Dr. John Bell as our first ever
Guest Editor. John is not only a theater scholar (PhD,
Columbia University, presently on the faculty of Emerson
College), but is a puppeteer as well (a longtime associate
of Bread and Puppet and a founding member of Great
Small Works). John has also been an advisor to PI since
the first issue, and is a frequent contributor as well
as being our Historian and Book Review Editor. We couldn't have found a better
candidate to shepherd this issue.
In addition to all the scripts, there are reviews of
some terrific new books. Film Producer and director
Joe Jacoby's memoir, Boy on a String has some fascinating
stories of working for both Maury Bunin and Bil Baird
in the fifties and sixties. Sandglass Theater—From
Thought to Image is the story of this beloved theater's
origins and their twenty years in Vermont. Hazelle
and her Marionettes: Creating the World's Largest Puppet
Company is the fascinating tale of Hazelle Hedges,
a puppeteer turned manufacturing mogul.
Finally, plans are underway for the Puppeteers of America
2007 national festival, which will feature some very
exciting puppetry from distant lands. So, whether the
universe was initiated with a "Word," an "Act," or
an "Idea," Hanus Hachenburg foretells how it will end
for us—
End of performance. We invite you again tomorrow at
twelve o'clock. Entrance free!*
by Guest Editor, John Bell
This issue of Puppetry International is devoted to scripts
for puppet theater, and it presents a conundrum, because
to a large extent puppet theater and the written word are
antithetical to each other. By this I mean that, in fact,
puppets don't need words to do their work, since they work
primarily as moving sculpture, moving image. In this sense,
puppet theater is like dance, music or the visual arts,
in that words might connect to or sometimes adorn such
works, but are not essential to the art forms themselves.
Ultimately, puppetry is not a text-based form.
But, having said this, one must admit that words and puppets
often seem inextricably connected, above all by the voice
connected to a puppet: Jim Henson's affable and simply
nuanced voice for Kermit; Frank Oz's bumptious comic tone
for Miss Piggy; and, going farther back, Punch's reedy,
menacing, swazzle-inflected chirping as he proclaims "That's
the way we do it!" after one of his peremptory murders.
It's the voice which marks the puppet, no matter what words
are being said; it's the tonal and inflective qualities
which complete those characteristics begun in sculpture,
rather than the literary content of a particular puppet
show.
And yet, finally, yes, the words in puppet shows do matter
beyond their simple aural qualities, and words do very
interesting things in puppet shows, which the many different
scripts in this issue will show.
Whereas the tradition of "The Drama" supposes and promulgates
a process beginning with a playwright, passing through
producers, directors, and actors to the realization of
a play onstage, puppet theater is more often "devised"
(as a contemporary theater neologism has it). It is the
combination of "image—music—text," as Roland Barthes put
it, in which all three elements share equal credit. This
aspect of puppet scriptwriting comes to the fore in the
script for Bread and Puppet Theater's A Man Says Goodbye
to his Mother, which presents the play as the succession
of different particular moments of "action," "music," and
"narration." Likewise, Jerry Juhl's script for a sketch
from the last episode of Fraggle Rock makes one realize
how much the work of Jim Henson's Muppets was primarily
a succession of images and gestures. In Juhl's script one
can see how a short Muppet sketch is a combination of camera
angles, sound effects, and puppet gestures, among which
Juhl's words rest delicately, as if punctuating the visual
and other aural effects. Other methods of writing puppet
scripts understandably place great importance on stage
directions, for example the transcription of Great Small
Works' Terror as Usual, Episode 9: Doom!, which includes
elaborate descriptions of toy theater imagery.
On the other hand, in many spectacularly stunning puppet
traditions, words can take on their own intense political
and religious power. Kathy Foley explains the power of
words in puppet shows through an analysis of Japanese bunraku
theater as the articulation of samurai values in eighteenth-century
Japan. One can see echoes of this in Daniel McGuire's transcription
and translation of a Javanese wayang kulit scene performed
by dalang Tristuti Rachmadi, which is not only the presentation
of a "branch story" from the sacred Javanese epic based
on the Mahabharata, but also a personal statement from
an artist (Tristuti) doing his work at a very difficult
political moment. In this case, the words of a puppet show
operate on many different levels, not simply because of
the hierarchy of different languages employed in wayang
performance, but because such spectacles involve constant
interplay between the artists and audience members as members
of a community of the present moment. Here, the words of
a puppet show are not simply important as dramatic literature,
but also as a multi-faceted communication system full of
nuance, ambiguity, and multiple meanings.
The puppet scripts in this issue also bring up the larger
subject of puppet dramaturgy: what stories do puppet plays
show us, and how exactly do they do so? Four scripts here
based on traditional sources—Polichinelle Precepteur, Moving
House, The Adventures of Petrushka, and The Doctor—are
connected by their serial structure and Punch-and-Judy
style violence. That is, all four feature a trickster main
character (Polichinelle, Titella, Petrushka, or Karaguz)
who meets up with a series of regular folks whom he tricks,
swindles, or, in some cases even murders. This puppet dramaturgy
of serial duets can be explained quite practically as a
necessity rising from the limited possibilities of the
solo puppeteer with only two hands; but beyond that important
physical limitation, the series of one-on-one scenes assumes
its own power as a repetition of charming mischievousness
(or evil) visited equally upon all strata of society—a
quite complicated and morally ambiguous message, which
must be part of these stories' constant appeal around the
world.
In the early twentieth century, puppet theater stirred
the interest of many avant-garde artists, the beginning
of a trend which still marks puppetry today. In this issue,
we present a translation of Lothar Schreyer's expressionist
attempt at a ritual celebration of procreation, Mondspiel,
in which the chopped telegram-style poetry of expressionist
drama is used to create an intensely emotional and erotic
world. The show was performed with life-size puppets at
the Bauhaus theater in 1923—could it have achieved what
Schreyer hoped it would? Likewise, the Spanish poet Federico
Garcia Lorca, in Buster Keaton's Stroll invented a kind
a surreal puppet world (quite different from the other
puppet plays he wrote, which seem tame in comparison) where
random acts of beauty and violence flow from the puppets'
speeches right into the stage directions themselves, creating
impossible challenges which a contemporary puppeteer, Blair
Thomas, was only too happy to take on.
A different kind of avant-gardism is represented by Robert
Bromley and Al Carthe's 1930s Sancho Panza marionette play
for the Los Angeles puppet unit of the Federal Theater
Project. Here, the currents of modern California puppet
theater, initiated by Blanding Sloan and Ralph Chessé in
the 1920s as an outgrowth of the Little Theater Movement,
emerge as part of a nation-wide effort to make live theater
play an active role in national cultural life, not so much
by stunningly new and different techniques, but by straightforwardly
claiming the puppet stage as a forum for the most serious
stories the theater can offer.
The political dimensions of puppet theater (which are never
far from puppetry's strong roots in religious ritual) can
be seen in Bread and Puppet's street theater piece, which
sought to re-tell the experience of Harlem mothers during
the Vietnam War in the frame of an international moral
struggle. It is also present in the political ends of bunraku,
which Kathy Foley elucidates, and (as Gary Friedman tells
us) in Hanus Hachenburg's teen-age persistence. The latter
left us a record of life in a Nazi concentration camp as
an allegorical puppet show of outrageous dimensions, even
as the outrage was taking
place all around him.
Although words aren't the primary focus of puppet theater,
they can sometimes assume a power even greater than that
of actors' theater, because they are somehow separated
from the characters who voice them. The separation is based
on the practical knowledge we all share—that puppets themselves
are incapable of speech—but we leap over that flat impossibility
with the wild desire to believe that puppets can indeed
talk, and that what they say (while we know it's really
the voice of the puppeteer) is in fact—by some magic feat!—the
actual voice of a wooden, paper-maché, plastic, or cardboard
creature who is both of this world and beyond it. That
element, which pertains to puppet theater but not to actors'
theater, makes the words puppets say that much more intense. |
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