[opening music]
[music]
[On loud speakers] Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!
I give you the amazing, the uncroakable,
Bessie, the cannonball!
[applause]
[chanting] Bessie! Bessie!
[explosion]
[Douglas Stritch] We have this half-cow lying in the shop
for a long time and we were always
wondering what we were gonna do with it,
if we were going to finish it, if I was
gonna see it to fruition, but Bruce
had ideas in his head about...
He wanted to do a cabaret-style show for the next
performance at the theater.
He said, "Wouldn't it be great if we could use
that cow in some form or fashion?"
and I said, "Yeah, oh yeah, like,
a cow joins the circus!"
or something to that effect.
From that on, we kind of had this idea
together of the show we wanted to do,
which pretty much involved a cow that
wanted to join the circus and what
on Earth she could possibly do in the
circus.
[mooing]
[Robin Frodhart] Frank is obsessed with order and
cleanliness and is a diligent student of
his office safety training manual.
For him, the pigeons represent all the
filth and chaos of the city and are
constantly causing all kinds of problems
for him.
[onstage sounds]
[laughter]
Later in the play he discovers
that the pigeons are tapping Morse code
back and forth to each other and he
deciphers the Morse code to find out
that it says "THE GREAT FLOOD," and he
realizes that all along they've been
planning and preparing for the flood and
not conspiring against him specifically.
So, he himself begins to prepare for the flood.
[onstage dialogue] "Safety In The Office: Part 1."
Work is important, but more important than your
job is safety at your job!
[Frodhart] It's a little bit about our
clinging to safety and control in
situations where in which there's
no such thing as safety and control
and sort of how man's clinging to an order is
completely futile.
"We're all a part of nature.
We can't separate ourselves from it, no
matter how many injury reports we file."
[Stritch] The reason I like to do marionettes is
because it's like reflecting a mirror
back at your audience something they get
to see on stage that they know is not real,
they know isn't alive, but we get to fool
them into thinking that it is.
I find that task of fooling them to be
extremely rewarding just...
because it's almost like you're doing magic!
They really believe that what they're
watching is alive, when they know for a
fact it's not.
[Frodhart] I think people are a
little bit more open to puppetry in a
way. There's something that is more
engaging about puppetry.
Watching a man
sit and breathes on stage is one thing,
but watching three people together
making this one thing come alive,
it requires the audience to use
their own imagination which engages them
in a in a much deeper way.
[keyboard music]
[Freddie Price] You get to watch the puppeteers, you get
to watch the puppet come to life, and
that that really seems to affect people
in a way that live actors don't do or
do in a different way.
There's a great pleasure in doing it in this very
simple way.
[Bruce Cannon] Marionettes are a specific
form of puppets, puppets that operated by
strings. That's the major difference.
All other puppets: you have rod puppets,
you have stick puppets, you have hand puppets,
but marionettes are specifically string
puppets.
[Stritch] Well, no two puppets are the same. So, to
have one methodology for building all
marionettes is pretty much impossible.
But, for the most part if you're just
constructing a normal human cast member
for a show, you'd start drawing it out,
getting a feel for what you
want it to look like. But, the character really
needs to look like and feel like and how
you want them to move. And then, you would
start basically...
I always start with the head,
sculpting a head, and then you move
on to the other body parts such as
carving out arms and legs. Hands I
usually do last because hands are the
hardest, in my opinion. And then
eventually, you have to joint all those
pieces together and string them up and
see if they move, and if they don't move
right, you gotta go back to the drawing
board and start again in some places.
It can be a long, arduous process, but in the
end you end up with something that can
really captivate an entire audience of
people just by itself!
It's really rewarding.
[music]
[Frodhart] For me, this whole show started by just
having Frank sitting at his desk and
breathing and thinking, and from there
he could reach out and start
interacting with things on his desk. But
it wasn't until we figured out how to
make him breathe that we could even move
on to figure out how to make him do all
the many things that he does in the show.
[Stritch] The puppet comes to life when it's finally
onstage in front of an audience
performing. That's when it's alive,
that's when we want it to appear alive, for
one thing, especially. You know, the very
definition of a puppet is that "an
inanimate object that comes to life in
front of an audience," and without the
audience there, it's not so much a puppet
as a basically toy.
I like to think also
that after you paint the eyes on,
that's when they really wake up on their
own in a sort of magical sense. But
really, it's when that audience gets
there that it can be what it is:
a puppet.
[onstage dialogue] It's a cow!
[Voice #2] But I thought you said the
horse's name.
[Voice #1] No, dunderhead. It's a cow.
[Bessie] Moo?
[Cannon] The audiences have changed through the years,
but one thing that stays consistent
is the magic that children see in
marionette theater performances.
Most kids see a movie, they see television.
In Broadway, we teach them theatre
etiquette. We teach them what you
need to do in a live theatre in a situation, like
applause, and what not to do,
what's rude, not to speak out,
things that you they were not
normally do if you're watching
television or a movie.
[Cannon in background] So, another name
for a marionette is a string puppet.
So, if you go home today and your parents
ask you what kind of puppet show you saw,
what are you gonna tell them? You saw what kind of show?
[Kids] A marionette show!
[Cannon] And if they ask you "what is a marionette," what are you going to tell them?
[Kids] A string puppet!
[Cannon] Excellent! Okay? And he has several
strings: he has a back string which makes him bow,
he has a shoulder string that works along
with his head string, and they're all connected
to this thing on the top which
we call "the control..."
[Stritch] To have a young audience is really rewarding
because they're just captivated the
whole time and you know you've done your
job right if you can listen to the
audience and they don't make a sound.
If they're really watching the show, they're
completely silent. If something funny
happens, of course they react and laugh,
and you'll know whether or not you did a
good job when those moments happen and
they react the way they should. But for
the most part, it's not hearing them at
all that I I know something's being done
right because they're not making a noise.
They're just completely focused on what
they're watching.
[Cannon] Well, to make the show successful,
puppeteers need to learn how to
collaborate. They have to be
collaborators. They have to be good
artists! They obviously have to know how
to work a puppet. I think that's that's
fundamental, that's Puppetry 101: you can't
get up there and not know how to work a
puppet's basic walking, basic focusing,
basic articulation of specific moves.
But, I think at the end of the day you
have to be a good team player because
you're up there working with lots of
other puppeteers. In our show, we have
four puppeteers up there, sometimes we
have more, but mostly four puppeteers,
and when you see a marionette cross, the
puppeteers also have to cross. So,
you have to understand the
dynamic that goes into that.
[Frodhart] What we had to learn for The Pigeoning to
make it successful was...
we had to learn
how to slow down and sort of break each
physical movement down into a really
specific sort of thing.
There's very little dialogue, only a
voiceover in the show, so every emotion
and every nuance of this pretty
intricate story has to be told by
movement.
[Voiceover] Incident reporting to your designated safety officer.
"Safety In The Office, Part 2!"
"Reporting Injuries."
Office employees should rep-
[dialogue between puppeteers]
-ort every accident...
[Frodhart] The coordination between the three
puppeteers ends up being more of a dance
than anything else. We all have to move
together really well and know each other
really well so that we don't stumble all
over each other, because we're all
working in a very tight space has a lot
of a lot of working together.
One person is on his head and his left arm, one
person is on his hips and his right arm,
and a third person is on the feet. And so,
we really do have to coordinate.
We are wearing hoods, so you can't see us and we
can't really see each other, but we can
definitely feel each other because we're
packed in really tight and fortunately
we've been working together for so long
and such a tight team that we kind of
know each other and I know what they're
going to do. Everything's really
well rehearsed, but if something does go wrong,
we're very good at covering for it or
improv-ing, working together to sort of
solve the problem.
[Voiceover] Supervisors are just as
responsible for training their people in
safety procedures they are training them for efficiency.
[Voiceover spazzes out]
The sign is dirty!
[heavy breathing]
[Frodhart] Because there's no dialogue in the show,
the music completely tells the story.
I mean, the music and Frank's
movements tell the story entirely,
so the music is absolutely, absolutely
key.
[percussion sounds from synth]
[Price] I am a silent character, so to speak,
although I'm the only not-silent thing
in the show. There's no words essentially
in the piece, so I narrate and accompany
the action with music and live digital
Foley sound design.
[Price's music]
[Voiceover] "Part 7: Surveillance."
When investigating a conspiracy,
proper surveillance is your best friend!
It is important to capture the perpetrators in the act
if you are to maintain your credibility around the office.
[Price] Bunraku-style is a very dance-like type
of performance because you get to watch
the puppeteers themselves.
That certainly informs the music.
When we work with new puppeteers, they bring a new
kind of movement and vocabulary into it,
so we're always trying to keep the piece
dynamic. So in a way, that's
challenging: we can't just like lock it
down and do it the same way every time.
[Cannon] Well, the challenges of running a show
and being puppeteer is that every day is
different. You don't know what to expect.
Marionette puppetry is very, very
technical.
It's not unusual for a leg to fall off
or something, you're constantly fixing
the puppets...
It's wonderful, but a lot of
puppeteers will not touch marionettes
for that reason because they're
extremely technical, so you have to
really know what you're doing with them.
They're harder work, it requires a higher
level of dexterity, so it's a great
genre, but you better know
what you're doing!
[Frodhart] The main challenge is
just entropy in general, that things that
you put together want to fall apart all
the time. There's about ninety-eight
different props on our prop list,
including sets, props, and puppets.
I made...all of them! Some with help from
Jesse Roadkill and I maintain all of
them. So, that is the main challenge for
me, is just upkeep of everything because
we play with them pretty hard and things
get thrown around and tossed in the
heat of the moment onstage.
Things can get broken, and so the main challenge is
keeping everything in order and working.
[Cannon] If you want to be a puppeteer, I would
say dancers make good puppeteers, musicians
make good puppeteers, actors and actresses
make good puppeteers, really good
writing and reading skills, if you're a
good artist. The analogy on a puppetry
is like a marriage of performing arts and
the fine arts.
[Speaker #1] You don't need a theater to do it!
You can do it at home, you can pick up
toys that you have and and move them
around. It's really about bringing
life to an object, and that's one of the nice
things about it. As a dancer or an actor,
you often have to join a theater company
or have a big theater to be a part of the
production, but puppetry is something you do on
your own at home: build your own puppets
and put on your own shows really easily.
[Price] I would say puppetry is a wide open
frontier and you can really bring
anything to life.
Anything can be a puppet, and there
are certainly a lot of workshops. The
Puppet Lab program over at St. Ann's
Warehouse in Brooklyn is an excellent
place to explore that. But yeah, just
do it and start playing with a napkin.
[Stritch] Marionette shows still resonate with
audiences despite the fact that they're
almost ancient form of theater.
Because they are so rare nowadays, it's almost as
if you have to really look for it
in order to find it, and once you do it's
like finding a diamond in the rough. But,
it's never lost any of its effectiveness.
[Frodhart] I definitely think that in the digital age
and people staring at screens and CGI
all day that people are
hungry for this sort of thing. To be able to see
something come to life on stage in this
way, audiences have been tremendously
receptive. I think that it reminds them
of their childhood, before we had all
this stuff. It's just exciting.
It's got more heart, it's more real.
[closing music]