Dear actors,

When you demand a prop, a strange and difficult to acquire prop, which requires some hours of time to get for you, please think carefully when presented with the object before you announce that you prefer what you’ve been using in rehearsal.

Many thanks for your time and attention.

A prop master who is checking on the return policy.

So… let’s recap today. Pilot overslept. Then thunderstorms. Still no pilot. Plane delayed by two hours. Miss D.C. connection. Rebooked on a flight for 6:15 am the next day. Sad. Get standby flight. Happy! Flight is delayed. Why? LaGuardia wasn’t letting flights in. Sad. Finally arrive in NYC. All buses are running! Happy! All buses Except mine. Sad.

I think, if I’m doing accounting for the timezone right, it took me thirteen hours to get home today.

And then! I made props and went to the theater to watch the dress rehearsal. Happy? Bed now. Happy!!!

The live musicians came in today, which was fantastic. Yuri, the violinist paired with the Peter character, is funny and immensely talented.

Initially she looked a little nervous, when we described the way Peter would be running in circles around her and said, “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry. I played.”¹

She immediately relaxed. “Okay. You get it.” So, she’s totally game to strolling on stage and letting Peter run in circles around her.

I completely understand her concern. A lot of people don’t understand how fragile violins are or how expensive they are. It’s the same with puppets, though they aren’t nearly as expensive. People tend to think of them as dolls or toys and will just pick them up to play with them. Basic etiquette: Never touch a puppet that isn’t yours.

In fact, a couple of the musicians did that last night and it really annoyed me. You’d think they would get that automatically, since I can’t imagine they would be happy if someone picked up their instrument. I didn’t say anything, because I figured they were just excited. Still, I might ask the director to casually talk about how the puppets are our instruments.

Aside from that one, minor, annoyance, it was so unbelievably fantastic having the live musicians there. Everything felt more immediate. The clarinetist and flute players were getting into their characters and teasing each other on stage, just as a cat and bird might.

I’m very much looking forward to the next rehearsal

1. Seventeen years [↩]

The puppets arrived yesterday from China. I was so tired when I got home after rehearsal that I didn’t write it up. So, I’ll try to hit what yesterday and today were like.

Yesterday:

The puppet is beautiful, with a bright lively face and a vibrant costume. It’s a curious blend of old and new construction styles. The body is made of L200, which is a dense industrial foam. Fantastic stuff and I love using it because it is flexible and yet rigid enough to be used for structure. The head is made of carved wood in a more traditional manner.

As soon as I picked up the puppet I realized that I had a problem. The weight of the puppet is supported by strings to a cap on my head, which is also supposed to control the head. However– holy cow. I just realized how much jargon I’m about to trot through to explain this to non-puppeteers.

Bear with me while I explain marionette theory. Imagine a styrofoam ball, if you put a single string in it, when you pull the string up, the ball rises. Now put two strings on it on opposite sides. If you pull the right string, that side rises allowing you to tilt it from side to side.

Now connect that to a body, which creates a third point of attachment. When you try tilting it again, the entire body is going to tilt. BUT, if you attach strings to the shoulders of the puppet then you can isolate the body and get movement from just the head. Make sense?

So, my puppet has a direct connection to my feet. I have rods to the hands. I have strings to the head. Nothing supports the weight of the body, so I can’t turn the head without the whole body moving.

Monumentally frustrating. Also the neck was a snug fit, which looks good and is fine for a direct manipulation figure, but marionettes can’t have any friction or they won’t move.

Now, there’s this saying in puppetry, “Never blame the puppet.” Why? Because the moment you do, someone else will pick the darn thing up and do whatever it was you said couldn’t be done. Even so, I felt like I spent the whole night fighting the puppet. I finally widened out the neck opening so that I had some more room for the head to turn.

Honestly, my impulse last night was to put a nub on the back of the head so that I could just grab it and turn it.

Today:
We tightened the head strings so that the puppet doesn’t sag at the knees when I look down. It means my neck is constantly under tension, but it’s not a long show. I also figured out a way to brace the puppet so that I could get a little head movement. It’s not as specific as direct manipulation, but it’s something. I continued to feel like I was fighting the puppet, but also starting to get more of a feel for what it was capable of and how to trick it into doing what I wanted it to.

I know that sounds like I’m anthropomorphizing the thing, but no more so than a computer. Oh tell me that you don’t use the same language when talking about your own machine.

I still want to go in there and fiddle with the neck joint so I can get some more movement out of it. We’ll see how tomorrow goes. The one thing I know for sure is that I will need a massage before this is over.

I have missed performing. And it’s not just the getting up in the audience that I’ve missed, it’s the rehearsals. The process of working out a show is strange and fascinating, especially if you have collaborators that you can trust.

We’ve been rehearsing Peter and the Wolf for a couple of days now (minus a trip to ballpark for me) but yesterday marked the first day that I’ve been actively onstage. Since my puppet doesn’t arrive from China until Tuesday (we hope) the focus has been on scenes that I’m not in. We’ve run out of those, so started staging Peter’s scenes with me standing in for the puppet. It’s fun and odd.

I have to think about the kinds of movements the puppet is likely to be able to do and work through that. For instance, if you look at the illustration of the puppet (by Simon Wong director of the Ming Ri institute in Hong Kong) you can see that I’ll be standing behind it, which means that if I turn the puppet’s back to the audience all they’ll see is me. So I’m going through the rehearsals playing me as a puppet playing Peter.

It’s fun. I hope my guesses are remotely close to the puppet’s range of movement.

I spent today getting props together for Steve and Idi a new play that I’m working on for Rattlestick theater. In the afternoon, Rob and I went down to pick up a rug for the Bully Pulpit, a play about Teddy Roosevelt.

In the evening, Katherine and I headed down to the Peter and the Wolf rehearsal. She alternated between reading and watching rehearsal while I painted puppets. Did I mention that I’d done the design for the animal characters? No… anyway, my puppet isn’t here from China yet, so I’ll be mostly observing till it gets here on Wednesday.

After rehearsal, Katherine and I went for Japanese food. At the moment, I’m creating some hand props for Steve and Idi before heading to bed.

This is a banner weekend.

I’ve just been cast as Peter in Peter and the Wolf. It’s a workshop production put on in joint collaboration with Terry OReilly, a long time member of Mabou Mines, and a Chinese puppet company– Guangxi Puppet Art Troupe with live music performed by Matrix Music.

Performances are April 18, 19 and 20 at the Abrams Art Center. I’ll post details and of course rehearsal updates as we go.

At rehearsal the other day, someone said that the way you feel after an all-nighter is the way you will feel all the time twenty years from now.

I feel eighty.

Today I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly. Their production uses a bunraku-style puppet for Madame Butterfly’s child. This style of puppet normally takes three performers and they were casting understudies; the principals were pre-cast.

First of all, receiving an email which says, “go to the back of the Met to the stage entrance,” was pretty darn cool in and of itself. Once you get past security the way to the rehearsal room is through a labyrinth of halls crowded with set pieces. In one corner stood a trio of temple bells. Another hall took me past a vast marble arch disassembled on the ground. The first rehearsal room had singers in rehearsal for a production, but no puppeteers. I rounded a corner, past a stack of chairs, and at the end of the hall found our rehearsal room. In it, they had put up the set for Madama Butterfly. A vast black lacquered floor dominated the room; shoji screens sat waiting in tracks to be slipped on stage.

I was one of the first puppeteers to arrive. For a while, it looked like there were only going to be eight of us auditioning but a whole gaggle of puppeteers arrived as soon as Mark Down (head puppeteer) said, “Shall we start?” All told there were between twenty to thirty of us auditioning.

Mark had us start by doing some elementary yoga. It was really nice that he took fifteen minutes or so to make certain that everyone was warmed up. Of course, it’s also a covert way to check for limberness and fluidity of movement.

He then introduced us to the puppet. As I mentioned, this style normally takes three puppeteers, but Mark wanted to see what we could do solo. He asked us to do a short scene using only the head and the torso to emote. We simply had to run across stage (with the puppet lifted so the feet didn’t drag) and then explore the “room” that our character had entered. What he wanted, he said, was a sense of breath and of the puppet being. He wanted to know that the puppet looked and listened rather than just seeing and hearing because he wanted to know that the puppet was thinking about what he was experiencing — incidentally, that’s good advice for writers too, I think. Then he said, “So who wants to go first.”

The room was silent for a moment as we all held our breath, waiting for someone else to volunteer.

“I’ll go,” I said as I stood and took the puppet from him. Inside I was trying to reassure myself that it was actually a good plan. I figured showing initiative and eagerness would make me stand out of the pack. Also, it meant that none of the obvious emotional beats had been tried yet. Anyone who came after me would either have to come up with something new, or repeat what I had already done. There is a downside to going first, of course. You can’t see how the puppet moves and don’t know what the director is looking for.

So, I ran the puppet across, peered around the corner of the screen set center stage and entered the “room.” The rehearsal hall phone rang. Instinctively, my puppet turned to look at it. Everyone laughed. Whew. But then… now what do I do? In order for the puppet to really look at something I needed to know what he was looking at. We were standing alone on a blank stage. So I decided that my character was looking for his mother. I didn’t do much walking because the dragging feet annoyed me. The whole time, a part of my brain was thinking, “When is he going to stop me?” It felt like I was up there forever.

Mark asked me to be very still with the puppet. There’s a difference, and it’s a very fine one, between still and static. With a puppet it is very easy to have stillness become static — it is, after all, an inanimate object. The difference comes from minute movements of breath and focus to keep the puppet thinking. My hand started trembling. I shifted position to get into a stronger hold and ignored the tremble.

(By the way, when I use the word “breath” I mean the rhythms of the puppet rather than just the act of breathing. When I teach puppetry I say, “Focus indicates thought; breath indicates emotion,” because the only time you notice someone in the act of breathing it carries meaning. The rest of the time we filter it out.)

Anyway. The rest of the performers went and I did the usual compare and contrast between their performance and mine. And that’s the thing. It really felt like I was watching performances; these were, for the most part, really good puppeteers. Some people he let go for a long time. Some he stopped fairly quickly. Some got direction. Others didn’t. It wasn’t always easy to tell why.

Then he introduced us to the choreographer. Since the stage is so bare, the performers form a large part of the world of the opera, so they needed puppeteers who can move well. They went in the same order as before, which meant — joy! — I was first again. The choreography was deceptively simple. Walk in, kneel, bow, sit up, say your name, stand, exit. No problem, right? Now do this very particular Japenese stage hand walk, where your feet don’t leave the ground. Keep your eyes facing down at 45 degrees. Fold your thumbs into your palm so they don’t show and you have “long fingers.” Make sure when you kneel, that your left foot is half a pace back and you kneel straight down like an elevator… The specificity went on.

This is where it sucked going first. I only got to see the movements twice before trying to remember them all. I was not expressing the “soul” the choreographer was looking for; I was expressing, “what next?”

Then came working as a team. Three performers on the puppet and we had to run the puppet across the stage. I dunno, sixty feet? Here’s the thing. The person on the feet had to crouch or squat. Go ahead. Try this at home. Crouch down and put your hands on the floor. Now stretch your arms out as far in front of you as possible, without losing the crouch. Now, in that position — while trying to make feet look like they are actually walking — run sixty feet. On a raked stage. I sucked at it. I felt marginally better because everyone sucked at it. Until one guy got up on stage and just did it. It was like watching magic. The puppet ran; the puppeteer didn’t fall on his face.

They had us break for fifteen minutes while they conferred.

When we came back, Mark said, “We’re going to break for lunch and when we come back we only need to keep these people. Jodi, Mary–” I stopped listening at that point. Thank God. I’d made the first cut.

He only kept seven of us. Some friends, who are brilliant puppeteers, didn’t make the cut. I’ve been on the other side of that line and it’s always hard.

After lunch, we headed back down to the rehearsal hall. This distinguished Spanish man was in the catacombs and a group of elderly ladies was lost. He said, “People who have worked here for years still get lost” and proceeded to tell them where the elevator was. I wonder if they knew that they were talking to Plácido Domingo.

In fact, as each of us walked back into the rehearsal room, there would be this moment of, “Was that…?”

“Plácido Domingo? Yeah.”

But, back to the audition. Mark kept switching us around trying to see what team would mesh best. Poor Oliver, the fellow who could do the feet, was on the feet the whole time. Granted, he knew he was cast by implication, but it was an awful physical position to be in for hours. Mark had us act out miniature scenes and play off an actor. It was fun to be onstage and wonderful to be in the audience. Everyone was good so it was like watching lots of little puppet shows.

After one of the teams did a very nice scene, Mark said, “Well, we’re only casting three people, and I think I’d like it to be the three on stage now.”

So. After reading all that, you now learn that I am not in the upcoming cast of Madama Butterfly. Which, you know, I’m okay with. Being on the list to audition for the Met? That’s something.

And here’s the final cool thing. One of the casting people referred to those of us who didn’t get cast and said, “We need to get their contact information, in case someone can’t do the part.”

Mark said, “Oh, right. I think we can just get Mary and Jodi’s information, then.”

I’m not cast. I’m not even an understudy. But I’m on the list for replacement performers and that’s not a bad place to be. Not bad at all.

This. Today. That opportunity is why we moved to New York.

Jodi came over this afternoon and we spent a while with one of my rehearsal puppets practicing some overt manipulation. We’ve got an audition tomorrow and figured it would be a good idea to brush up. The thing is, that we’ve performed for so long together that we got back into the groove really fast, which I know is totally misleading us about how the audition will go.

No. I won’t tell you what I’m auditioning for yet — I’m strangely superstitious that way — but I will ask for you to send good vibes my way from 11 - 4.

Afterwards, we all went out to dinner with Jonathan who is heading down to New Orleans for a film shoot. It was a good day today, all in all.

The theater decided to move the dress rehearsal up a day, as in tomorrow. I explained that it was impossible to have the wings built and installed in the dress–which the designer also knew–by tomorrow. So, they are going to cut the puppetry wings.

le sigh…

This requires some explanation.

The costume designer for Mabou Mines’ latest show approached me about making a wing mechanism for her. I didn’t have time for the whole project, but was able to make a single wing, hoping that they could copy it for the other. She took it to California to be tested. Last week I got a phone message from her that was garbled. All I could make out was something about her going out of town and something about picking up. I sent her an email saying, “Hey, I couldn’t understand your message. What’s up?”

Meanwhile, she went out of town, confident that someone from Mabou Mines would contact me and explain the situation. No one did. So the poor designer arrived back in town tonight to discover that nothing had happened with the wings while she was gone. Her message had been that she couldn’t find anyone to copy the wing and could I please, please make the other one.

Their dress rehearsal is on Wednesday.

At this point, I simply don’t have the time. The first one took me about four hours, but I am booked solid this week. I’m already staying up until midnight just to get my current commitments finished. Three of my projects are due on the 30th and there’s not one that I can bump.

They have no money–I was doing this as a gratis thing–and the designer is totally screwed. Had I gotten the message last week, or had someone from the company contacted me as she had asked, I could have helped, but I can’t now.

I’m looking for anyone with reasonable skills with power tools to duplicate the existing wing mechanism on Monday or Tuesday in the New York area. You can see what I built here. I will happily supervise while I work on another project.

I will buy you a really good meal and trade you an equal amount of time later. I just flat don’t have time right now. Interested? Full of pity? The woman is really screwed and really nice. Mabou Mines is not a bad company to get in with–aside from this unfortunate miscommunication–and I’ll make sure you get credit.

Did I mention the meal? How about a bottle of wine?

If you are curious, there are pictures of the Monkeys in rehearsal. They aren’t finished yet. Emily still has hair and “makeup” to do, but she’ll wait until closer to performance for two reasons. First, they’ll get dinged up in rehearsal. Second, she’ll have a better idea of what the needs of the paint are, as she watches the monkeys work in the space.

We met with the cast today and heard their first table read of Serendib. It was very exciting to hear it, and confirmed that I really like this play. After the read, Emily put them through a quick puppetry experience, which she’ll go more in depth with later. It’s a relief to see that they were all excited about the puppets and really jumped in to play with them. Sometimes you run across–frequently, you run across actors who are not confident enough in themselves to be able to translate that into an external form. Puppetry is a form of acting, but the tool, the body, your character has to inhabit is not the tool we’re used to using. A lot of people can’t separate their acting from what is happening with their body, so they can’t transfer their skills to the external body of a puppet. It’s nice, and a huuuuuge relief to see that it’s not a problem with this cast.

I’m sad that I won’t be here for the rehearsal process, but, as they say, my work here is done. From here on out, it’s all hair and makeup for the puppets. I’m off to Hawaii with my husband to visit his folks. That’s not a bad way to end a build.

I had an interesting experience today. We ran into a problem with the girl monkeys because their heads were cast of a significantly heavier material than the rehearsal puppets. The workshop design required them to be light. What to do.

After ages of trying different things and getting frustrated and thinking that we would have to recast them with featherlight, we decided to go to dinner and not think about it, hoping that our subconscious would present us with an answer later.

We got back to the studio, and Lo! the answer presented itself to me in beautiful three-dimensional renderings, with a clear plan on how to make it work. I exclaimed that I thought I had a solution. Emily asked me to explain. In the process of pulling the answer out of the non-verbal part of my head and translate it, the entire idea fell apart. It just didn’t make any sense at all.

I grabbed a reference book (Rod Puppets and Table-top Puppets, by Hansjurgen Fettig) hoping that I could bolster the crumbling idea with an illustration. As I was flipping through the pages, my brain offered me another idea.

Rather than explaining it to Emily, and risking losing it when I translated, I just built the thing. It worked, beautifully, and doesn’t require recasting. If I had to articulate the thought process now, I’d say that I stopped thinking about how to make it work like it did before, and started thinking about what the most comfortable hand movements were. That’s it. That would be all I’d be able to say verbally.

The rest of the idea happened in a space without words. Which makes me wonder, if I had just built the other one, would the idea have held up? I think it would have. It felt right. If I had time, I might try to pull that picture up and try to build it. I don’t have the time, but it still makes me wonder.

I’ll post a picture of the solution tomorrow. I’m very pleased with it.