One of the men working in operations came up to me at work last night and said, “Does the phrase, ‘It happened in Narnia,’ mean anything to you?”

I hedged my bets and said, “It might…” because all I could think of was that someone had told him about the white spandex suit I used to have to wear in a production of the show.

The he said, “Do you remember little K— P—?”

My jaw dropped. Really. That’s not a metaphor. When I had last seen him, he had been twelve or thirteen years old playing Edmund. Now, I know that people age and realistically, I recognize that it has been 13 years or so since we worked together, but– but… he was twelve and now he’s an adult peer.

Afterwards we went out to lunch and then Peter and I trotted down to pick up some pirate regalia for him. He’s an adherant of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  He has a good hat and a pair of boots now. The boots should work with non-pirate gear, but the hat is definitely piratical.

The three of  us went to see “The Norman Conquest: Table Manners” tonight which I loved. Very funny and also smart.

Here Theater is just around the corner from City Winery, so we started the evening with dinner there.

The show itself is difficult to describe.  The NY Times review says:

In the wake of the grim news about the bankrupt auto giants, commentators have been bemoaning the decline of American manufacturing. Please don’t share this sad news with the three crackpot inventors in the gloriously demented new show “Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines,” at Here Arts Center. As the obsessive-compulsive title clearly suggests, these guys are intense, seriously nerdy and highly sensitive fellows. The idea that the world’s last superpower has lost the knack for gizmo making might send them into a colossal funk.

And the program notes say, the production company, rainpan 43, is “dedicated to creating innovative, actor-driven absurdist plays that are at once deeply profound and utterly ridiculous.” In that, they have utterly succeeded with MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES.  The set, a collection of contraptions and Rube Goldberg machines, is as much a character as any of the actors. I really don’t know how they could have rehearsed without it.

This is a sample of their Monkey King

At the SF Puppetry Festival I volunteered to help with whatever was needed and was lucky enough to be assigned to the Shadowlight production of In Xanandu. This mostly meant I was a runner if they needed anything, but the upshot as that I got to watch the show from backstage. As a young puppeteer, this had a huge impact on me. This photo is of Miranda and Ferdinand from the production of Tempest we did at McCarter theater. I think you can see the influence.

If it interests you, here’s Part 1 of a two part documentary about their work, including behind the scenes shots.

For the show, Night Sky, I was brought into the project very late, after the original propmaster had to depart. We had a tight budget and very little time to find furniture, which meant that I was shopping for shape, knowing that I could adjust the color later. The designer was very particular about wanting all the furniture to have the same chocolate brown finish.

As you see, this chair is honey maple. Now, if I had time and were going to do this right, I’d have stripped off the varnish at this point. But I found these piece the day tech started, so time was not my friend. I also don’t need it to look good forever.

What you see here is a test of some different color palettes. The one on the right side of the chair (bottom of the photo) is mostly burnt umber. The darker stripe is about half burnt umber and half mars black. I also tried a spray and a rag treatment, neither of which I liked.

For the final chair, I used a fluid satin acrylic “varnish” or medium to create a glaze. This allowed some of the original wood to show through for richness. That, combined with the brush strokes give a fairly convincing tightgrained wood. One of the tricks is to use a wide brush — in this case a three inch chinese brush for doing ink work — and long brush strokes. Any time you start or stop the brush it shows as a grain variation, so you have to either continue the stroke off the furniture or lift very smoothly.

The downside to this treatment is that it does scratch easily because it’s basically sitting on plastic. We’ve got a paint kit to do touchups, which is fairly easy, but it’s not something I’d recommend for a long run. With a long running show, taking the time to deal with the original finish would have been significantly more worthwhile. Or if this wasn’t a piece that was going to get a lot of wear, I could get away with this.

• 01:04 I’m at home after a day running around at the theater. #
• 14:29 I think I’ve done the last of the paperwork props for this show. Now to make the music of the spheres device. #
• 18:11 I arrived at the theater and there was a fire alarm going off. The fire department just arrived looking bored. #

• 10:22 Picked up a zipcar at 10 and am going to get a table and chairs for Night Sky. #
• 10:40 Astonishing. Parking in front of the building. #
• 10:40 The very nice French student and her father helped me get the table & chairs into the car. Now, to the theater. #
• 11:16 I have arrived at the theater and am not dead. Again, there is parking in front of the building. This is not normal. #
• 11:36 Dropped off the furntiture, extended the Zipcar res. And heading out for next load. #
• 11:42 Also sending designer reference photos while stopped at traffic lights, of which there are many. #
• 12:06 Ah ha. Now is the driving in circles looking for a spot, as expected. #
• 12:16 I’ll be double-parking, now. #
• 12:25 Furniture loaded and back to the theater. #
• 12:58 At theater. Found parking. Dropping furniture. #
• 13:08 Furniture dropped and off to return the zip car. Fascinating day, I know. #
• 13:21 On the car radio, 89.9 is playing the complete discography of Benny Goodman in chronological order for the next 16 days. #
• 13:39 Whew. I’ve dropped off the car and now have a little room for a breather before heading on the next errand. #
• 14:20 For those folks who wanted to listen to the Benny Goodman complete discography. 89.9 is streaming online bit.ly/Hkmj #
• 15:03 I’m laying out some of the paper props used in the show. Brochures and forms. #
• 15:07 I’ve got the aphasia lesson plans printing now. #
• 15:37 I’m printing flashcards of actors. #
• 15:39 Ugh. A brand new color cartridge and it’s not printing yellow. This is the third one that’s happened to so I think it’s the printer. #
• 15:53 I’ve emailed the flashcards to the office which will print them for me. Now, off to the floral district to buy fake asters! #
• 16:55 Fake asters don’t exist in NYC. I need another flower with a connection to the word “star.” Any ideas? #
• 17:08 Thank you all! I have aquired star jasmine. #
• 17:39 At the theater to drop off star jasmine, jewelry box and put alka-seltzer in a champagne bottle. #
• 21:57 10 alkaseltzer have the right boost, but priming the bottle without losing liquid is hard. #
• 22:01 Back into the bowels now. #

I got home around 1:00 am.

Truly? Because unless I’m building something interesting, the job is deadly boring. My posts would consist of, “Today I went shopping for paper, a box and a copy of King Lear.” At best. More likely they would say, “Today I went shopping and didn’t find anything on my list.”

The other reason is that when I’m really in full swing, as I’m about to be this week, I don’t have time to post at all. So it doesn’t say anything about the props ’cause I just don’t have time. Like, I’m heading into tech week starting tomorrow and I won’t surface again for another week.

And the last reason is that I don’t self-identify as a props master. I am one, but I identify as a puppeteer and more recently as an SF writer. The props thing feels like just a dayjob.

Ooo! I just received this video promo of the previous Puppet Playlist at The Tank. This was the one focused on Tom Waits. We did a found object piece with dinnerware.

EATING and drinking on the stage,” remarked the chronic theatregoer the other night, “always bores me when I have dined well and tantalizes me when I haven’t; but whenever I go to a theatre nowadays I am sure to find the people across the footlights either enjoying a big meal or pouring down tea or champagne early and often.”

It’s a pdf, but When Actors Eat and Drink Upon the Stage is worth checking out. If for nothing else, the wardrobe.

That photo has about 600 toothbrushes in it. The final version has about 800. They are glued and wired together in mass. Moving them to the theater today should be interesting.

I’m also making a drawer spilling lingerie, a purse spilling keys and a moving box spilling mail.

I did not order nearly enough keys, so that’s going to get built on Tuesday.

After that, we headed down to the theater to see Avenue Q. The seats were in the very, very last row of the theater, but it’s such a small house that it didn’t feel that far away.  It’s been a couple of year since I’ve seen the show, but it was as fun as I remembered it.

The bonus came afterwards. My friend, Jen Barnhart, is an original cast member of Avenue Q and gave us a backstage tour afterwards. Amoung the other characters, she’s the girl Bad Idea Bear and was totally game for photos with Peter.

We were both sort of bouncy after the show so walked home from the theater. We stopped halfway for a late dinner and then just kept walking because the night was so pleasant. Peter was belting out songs from the show, although I suggested that “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” might not be the best choice at 11:00 on a NYC street. I was surprised that he has the songs mostly memorized.

Oh! The other highlight of the evening. At one point he said something which prompted me to say, “I find your rationale dubious.”

Peter said, “Why do adults think teens always have to have a reason for doing things? We don’t. We’re totally random and just do stuff.  There’s no reason, we’re teenagers.”

I laughed and laughed.

From there I swung by the apartment to collect Peter and we went to see August: Osage County. Rob was supposed to join us, but then couldn’t so I gave his ticket to an old puppeteer friend who I hadn’t spent time with in ages. It was great catching up although I think that bored Peter. He reports that the play was good. I’m pleased, I must say, by the fact that my nephew wasn’t put off by being taken to a pretty heavy bit of theater. Bleakly funny though it is.

We went out for Italian for dinner and then came back to the apartment so I could get some work done. He’s used to having his xbox 360 so is a little restless in the apartment. We wound up going for a walk around 9:00, up to the Hungarian Pastry shop and then around the Columbia campus, just shooting the breeze.

It was a good day. If only I didn’t still have work to do.

I’ll update when the ticket is gone.

Edited to add: The ticket is gone.

I picked him up in the evening and we went to dinner at Henry’s then downtown to see Avenue Q. At least… that was the plan. It was thwarted by the fact that our tickets are for Thursday, not today.

So, we went over to Times Square and saw Slumdog Millionaire which we both liked. Although it was not the Bollywood musical I think we were both sort of wanting.

So, I’m looking for suggestions on what to take him to.

Puppets can do things that actors can’t as well as having limitations that actors don’t.  In the course of the conversation, I talked about the importance of finding a playwright who understands, or is willing to learn, about writing for puppet theater.

Frequently, a show is largely non-verbal.  The question came up: How do you script a non-verbal show?

In response, I wrote:

Heh.

Okay, so that thing I said earlier about that I don’t write for stage?  My one play was non-verbal and was awarded an UNIMA Citation.  The reason I bring it up now is that several years ago, we did an experiment with MUM Puppet Theater and shipped them our script and puppets.  By all accounts, the show had the same impact on the audience as our original play did.

The way I did it was that I scripted the characters’ intentions AND their actions. My feeling is that body language is a non-verbal expression of what a character is thinking and feeling. So writing, “Character picks up rock” tells you what happens, but the way you pick up a rock if you’re planning on killing someone is different from if you think it’s pretty. It might be body language, but it is still language.

Since I can’t attach things to posts on puptcrit, I told everyone that I’d post it here.  Sorry non-puppet folks, for dropping you into the middle of a larger conversation.

Here is the 1993 script for “Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom.”

Jodi Eichelberger and I are performing an original piece, “Dinner Conversation” as part of Puppet Playlist, this Thursday at 7:30 pm at The Tank, in NYC.

Puppet Playlist takes talented puppeteers and brilliant musicians and slams them together into an evening of live theater to stir the senses.

Our first Playlist will feature works of puppetry set to the rasping, crooning, stomping and shouting of Tom Waits. Between sets, hear  new interpretations of Waits’ music — on cello, electric guitar and more. A chance to see some of New York’s most interesting puppet artists and musicians at play.

Performers (and their work) have been seen all over New York and throughout the world, on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, at HERE Arts Center, Shakespeare in the Park, the Metropolitan Opera, FringeNYC, Lincoln Center, with Jim Henson Productions, and on both American and International TV (yes, that includes Sesame Street).

Featuring pieces by: Eric Wright, Melissa Creighton, Jean-Marie
Keevans, Jon Stancato (Stolen Chair), Andrew Broaddus, Jon  Levin, Maja Rajenovich, and Mary Robinette Kowal & Jodi Eichelberger.

Musical performances by: Anna Leuchtenberger, Leah Siegel, Emily Hope Price, The Relatives and Irv Irving.

$5 suggested donation at the door

http://www.thetanknyc.org/theater

I hope to see you there. Let me know if you’re coming so I can look for you after the show.

“Yeah.” I continued to fold laundry as we chatted,because this was pretty simple stuff.  “A box of unlubricated condoms, KY jelly, food coloring, saran wrap and a little stage blood.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone and then she said, “Oh. I thought this would be a longer conversation.”  Another beat of silence. “I take it you’ve done entrails?”

“Oh, yeah.” I tucked the last pair of socks into the drawer.  “Had to do a disemboweling for a show.  Fun stuff.”

The crows now.  That’s going  to be  a much longer conversation.

I had a rehearsal this morning for a show that Jodi and I are doing on March 12th. It’s a very short piece which involves me being a dish, a fork and a bowl.  Jodi plays a spoon, a knife and a plate. The tension and high drama!  Actually, I think it’s a good little piece and I’ll post a link to the show information later.

I went straight from that rehearsal to a production meeting for a different show where I’m building some crows and a box of entrails.  Really, I have the best job.

I’m in San Fransisco now, totally wiped out and am going to bed. Just a reminder that John Scalzi and I will be at Borderlands at 7:00 tomorrow night to read. It should be a total blast, especially if our top-secret plan goes well.

Scalzi mentions this on his blog, but I’ll mention it here too. I was going to record this, but my new computer hasn’t arrived yet. So if you happen to have a microphone and computer that you wouldn’t mind hauling along to record us, that would be swell.

And now, since the only sleep I’ve had has been on the plane, I’m turning in.

I think bed might be in order.

For instance, I needed disappearing ink, but the magic store was out.  But, they were close to another store, where I was able to find the tree I needed for a different show.

The whole day was like that.  Tomorrow, though, the focus is on building the lamb and making a mountain of paper and pine needles.

Joel Johnson: Sir, I was really trying to avoid using this term [security theater] at all. But are you actually saying that security theater is an important aspect of actual security?

Secretary Chertoff: No. I don’t think it’s theater because I think the person who says this is kind of unrealistic and is kind of trying to be provocative. I don’t think they’re doing things for no reason to make sense, but I think understanding that visible security has a role to play is important. It is a deterrent.

Joel Johnson: Well, sure. But theater also means…theater has a purpose, too, to express a meaning.

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah. I mean, the problem is, I think the term is not meant to be…it’s meant to be pejorative. It’s meant to suggest that it’s like a puppet show.

I know it’s narrow and job specific thing to be annoyed about, but really? Do you have to pick on the puppet shows?

After I dropped that off at the apartment, I gathered Mom and Dad for a stroll down Central Park. The weather cooperated in lovely ways and was crisply sunny. We hopped onto a train eventually and went to Cafe Edison, also known as the Polish Tea Room for an egg cream and brunch before the show. It’s a diner in the fading splendor of a Victorian ballroom. Gorgeous plasterwork and then hardcore diner fare. It’s a grand blend of styles.

We had tickets to the matinee of Spamalot. I’ll tell you that I was highly skeptical of the premise. I mean, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is pretty much perfect as is, how could converting it to a Broadway musical possibly be good. And yet it was. It succeeded perfectly at what it set out to be, a profoundly silly musical adaptation of Monty Python. The energy never flagged. I enjoyed it without reservation.

We stopped at Zabar’s to pick up some treats. Mom and Dad were suitably impressed with the place.

We picked up tickets for Tale of Two Cities for this evening and Spamalot for the matinee tomorrow. As Dad says, one highbrow and one lowbrow.

From there we went to Chinatown to Shanghai Cafe, one of my favorite restaurants for a meal midway between dinner and lunch. Their soup dumplings are the best I’ve had anywhere. Yes, for the KGB folks, they put our usual restaurant to shame.

We strolled through Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho up to the City Winery to visit Rob. By happy chance they were finishing early today so he got to give us a tour and then come home with us. We hadn’t gotten a ticket to the play for him, but I doubt he could have stayed awake if we had. He was asleep before we left the apartment.

The play… it wants to be the next Les Miserables and it’s just not. That said, James Barbour as Sydney Carton was brilliant. I could have listened to him all night long and waited for the moments when he was on stage. Particulary his scenes with Brandi Burkette as Lucy. Mom concurs. The cast was overall very strong, I just felt like the music was overblown, even for Dickens. Mom and Dad don’t agree with me there.

So we’ve come home, had a glass of 2006 Passito di Panterlleria and are heading for bed. I bet you guys don’t know what to do with me after all that twittering.

The producer and the director of “There Will Come Soft Rains” — which you should go see — asked me to build a new head for the dog in the show. We discussed budget and at one point the producer asked if I needed money up front for materials.

I laughed. “There is no materials cost for this project.”

“How can that be?”

Allow me to explain. I start by using a piece of scrap blue foam as the base for my sculpture. I just trace the profile of dog’s head on it. Now if I’d bought a piece of foam, the cost of this piece would be, maybe, fifty cents.

I then cut it out with a bandsaw.

Next I turn it ninety degrees and draw the top view, which also gets cut out with the bandsaw.

I rough cut the shape with a saw.

I sand it a little to take off the hard edges and give me a loose dog head shape.

I sculpted the details in clay. I prefer working in waterbased clay because I like the feel of it, but for this I used plasticine clay because I had it on hand. A block of clay costs between $12 to $20, but once you’ve got it in stock it gets reused.

You can see that some parts of the sculpture still show the blue of bare foam. If I were planning on casting this I’d have used clay over the whole surface to make it very smooth because the details would show up in the final. But, I was planning on doing direct mache which tends to obscure details so there was no need to go overboard in making things smooth. It took me about two hours to get to this point from the original drawing.

For the first layer of papier-mache I used an old script and a couple of rejection letters — my favorite material — and wheat based wallpaper paste. The wallpaper paste is the only material so far that I’m not able to reuse. Estimated cost of the amount I used? Maybe forty cents.

The key with papier-macheing is to not get the paper too wet with paste. If there’s too much paste, it will form airbubbles as it dries. Those reduce the structural integrity.

For the second layer, I alternate with brown paper bag. It’s got nice long fibers and is heavier than the scripts so it tends to be stronger. It is also a different color which makes it easy to make certain that I have even coverage on each layer.

Each layer takes about 45 minutes to do. If I were going into a mold I could work faster because only the first layer — which is the top layer in a mold — matters. The other layers can be all wrinkly and they’ll have no impact on the level of detail in the finished product.

With direct mache every single layer and every piece of paper matters because each one obscures the original sculpture or has the potential to introduce an unwanted wrinkle.

For this, I did five layers of mache. White, brown, white, brown, white. That’s fairly standard.

The same number of layers in a mold would take about forty-five minutes total. So why didn’t I make a mold? Time. Making the mold would mean less active working time, but I’d also have to wait for it to dry before using it. A damp mold means that it would take forever for the mache to dry. So using a mold would mean less time for me, but a longer overall process. Plus, I knew this was a one-off. We won’t need to make a copy of this.

Even without worrying about a damp mold, I still made a jury-rigged hot box to speed the drying process. It’s basically a hairdryer and an upside down bin. Like the world’s ugliest easy-bake oven.

I used a mat-knife to cut the mache off the sculpture by carving right down the middle.

Warning: If you do this and discover that the mache is still damp inside, make sure you tape the thing back together and dry it. If you let the two halves dry separately they will warp, which is unpleasant.

I ran a bead of hot glue down the halves to hold them together and then papier-mached the seam inside and out. The mache gives it strength, the glue would give fairly quickly.

This is pretty fast, I don’t think it took more than half an hour.

I also seal any raw edges, like the ones around the back of the head. It’s prettier, but more importantly, it keeps the edges from peeling.

When the head was dry, I painted it with gesso. Let that dry. Sanded it. Painted with gesso again, one more light sanding and then started to paint. For some puppets I’ve done between five to eight sanding and gesso layers depending on the degree of polish I wanted. For this, I wanted a little bit of smoothness, like bone, but not all the way to porcelain.

Here’s a shot of the finished head and my design sketch.

And this is the head attached to the original dog body.

And here, because I like the final effect, is a detail of the paint job on the dog. All told, I spent between seven to ten hours making this and spent maybe a dollar in materials.

This is one of the hard things about making puppets, explaining that the major cost is in the labor. And don’t worry, the producer of the show totally got it. It’s just interesting that it’s a conversation that I have to have almost every time I build a puppet. I think people make estimates based on puppets they built in elementary school.

So… figuring that I’m skilled labor, how much do you think something like a simple puppet head costs?

Sinking Ship Productions delivers ingenious new stage adaptations of three science fiction tales, using elements of story theatre, puppetry, and video. Director Jon Levin takes 3 stories and turns them into wonderfully theatrical fare:
“How The World Was Saved”, adapted from the story by Stanislaw Lem
“On the Nature of Time”, based on the story by Bill Pronzini & Barry N. Malzberg
“There Will Come Soft Rains”, based on the short story by Ray Bradbury

This production received excellent reviews and sold out in its original run. The performance has been extended through September, so don’t delay in ordering tickets!

WHERE: THE BARROW STREET THEATRE
27 Barrow St.
New York, NY 10014
http://www.barrowstreettheatre.com/index.asp
WHEN: Thu 9/4 @ 7pm, Sat 9/6 @ 2pm & 7pm, Sun 9/7 @ 2pm, Wed 9/10 @ 8pm
TICKETS: $18

What’s really exciting to me about the show is that the staging itself pushes the boundaries the way that the best SF does. I’ve often said that the thing that attracts me to both puppetry and speculative fiction is that they are both places where anything is possible. There Will Come Soft Rains took full advantage of that juxtaposition.

There Will Come Soft Rains is the sort of thing I want to see on the nominations list for Dramatic Short Form, but never do.

Seriously. Go see it. There’s only one show left. Saturday at 7:30.

Unfortunately, it was in the wrong festival. See, it was in the Bad Musical Festival. The other two pieces on the program took bad to mean, “Deliberately awful,” and succeeded at that goal. I mean, the actors worked their tails off, but there’s not much you can do when your show is a musical version of “a guy walks into a bar…”

Grimm Late Night on the other hand took bad to mean “naughty” which it is.  It was the second show of the evening and when it began the audience clearly didn’t know what to think. They’d just seen a show that was trying to be bad and seemed a little lost at something that was funny because it was well-crafted.  And then, they got it and loved the show from there on out.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner at a restaurant that seemed to be trying to emulate the other two plays.  The drink specials listed a cosmopolitan as one of their “special” drinks.  I mocked that, until I realized that it probably was special since they didn’t know how to make a Sidecar, a Tom Collins or a Gin and Tonic. The first two I tried to order, but the bartender didn’t know what they were. I ordered the G&T which was actively bad.  How the heck do you screw up a gin and tonic?

Just in case you don’t know about the virtual line:

While the majority of Free tickets for Shakespeare in the Park are distributed via the Free line at the Delacorte Theater, a limited number of tickets will be available the day of each performance online. Specific locations for senior and handicapped accessible seats are not available through the virtual ticket line.

Register anytime at PUBLICTHEATER.ORG and then log on between midnight and 1PM on the day of the performance you want to see to submit a request for up to two tickets. You must log-on again between 1PM-6PM to see if you have been selected to receive a pair of tickets. People are chosen at random, not in the order requests are received.

This is one that comes up a lot and, strangely, I don’t think I’ve posted on it, so I’ll give the long answer.

I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything. My parents indulged me and so I took violin, art, theater classes, writing workshops and then, in high school, discovered puppetry. A friend of mine went to a church that had a puppet ministry program, which was the coolest thing ever. I started going to the church so I could be involved — maybe not the best reason to join a church. Anyway, I got very lucky because the leaders of the puppetry program worked very hard on teaching us good skills. A lot of puppet ministry programs have truly dreadful puppetry.

I loved the puppetry. When our high school did Little Shop of Horrors, I was the plant.

I did puppetry as a hobby until I went to college. I majored in art education with a minor in theater, which was the closest I could come to combining everything that I loved to do. ((Later I learned about colleges, like the University of Connecticut, that had puppetry programs.)) My sophomore year, the college did Little Shop and I was the plant again.

Then a professional puppeteer came to see the show. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that someone would actually get paid to do puppetry. I mean, sure, I’d seen Sesame Street, but that was on PBS and everyone knew that PBS was run by volunteers, right? Yeah… But this puppeteer, Dee Braxton, owned a house, only worked a couple of days a week and most importantly, was willing to train me. By the end of the first summer, she was handing me the gigs she couldn’t take. People were giving me money. To do puppets. I was making more money doing that than my part-time job.

Later, I realized that we lived in an area of the country with a very low cost of living and that we were the only puppeteers in a three county radius. It helps.

From there I went to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA for an internship. This shaped me as a puppeteer more than anything else. George Latshaw (like unto a god, in puppetry) was directing, and the cast was a dream team of puppeteers, Jon Ludwig, Jane Catherine Shaw, Bobby Box, and Peter Hart. Pete was in charge of the internship program and my mentor. If I tried to say enough good things about that program, I would bore you, so suffice to say that I can trace everything back to there.

After the internship, I just kept working. I’ve been at it for nineteen years now and, with the exception of a two-year break due to a wrist injury, have made my living as a puppeteer.

Until I came to NYC.

Now the irony here is that, before Iceland, I’d had several years where I worked three to five months out of the year here, as a puppeteer. I always felt as if I would work constantly if I lived here. And behold, that’s true. The odd thing is that almost all the work has been in the props department.

That’s something I stumbled into and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I enjoy it and it’s honest work. On the other hand, it’s not why we came to NYC and is taking up so much time that I haven’t had a chance to really pursue puppetry and it’s cutting into my writing time.

Rob and I are talking about how to balance that, going forward. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

But I’ve been having this weird thing happening lately, since I’ve been too busy to actually sit down and write a journal post but I still have ideas for them, I wind up composing them in my head on the way from point A to point B. Then, by the time I finally have time to write (like now) can’t remember what I’ve written about and what I’ve merely thought about writing about.

So, if I’ve mentioned something in passing and you want me to expand on it, please ask.

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.

Consider this gem.

Thoughts of a Sliver

The Vine Yearns for a tea table.
I take it.
Were done properly on a rule.
Oh.
What was your name when he was your letters from there?
Why him?
Forgotten Person, I said you ask
The last two there.
And that, yes.
My Pilot in the Light
Perhaps just a great deal.
The last two there.
You are a tea table.

Go on. Read it aloud in a “meaningful” voice and tell me that it wouldn’t fit in at a poetry slam.

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!!!

1. I’m moving back to Shimmer land. Screw the gods.
2. Just be sure you aren’t screwing when the actors get there.
3. Can I get a stiffer rod?
4. I can retain his rods if I hold them between my pelvis and his head
5. May I touch your dead animal head?
6. He couldn’t get it up.
7. All I have to do is buy this moosehead and then pick up some KY jelly.
8. I think I can give you a donut but I’ll have to sacrifice a baby bunny
9. Give me a second to wash the blood off my hands
10. All right. Who wants to be tied up?

What it really means

1. I had been painting Greek gods for a show all day and needed to get back to layout
2. Discussing set construction at a theater.
3. The metal rod had too much spring in it for the weight of the puppet’s hand.
4. I kept dropping the arm rods of a puppet that stood waist high.
5. I was moving some taxidermy heads
6. At the end of a long day, a puppeteer was too fatigued to lift his arm, and heavy puppet, over his head.
7. I needed to complete a purchase of a taxidermied moose head on e-bay to be used as set dressing in a show about Teddy Roosevelt. The next item on my to-do list was to pick up KY jelly for another show. It goes in the bottom of ashtrays as a fire safety measure.
8. We needed a donut to appear magically on stage. The only foam that I had that had the right density was part of a baby bunny prop.
9. I was mixing stage blood and had it all over my hands
10. I needed to test a trick rope that had a quick release.

Alas, the Glock throws the spent casings in a twenty-foot arc, which lands them squarely in the audience. I’m taking it back in the morning for a revolver.

As part of the rental package, they give a tutorial on handling the gun. Included in the tutorial are instructions for what to do if stopped by a police officer while carrying the gun to the theater.

If stopped:
Keep your hands clear and visible. State calmly, “I have a blank-firing gun in my bag. I will let you open it. The receipt is in the case along with quarter-charge ammo. The gun is not loaded.” And then, don’t move until given the okay.

I’m hoping I don’t have to use those instructions.

“My god!”

“What is it?”

“Are they real?”

“May I touch your dead animal heads?”

I’m doing props for Bully Pulpit, a show about Teddy Roosevelt, who was a big hunter. The whole thing is set in the North Room at Sagamore Hill which was decorated with… yes, taxidermy. I found these heads on Craig’s List and they were only ten blocks from my house. Clearly, I was not going to pass up a chance to interact with my fellow New Yorkers.

One poor woman, who must have been a serious vegan, had a look of absolute horror on her face while her son was totally fascinated. Her husband stopped with their daughter so I could explain about taxidermy and theater. She stood behind them looking like she wanted to throw up.

I’ll bet they have a very interesting conversation when they get home.

Everyone else I passed seemed either completely indifferent or amused.

Sergei Prokofiev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is re-imagined by Mabou Mines co-artistic director Terry O’Reilly and Jane Catherine Shaw to speak to the experience of children newly immigrated to the USA as well as young native New Yorkers. The Matrix Music Collaborators is a playground for the puppets – a garden of delight for Peter and his animal friends and safety from the wolf outside the gate.

Matrix Music Collaborators, a New York-based innovative chamber ensemble presents interdisciplinary collaborations through the unique approach of bridging dance, theater, visual art, film and poetry with classical, experimental, contemporary and world music, sharing the stage with an international roster of accomplished musicians.

Program:

W.A Mozart Excerpts from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik featuring ‘Rainy Nights’ (2002) by Hong Kong artist, Eric Siu

Sergei Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67 – a staging with Chinese Puppets directed by Terry O’ Reilly and Jane Catherine Shaw

Paul Wiancko Hip Hop Cello Concerto No. 1

John Williams Music from the Movies

Instrumentation for Matrix: violin, cello, flute, oboe, horn, clarinet, bassoon and piano under the direction of Sheryl Lee.

Tickets: $10 Individual | $30 Family of four
Free family workshop Saturday, April 19 | 1 pm
theatermania.com | 212.352.3101

Wolf image: Simon Wong

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.

Smart, with an excellent cast, the musical is both moving and funny. It’s based on an 1891 play by Frank Wedekind which deals with themes that I can’t even imagine audiences watching back then. Sexuality, puberty, homoeroticism and abortion… it’s powerful stuff and somehow the play ends with a note of hope. I highly recommend Spring Awakening and my niece does too.

In all seriousness, sometimes in theater we need a piece of furniture to look as if it was older. The process of taking a new thing and making it look old is called “distressing.” In the show that I did props on, the original show table broke and had to be replaced. Someone else picked up the new one, but I had to run over to the theater to distress the table.

I use a steel wool to dull the finish, a little paint for staining and honking big rasp to create dings and scratches. By honking big, I mean the about eighteen inches long and an inch wide.

On the way home, I’ve got all the tools in my bag and the rasp handle was poking out. It rested at my hip at almost the angle of a sword’s hilt. At one point, I passed this guy who tried to get me to stop and talk to him. Never works, but this time I got a story flash.

See, I always want to write stories with people in theater, but really need the fact that they are in theater to have an intrinsic role in the story. So, showing a props master at work on a show and the bag of tricks used and then getting to reuse those tools in very different ways later would be a lot of fun.

I mean, can’t you just imagine drawing the rasp like a short sword? And from the time or two that I’ve accidentally caught myself with one, those suckers hurt.

Tomorrow should be very interesting.

Thanks! Googlefu is failing.

Edited to add: A hearty thank you to Sean, who found the info for me.

BUT. I’m in tech week for two different shows for the next week. I will be largely offline during this.

While I’m working, would you take a moment to share your favorite curses? It’ll come in handy. Remember that couch? Yeah… I’ve got stories to tell about it, once I get past this week.