Puppets are people too

From Pinocchio to Kermit the Frog to ... Joyce Carol Oates? Yes, it’s a brave new world for puppets, a theatrical zeitgeist where suddenly it seems every playwright is grabbing a sock or some foam, buttons and a few of those cute wide-open eyes. In this universe, puppets sing about racism, debate free will and predeterminism, delve into dysfunctional families and even reflect on aging and mortality.

“People are always looking for something new. For mainstream audiences, puppets are fresh and make audiences say, ‘Hey, wow,’ ” says puppeteer Basil Twist, who is best known for more experimental pieces like “Symphonie Fantastique” but is now designing puppets for Paula Vogel’s family drama “The Long Christmas Ride Home.”

Puppets are not entirely new to Broadway and off-Broadway stages; there’s the giant, murderous plant Audrey II in the revival of “Little Shop of Horrors,” last season’s life-size rag doll puppets of Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman in “Imaginary Friends” and, of course, the king of all puppets, the long-running “Lion King.” But rarely have so many small, intimate puppets played so many fully developed, integral characters.

“It is harder and harder to get audiences to suspend their disbelief for actors,” says Craig Wright, whose drama “Recent Tragic Events” at Playwrights Horizons features a sock puppet incarnation of novelist Oates. “But puppets sidestep the whole problem -- we can stop pretending these are real people and get on to the discourse at hand.”

The recent puppet invasion took off this summer with the Broadway transfer of the hit musical “Avenue Q,” with its lovable Muppet-esque characters who sing catchy, un-Muppet-esque ditties like “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” “The Internet Is for Porn” and “Schadenfreude.”

“I love it when people are actually moved by the show even though the characters are really made of cloth,” says Jeff Whitty, who wrote the book for “Avenue Q.”

Like the human thespians who share the stage, these inanimate objects are stretching their “acting” muscles by taking on darker, more dramatic roles. In “Events,” Oates crashes in on a blind date the day after Sept. 11 and joins in as the characters cope with the tragedy and argue about whether we are truly free in our actions and choices.

Vogel’s “Long Ride Home,” which opens Nov. 4 at the Vineyard Theatre, features puppets playing the children in the back of the car on that drive. (During the car ride, the children are accidentally hurtled into their futures; the actors handling the puppets also play the grown-up versions of those children.)

And at the Signature Theatre in December comes the world premiere of “The Regard Evening,” an update of Bill Irwin’s classic comedy “Regard of Flight,” which used classic vaudeville and clown bits to mock both the theater world’s “New Vaudevillians” and their pretentious critics. In the second act of the new play, in which characters from “Regard of Flight” are seen 20 years later, Irwin will use a puppet of himself to explore his own aging process.

Irwin, who actually plays a marionette in one scene of his current production, “Harlequin Studies,” was initially struck by the simple idea of using a puppet to make jokes about the concept of contemplating oneself but has realized that “puppeteering is a complicated craft” and is now “wary” about how this venture will turn out.

“Great puppetry is very compelling,” he says, “but bad puppetry is extremely irritating.”

‘Pure’ and ‘primal’

Despite the perils of poor puppetry, the appeal of animating these handfuls of material seems irresistible. “Our society is so digital and virtual, and puppets are a classical way of expressing theatricality and humanity,” says Colleen Werthmann, who dons the Oates puppet in “Events.” (She also plays a silent human character, Nancy.)

Werthmann was originally ambivalent about using a sock puppet in a 9/11 play but ultimately felt the puppet gave the play’s themes more richness and power. “Puppets trigger childlike reactions even in sophisticated audiences and open a window into the irrational.”

Beyond the reaction to our impersonal high-tech world is another factor, Vogel says. “In the turmoil and ferment leading up to World War I, there was a huge renaissance in puppeteering. I don’t think it’s an accident that in periods of great terror we seek a metaphor, a level of abstraction about the human experience.”

Ultimately, the playwrights, puppeteers and actors all explain the puppets’ appeal with the same words: puppets are “pure” and tap into something “primal.” Ironically, they say, a puppet’s artificiality makes it more real, more universal because it strips away the layer of having an actor portraying a character. “Avenue Q” director Jason Moore says audiences instinctively know that an actor has a real name and a real life outside the theater. “The puppet has no filter; it is a pure form of expression,” he says.

“With puppets, every emotion is so distilled,” Whitty adds. “I wish more actors were like them.” He’s joking, of course, but Vogel chose puppets to play the children because they provide a distance that allows for empathy, something an actor’s persona can potentially undermine.

“Puppets strike a deeper chord than actors could because they speak for all children as opposed to the personality of an actor,” Twist adds.

Like the best animation -- Bugs Bunny or “The Simpsons” -- puppets are also freer to break the laws of nature (one character in “Avenue Q” survives a seemingly deadly injury, a la Wile E. Coyote, while Vogel’s puppets time travel) and, Moore says, to say things that are taboo -- whether it’s singing about racism or dealing with the complex emotional responses to Sept. 11.

But they can also bring a freshness to oft-told tales. One story line in “Q” involves Rod, a Republican banker, struggling with his homosexuality. “It’s not really an original story,” Moore says, “but it is because it’s about a gay puppet.”

Another story line involves Princeton, a college graduate, looking for his purpose in life. “If a human sang about searching for his purpose, you’d think he was an idiot,” Whitty says, “but because it’s a puppet it’s somehow OK.”

The same holds, Wright says, for the genuine melancholy that Oates expresses in “Events.” “It’s that aesthetic distance,” he says, arguing that it would seem “voyeuristic and creepy” to tackle Sept. 11 without it. “In a weird way, puppets are freer to be the most straightforward and honest one onstage.”

For Wright, the use of a puppet was an especially helpful metaphor for his conversation about fate and free will. In “Events,” the cynical next-door neighbor Ron, who, like Oates, crashes in on the blind date between protagonists Waverly and Andrew, argues with Oates. When Oates says, “Look, Ron, you’re choosing what to say, right now, to me, aren’t you?” Ron retorts, “How ... should I know? I say what comes into my head!” But soon after, when he again argues that “I take the positions I’m stuck with,” Joyce responds -- in all seriousness -- “So you’re a puppet.”

Wright also frames his play with a stage manager who emphasizes that the characters are not speaking freely but are merely saying what the playwright wants them to (in other words, they are the playwright’s puppets). But he says this particular line would be less provocative coming from a human actor since she would still seem freer than a simple sock puppet. The puppet underscores the point, making the people in the audience understand that they might also not have as much free will as they’d like to believe. (“My favorite color is orange, and I can’t change that,” Wright explains.)

Bringing puppets to life is filled with pitfalls, however. Wright says the biggest danger is being glib, saying writers must treat their puppets as real characters that need to be fully developed. Whitty agrees, saying that in early “Q” drafts he had too many jokes about them being puppets. “It completely sank the show,” he says. “All the fun went out because the audience wants to believe in them as characters.”

Strange as it sounds, Vogel says, one thing she learned from Twist was to listen to the puppets. To make puppets speak naturally requires a different rhythm and tempo, putting silences in different places. “You have to cut to the quick,” she says, adding that she handled the puppets a bit to get a feel for it. “You can’t go for fancy garnishes. You just need an elegant, spare truthfulness.”

And then there’s the challenge of directing puppets. The writers tried developing complex characters, but puppets, with their relatively immobile faces, are “a simplification of emotional expression,” Moore says. So while he directed the actors handling the puppets to provide the appropriate expressions, he also relied on universal body language for emotional resonance -- a puppet’s head bent at a certain angle to signify deep sadness, while another angle represents wistfulness.

Having skilled puppeteers is a huge advantage, Moore says, since “they’re directors in their own right who know they must always make intelligent decisions. It’s a highly technical and highly emotional art.”

While “Q” hired puppeteers to act, “Events” and “Long Christmas” made actors into puppeteers. (Puppeteering wasn’t even part of the audition process.) It’s an intimate relationship and an exhausting one. Werthmann notes that after rehearsals she couldn’t even pick up her remote control with her right arm. For the actress, it was a “lonely and alienating experience” because her human character was silent, and when her colleagues interacted with Oates, “they were really acting with my hand.” Add that she already felt awkward playing a sock puppet opposite someone as famous as Heather Graham.

Werthmann, at least, had only a sock to manipulate. The actors in Vogel’s play will be working more sophisticated puppets that will look like actual children and need to be manipulated more subtly than a mere sock puppet. “It was a major challenge,” Twist says, since making puppets expressive also makes them trickier to handle. “It was a technical challenge. I had to make them expressive but instinctive and easy to work. The actors were wary at first, but now they’re delighted, and they’re doing well so far.”

But ultimately, Twist says the idea of animating something is innate, something all kids do naturally. “Everybody,” he says, “has a puppeteer inside them.”