>>REVIEW
FAMOUS PUPPET DEATH SCENES
Old Trout Puppet Workshop
DIRECTED BY Tim SutherlandOne Yellow Rabbit
Runs until March 25
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
That we can imagine inanimate pieces of wood with a few slivers artfully removed as living creatures is beautiful and bizarre. That Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s latest work, Famous Puppet Death Scenes, is built entirely on the emotional resonance and comic possibilities of taking these same lives away is simply remarkable.
Laden with a devotion so intense that it can only be described as religious –realized in his own concluding presentation of The Perfect Death Scene – emaciated curator Nathaniel Tweak guides the audience through the greatest puppet death scenes culled from a canon of the Trout’s own imagining. Leaping between the comic, the tragic and the poignant, blocks of scenes are book-ended both by Tweak’s erudite musings and by scenes from The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frost, whose egg-shaped, allegorical protagonist graces the production’s posters. From a stair-climbing scene evoking Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the horrifyingly comic disembowelling of adorable plastic creatures, the Trout’s premise allows its latest production to switch tone effortlessly and frequently.
More than a splintered collection of scenes from their fictitious canon, Famous Puppet Death Scenes is an innovative showcase of the Trout’s ever-broadening esthetic. While the stage’s setup initially suggests a familiar puppet theatre, with three small stages framed by purple curtains, under the direction of Tim Sutherland and backed by Mike Rinaldi’s varied sound design, nearly every scene is executed with a perspective so alien to the others that the nuances of the canon might be established by sight and sound alone.
A refurbished armoire wheeled to centre stage holds a forest of spindly tree limbs in The Ballad of Edward Grue; an oversized novel composed of portraits conjures the dread of the unseen in Never Say it Again; and King Jeff the Magnificent sees the audience’s perspective bent to add a cosmic, vertical dimension to the familiar, largely two-dimensional realm of the puppet stage. Already masters of their own indulgent visual style, the Trouts have expanded their repertoire to include visual tools remarkable not only for their arresting style, but for their technical innovation.
At its best, the play produces exactly what its conceit implies, with the power of a single scene suggesting a larger work. As a dying woman’s face is literally peeled of its age in Lucille Arabesque, the audience can imagine the scene as either a conclusion or a beginning – a hauntingly beautiful image that begs the audience to consider the potential at its edges. Yet even when it fails to suggest the breadth of the canon, the show’s engaging pace and artful pauses render scenes of such wit and style that the Trouts can be forgiven for crafting vignettes too succinct to fit into larger pieces. If the production suffers, it is only when the audience makes a few initial falters in trying to determine whether they are about to be made to laugh or cry.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes offers equal measures of the hilarious and the poignant, exploring the dramatic potential of carved wood and the audience’s imagination. Just as Nathaniel Tweak is driven by his limitless devotion to the idea of puppetry as theatrical communion, the Trouts’ own creation is clearly a work of love. Coupled with a dynamic premise and the occasional, wholly welcome dose of self-conscious satire, Death Scenes is a delightful example of puppet theatre too intense to allow its audience to catch its breath, too beautiful for them to want to. |
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