>>PREVIEW
FAMOUS PUPPET DEATH SCENES
Opens January 30
The Old Trout Puppet Workshop and Theatre Junction
Theatre Junction (The GRAND)
Judd Palmer doesn’t deny that he’s got travel on his mind when I meet him in the woodshop of The Old Trout Puppet Workshop. We’ve moved to the woodshop because the Trouts’ main studio seems only a few degrees warmer than the sudden January chill outside, and Palmer concedes that it’s on blustery days like these that he pines for a place by the ocean. Without saying so, I assume he means the Pacific, because at that moment Atlantic Canada is no warmer than Alberta.
But in a few days, the Trouts (Palmer, Peter Balkwill, Mitch Craib, Steve Kenderes and Bobby Hall) would be eastward bound, heading to their first New York premiere with a remount of Famous Puppet Death Scenes, the first stop in a principally cross-Canada tour. After visiting New York and Vancouver’s Push Festival, Famous Puppet Death Scenes will return to Calgary for a run in The GRAND, following last year’s held-over performance at One Yellow Rabbit’s Big Secret Theatre. At this time though, Palmer’s mind is thousands of miles away and a few years ahead.
"You hope to get that one show that crosses that line and becomes a true international touring thing and becomes a touring machine," he says. "Then you tip over the edge and then hire other people to do it for you."
The success Palmer is envisioning brings to mind Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s Obie-winning Off-Broadway run of Tinka’s New Dress, the first in the Street of Blood trilogy that firmly entrenched him as an international star. Like Burkett, the Trouts have had no small share of local success in Canada, producing, among others, Betty Mitchell-winning runs of Beowulf and the grand, but ultimately untourable, Pinocchio. The hope, says Palmer, is that continued touring will allow the Trouts’s footprint to expand, returning every year to connections made in festivals across the world.
Though the play is not the first of the Trouts’s creations to be built specifically for touring, a cursory look at Famous Puppet Death Scenes’s mix of puppet vignettes culled from a fictitious puppet canon proves why the production may well be the company’s most accessible and distinctive work to date. Showcasing a full range of comedy, tragedy and the raw beauty of the Trouts’s rough-hewn style, Famous Puppet Death Scenes takes its audiences from a pair of pylon-shaped puppets being comically eviscerated to a desperate man’s cosmic transcendence, all within the miniature proscenium of their puppet stage.
Palmer, never a man to shy away from the metaphorical, explains that, "As a company we’re always trying to strike a balance between something that’s appetizing, like a tasty stew but also nourishing in that way. We’re striving to make something that isn’t inaccessible but we’re also striving with our frail, withered hearts for beauty and for some glimmer of depth."
Certainly, the production offers its fair share of both depth and flash, from ghastly apparitions to an absurd conflation of children playing with toys as mean-spirited ogres. In fact, with the complete retinue of crowd-pleasers – laughs, tears, etc. – it isn’t surprising that, despite inevitable post-touring changes and the introduction of more opulent sets, its core remains.
"Ultimately," says Palmer, "this show in particular is a fragile raft. If you pull up a plank the whole damned thing might sink on you, held together by such a tenuous connection of thematic strands, and that’s what I like about this show."
By the time the Trouts begin their run at The GRAND, their New York premiere will be in their past. With success, fighting the cold in the woodshop may be a thing of the past, just as the company’s original move took it away from a coal-heated shack in rural Alberta. If ever Calgary audiences have had a reason to be ambivalent about a local company’s well-deserved success, it would be in watching the Trouts’s puppet stage retreat into the distance. |
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