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Performing Arts

SINGLE BAUBLE, SINGLE SAUSAGE, ONE FLOWER UMass theater stages a modern morality play — with puppets

by Ali Crolius

INSTRUMENTS OF SELF-EXPRESSION: the ingenious and disturbing puppets of The Archipelago of Delight. Photo by Ben Barnhart. WEANED AS WE ARE ON an entertainment diet of Miss Piggy and the Cookie Monster, most Americans equate puppetry with children’s programming. In truth, puppets have played a grownup role in world cultures for centuries – a point that UMass theater professor Miguel Romero has been making to his students for years. So in summer 2000, fresh from a sabbatical spent studying puppetry in Europe, Indonesia, and Japan, Romero teamed up with theater department colleague Harley Erdman to create The Archipelago of Delight, a musical morality play with puppets. It was a cheeky project. The production would involve dozens of cast and crew members and a live orchestra performing an original score. And if it’s tough to draw audiences to amusements involving live actors, a didactic drama acted out by puppets should really buck the odds. The title itself hints of chutzpah. An archipelago is a sea with many islands; the authors used it “because we liked the word,” Erdman says. But in modern American English the word is most familiar from The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic indictment of the Soviet prison system. The sinister echo is not amiss. The thematic basis of The Archipelago of Delight is the Seven Deadly Sins. Its three “island-scapes” are settings for a young woman to explore her innate capacity for sin. In the event, the odds fell in favor of Archipelago of Delight: The Rand Theater was full during most of the play’s two-weekend run last April. THE LIGHTS GO UP ON Archipelago’s only human actor: Jenny Conley ’02, in the blue-sequined dress of a torch singer. Despite her zaftig figure and creamy arms tapering in elbow-length gloves, she is an innocent on whom some of life’s big questions are just beginning to dawn. “Is it a sin to want to feel some change jangling in your pocket?” she sings wistfully. “Is it a sin to wish you had the cash to buy that new leather jacket?” The lights fade and come up on her alter ego: a puppet crafted to resemble her right down to the blue dress and sleek dark hair, manipulated by a just-visible crew member dressed head-to-toe in black. The singer has arrived on the dreamy and surreal Isle of Greed. Glittering cloaked figures, arms writhing like a nest of snakes, offer baubles. A paper serpent slithers by, whispering, “Kid, what do you long for?” The puppet has none of the singer’s girlish inhibitions; wild to possess the baubles, it tussles with ghoul-puppets with skeletal limbs and the mutant faces of elephants and rodents. The black-clad manipulators scoot along on low wagons, contributing to the rat-like scurrying that makes the puppets’ movements so disturbing. Desire becomes raw cupidity. Mayhem results: Bizarre props and constructions drop from the ceiling and pop out of the floor. Scenery that seemed stationary comes to life, animated by cast members who’ve been standing stock-still in the shadows. The orchestra, abetted by synthesizer-generated grunts and squeals, provides a dismaying soundscape. Similar psycho-spiritual plunges occur on the islands of Gluttony and Lust. At the pitch of action, the lights go down on the puppets, and the human singer turns toward the audience, more bewildered and unsated than before. In the end, she gratefully accepts from the venal ghouls a single bauble, a single sausage, one flower. The message seems to be that our fiercest carnal urges must be met with moderation, even as we wrestle with that unbudging taproot of human suffering, desire. Ah, another light-hearted evening in Amherst. ROMERO BELIEVES IN THE PUPPET as an instrument of self-expression. "And I teach it as such,” he says. “It can work its magic on a table top as well as through electronic media. It does require skill, an impeccable sense of timing and, of course, something worth saying.” It was the pursuit of puppets – their history, construction, manipulation, and potential for social change – that took Romero around the world on his last sabbatical leave. In the ancient puppet venues of Japan, Bali, and Java, he says, “everything I had read about came vividly alive. Shadow puppeteers performing in temple ceremonies in Bali brought home the concept of the raw human comedy as part of worship.” He returned to Amherst determined to enlarge his students’ vision of what a few bits of cloth and some imagination can do. For young people used to Kermit the Frog, this was an eye-opener. “Jim Henson made puppetry viable, both as pure entertainment and as an educational tool accessible to millions via television,” says Romero. “Without minimizing his genius, an unfortunate part of his legacy is that our culture too often confuses puppets with Muppets. In fact, puppet artists have an enormous range of theatrical possibilities at their disposal, Romero says. The fabulous success of the Broadway version of The Lion King, which employed spectacular puppetry, is only one very recent example. In Asia, puppetry is used to this day not only to convey folk material but as a vehicle for political protest. It seemed natural to Romero to use it to protest social excess as well. Romero and Erdman arrived at UMass at nearly the same time, Romero in 1993 to teach scenic design, Erdman in 1994 to teach dramaturgy and theater history. Their first scenic collaboration was Monsters Among Us, a rap puppet opera for children that dramatized how kids can be introduced to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs by members of their own families. In the wake of that successful project, the professors began tossing around ideas for a “puppet musical.” THEY ENDED UP REACHING BACK half a millennium to what Erdman calls “that last moment in western history before the conventions of drama as we know them today were established.” In the morality plays of medieval Europe, events and concepts such as Death or Confession or Famine or Repentance were embodied in human actors. Among the most potent of these paradigms were the Seven Deadly Sins – which despite centuries of censure are still alive and well, Erdman and Romero feel. They spent the better part of the summer of 1999 weighing the theatrical potential of each Deadly. While Pride, Envy, Anger and Sloth generate plenty of wreckage in everyday American life, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust were eventually settled upon as most promising for the stage. After working out a storyline together, the two concentrated on their respective specialties. Erdman set to work on the lyrics. He worked closely with composer Christopher Haynes, a faculty member at Springfield College, who recruited and directed the five musicians of the live orchestra. Theater grad Nick Keenan ’00 recruited vocalists to provide the offstage voices of the puppets. Meanwhile, in the Rand scene shop, Romero and his students worked on the puppets. Because adult audiences tend to tire of watching hand puppets, Romero chose to adapt the Japanese genre of bunraku, in which human manipulators are visible. For imagery he drew on the works of Late Gothic Netherlandish painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose iconography of the grotesque and surreal is tailor-made to that of Archipelago. DURING WINTERSESSION LAST JANUARY, ROMERO invited German master Sebastien Roser to conduct a mask-making workshop for his students; it was Roser who translated Jenny Conley’s face into the dead-ringer mask of her puppet double. Undergraduates with acting ambitions, says Erdman, may have felt understandably hesitant at first to trade their expressive mugs and carefully cultivated naturalism for the anonymity and artifice of puppetry. But the experience of being the power behind a puppet won converts: After inhabiting their characters, says Erdman, several actors had a hard time reverting to their non-puppet personalities. Last spring’s Archipelago was a work-in-progress that will go through many revisions before it’s staged again, Erdman says. But it drew praise for its imaginative treatment of perennial moral issues, and though the medieval vice squad would not approve, it was with apparent Pride that he assessed the play’s debut a week or so later. “It was a show with zero name recognition, because the name was unpronounceable,” said Erdman. “It was a dead time for theater, in May, when too many other things are going on in the Valley. “People came because of word of mouth. It made a statement that UMass theater is willing to go out on a limb.”

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Single bauble, single sausage, one flower

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