Douglas Paasch in an undated photo
Beyond the fringes of Seattle’s scrappy theatre scene there is a tiny but vibrant puppetry community. For many years, the most successful member of that community was Douglas Paasch, a homegrown artist who spent much of his career making magic at Seattle Children’s Theatre. Last weekend, Strawberry Theatre Workshop honored Paasch’s legacy with a showcase of puppetry from the region and beyond at Seattle University’s Lee Center.
Though Strawshop advertised a 7:30 curtain, last minute arrivals missed out on Clay Martin’s Punch & Judy show. Martin is a seasoned professional. His Punch & Judy sustains the tradition, right down to the voice-altering swazzle, while staying fresh, current, and culturally relevant.
Following a brief encomium on Paasch, the showcase opened with Escape, designed and performed by Reed Garber-Pearson. This is a delicate, soundtrack-driven piece in which a marionette nebbish endures an empty, joyless existence at work and home before taking off into the ether. The marionette sculpture is excellent, expressive even in stillness, and the piece is very still.
Unfortunately, marionettes don’t do stillness well. Hanging from a hand or two, they extrapolate the slightest tremor into a ripple of twitches. The puppet’s final transformation, taking flight from his life, also works against its form. Hanging from his strings, suspension is his natural state. Garber-Pearson proved more interesting to watch than the puppet as he shuffled around the stage, carefully maneuvering around the thigh-high set and reaching high out of his normal plane in the final scene.
The second act gave focus to another prominent quality among marionettes. Denmark is a film by Signal Light Puppet Theatre and Two Penguin Productions in which a creature resembling a mayfly nymph seeks escape in flight. The mediation of one puppet form (marionette) through another (film) makes flight seems more transformative than it is in Escape. This is due in no small part to the marionette entering the enclosed space of a space ship. The most striking commonalities in these two pieces are the theme of loneliness and the marionettes’ sadness. Is sadness inherent to these drooping puppets?
An entirely different tone drives Sarah Frechette’s The Snowflake. These puppets hang but they aren’t suspended; they sit fast, skewered on the ends of rods. They move up and down, but their most dramatic acts come from spinning. Limbs flail and every look is a giant double-take. A second rod provides minimal control to hands.
Frechette uses these high-energy little dolls to deliver a script packaged for elementary school children telling the story of Snowflake Bentley. The fourth wall gets perforated with great control. The tone is perky and condescending, and the performance is polished to high artifice. Using puppetry to enact history is a great improvement on the standard reenactor fare in as much as it maintains the inherent narrative distance of puppetry. Frechette subverts that distance by working in a lot of meta-theatricality that contributes little to the piece, though the puppet of the puppet is a highlight of the show.
More than many of the preceding shows, The Snowflake brings attention to the use of underscoring in puppetry. Whereas the soundtrack drives the action in The Escape, here the music is driven by the action, with each scene performed on a pop-up book set with each page turn initiating a new song.
Music also played a prominent role in the final two shows. Torry Bend’s Nesting, performed in the lobby during intermission, was a highlight of the evening with its toy theatre scale, abstract narrative, and homemade roughness. That roughness extended to the music, provided by a pair of music boxes.
Torry Bend in Nesting at StrawShop’s Douglas Paasch Puppet Playhouse
Bend’s stage is a paper house suspended from her back as a cowl, her face often visible behind the action. She dresses to resemble her character (who does not have a house for a head), in a tidy 40s dress and green apron. The play follows her character’s hope for a home with rejections, projections and dreams all assembling and collapsing under her roof. The music boxes are embedded in either side of that pitched roof, and Bend stops the show at several points to wind one or the other. The stage left music box is in more of a minor key, bringing the play to a bittersweet conclusion after an Ives-ian transition between the two tunes.
The final show, by Seattle’s most adventurous puppeteer, Kyle Loven, makes sound into another performing object with which Loven interacts. In Moon Show 143, the puppeteer is prominent, almost the protagonist. As with Loven’s earlier Loss Machine, the narrative is just sufficiently abstract to frustrate easy synopsis, but there is a palpable arc broken up by the turns of a steel frame cube on which Loven’s objects rest. Each face of the cube sets up a different performance space and central item. A child’s face and extraordinarily articulate hand in one scene give way to a headless, handless torso in another. Each of the characters speaks in a different voice, with Loven’s usual inarticulate language of emotion in both vocal and physical expression.
Though inarticulate, that emotional expression is what makes Loven’s work powerful, drawing us in and keeping us engaged. Yet Loven seems to question the lack of articulation, with voicelessness emerging as a prominent theme. Between scenes, Loven-as-actor attempts to speak into a microphone, only to be disrupted by interference from composer and sound performer, Paul Warlsch.
Overall, the performance is polished, yet visceral. A late scene of a puppet unpeeling into a kind of puppet negative felt more laborious than performative, and the piece occasionally dragged, but the impact was strong. Loven’s work continues to push the boundaries of puppetry, taking a solid position in the notion of object-centered performance.
As for Douglass Paasch, the showcase’s namesake, a lobby display allowed audiences to have an intimate interaction with his puppets, while photos helped viewers recall his works from Seattle Children’s Theatre.
