On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Doll Houses The first half of Peter Schu-man's current offering at his Bread and Puppet Theater, "Leaf Feeling the Moonlight," inches forward lugubriously. So do the...
...Yet it may be no more than a formal exploration of the medium...
...A French horn suddenly croaks...
...Nor even the smoke bombs...
...One can only hope that it will thrive, help the Bairds consolidate a valuable tradition, and encourage them to put more distance between their art and showbiz...
...it is not loud enough to hear, not quiet enough to shut out...
...The puppets incline toward one another, then separate, appear and reappear...
...They glide rather as a female character does in the Peking Opera or a Noh performer does as he takes 10 minutes to traverse the few feet of hashiga-kara from the entrance curtain to the stage area...
...Electronic music growls like a decrepit Wurlitzer being tuned by unpracticed hands, while from time to time a sort of choir up front breathes in a sighing diapason, as if to imitate a man sleeping or dying...
...A big, ugly puppet with its mask plastered over with gesso and blankness is a threatening object in its own right...
...No particular craft is required to make it do dangerous things, as the puppets do in the "Motel" sequence of America Hurrah...
...The quartet from Rigoletto is sung to a recital of all the big names bought up for the Met by Rudolf Bing...
...They do not "walk" like people with their shoulders rising and falling or swaying to compensate for changes of balance, even though there is an actor inside each one...
...he finally strikes out at Death, one of the skull masks, and is vanquished...
...Tolstoy and the play's pious last words notwithstanding, does anybody really think these days that war is inhuman or that it depends on chance...
...The special brand of noncomform-ity indulged in by the denizens of the East Village gives rise to a bunch of young look-alikes, one of whom says, "Every night before I go to bed I say to myself 50 times, 'Screw Scarsdale.' " Somebody sings the song "Lover" to a sketch that begins as a coy romance and ends with the female of the pair milking the male dry of love and everything else and tossing him away...
...Poor Grandmother Russia????will she never be laid to rest...
...They undercut the cuteness, however, instead of exploiting it, by keeping their "musical revue" on a tartly comic level...
...Schuman is interested in discovering the impersonal, intrinsic possibilities of his creatures...
...Schuman's huge dolls appear to swim through the air...
...The Bairds' latest production, at their new, pleasing theater on Barrow Street, is called People Is the Thing That the World Is Fullest Of...
...Another specimen of puppetry, the apa's War and Peace (Lyceum), constitutes Tolstoy sliced transparently thin and served up with indecent haste...
...In the background, music gabbles...
...Piscator who had a big hand in the original German production should, of all people, have known better...
...A warrior, the large puppet, is called in and matter-of-factly disposes of the dragon...
...Similarly, if you don't fasten your ears to every phrase of the narration, great slabs of it escape...
...Each time the exhumers bring her to the surface she looks more wan and more New Worldly...
...The Bairds also employ animals (visually their least imaginative dolls), simple masks, cartoon people, and abstractions from the human figure...
...Some of the marionettes are complex enough to need 15 or 20 strings...
...The set consists of a red cloth held up by two actors wearing death's head masks...
...The point of the playlet is that the warrior's head is a caricature of Columbia's, spiked helmet and all...
...The solemnity is occasionally dispersed by feet that scurry about the edges of the room????somebody is organizing something, preparing something????and once by the crying of a little girl in the audience who is frightened by the spookiness...
...Again the horn wards them off...
...Nothing in the play quite manages to establish or justify itself...
...if you do, it doesn't make much sense...
...As a series of afterthoughts, he slays the king, the priest, and all the people...
...nor the pretty-pretty spotlit tableaux of Napoleon looking down like Horatio Nelson from a great height...
...All the puppets but one are small and are operated fast and jerkily above the curtain...
...The Bairds, like Disney, transfer personal attributes to theirs...
...A trio of bullfrogs does a wicked take-off of The Ink Spots...
...The puppets' faces and garb display a vivacity and sure colorsense that one rarely sees elsewhere in theater design...
...One could scrabble endlessly for meanings and conclusions in this piece of work...
...They operate them from above with strings, from the lower edge and sides of the proscenium opening with rods, and from within (the gloves) with fingers...
...Eventually it deflates them with its hoarse shouts...
...The choir sings a motif for each of them...
...It also means that in some cases limb appendages?the feet, for example????can go up and down as well as from side to side and so contribute to the three-dimensional effects...
...There is a story narrated by Schuman involving a small country invaded by a dragon...
...Its producer is an organization called The American Puppet Arts Council, Inc...
...their movement belies their bulk...
...second, something like half the evening is given over to swooning moments of birth, death, and forgiveness, prolonged beyond tolerance and accompanied by snuffles from all over the house...
...Skits on Lincoln Center are introduced by a severe little Abe Lincoln puppet and an applause-mad Leonard Bernstein, who remarks, "This place teems with culture...
...A puppet has its own life, and that life is governed by its size in relation to the size of a human being, as well as the gestural limitations imposed (and for an artist, the opportunities afforded) by its range of activities...
...The second half of the program has affinities with a British Punch-and-Judy show, and strikes a contrast in almost every way with the first half...
...They go down very slowly into darkness...
...When Chaplin hid inside an empty tree trunk and darted from spot to spot, the scene was funny precisely because the tree looked untreelike, it moved humanly, like a Chaplin-tree...
...The resulting articulation means that the dolls' fingers can flex independently, as when one of them plays a trumpet or a piano, or a pair of detached hands works a floating violin...
...The loving puppets are no more than a couple of gloves...
...They return...
...They are mesmerized by a plastic pink rose the size of a chrysanthemum which, in this sepulchral context, seems naming red...
...the exaggeration culminates in an anticlimax...
...or "Natasha...
...The text touches its rhetorical peaks with such gnomic fictions as, "War is inhuman because it depends on chance...
...What Schuman achieves is to match a clumsy appearance to graceful actions...
...I deduce the "natural gait" of a tree from remembering what didn't happen in Shoulder Arms...
...They advance and recede?Faulkner's favorite adverb, "terrifically," applies here????in front of a shabbily painted landscape...
...They keep coming back...
...nor Rosemary Harris, who gabbles????as she does everything?delectably...
...Their behavior is that of non-sentient matter, drawing on mechanics, not on physiology...
...The result there is rather like deploying a sword and then letting it cut through a sheet of paper...
...As in the movies of War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago, the characters seem to spend most of their splintered time either avoiding smoke bombs or falling into each other's arms with throaty cries of "Sasha...
...With its 100 or so puppets, perhaps more, its elegant lighting and decor, and the limited capacity of its auditorium, the Baird Theater is presumably subsidized...
...Even when he infuses a moral, though, Schuman takes his art seriously...
...In case this sounds snooty, I should add quickly that Etienne Decroux considered Disney one of the 20th century's great mimes...
...not the costumes, which are assumed and discarded before one has time to count their gold buttons...
...If the penalty they pay for this is a degree of cuteness, that is a penalty associated with any of the arts of miniaturization...
...This last number illustrates the Bairds' versatility...
...This, one feels, is how a tree might travel if it could get off its roots and pace the earth...
...The other actors gabble the scenes...
...by Burt Shevelove, and the Bairds are assisted by six other puppeteers...
...It drives the figures out of sight...
...Schuman's puppets then, are not conventional robots, much less stiff-limbed human beings or cripples by default...
...So do the puppets themselves, cowled presences eight or nine feet high, like monks and nuns off a canvas by Rouault, their white mouths and eye sockets full of dumb, unchanging anguish, and no backs to their heads...
...In terms of simultaneous equations, Schuman's puppetry is to Bil and Cora Baird's what a film made by an impoverished independent is to one of Walt Disney's superior works...
...Perhaps their most dazzling realizations are sets of wires that dance a spastic rock-and-roll, and a pair of tubular metal boxes made up of hinged or freely-jointed triangles that resolve themselves (in unison and rhythm) into a bewildering assortment of shapes and poses, looking like Noguchi sculptures come to unpredictable life...
...It is a flow of tested material delivered with jaunty proficiency, the sort of confidence that comes only out of masterful techniques...
...A commentator, who handles about 50 one-line roles on the side, gabbles the continuity...
...The benefits yielded by the panicky speed that Ellis Rabb has imposed are twofold: First, the curtain comes down on the stroke of eleven...
...The playhouse is at 425 Lafayette Street, and open only on weekends...
...A stagehand sits in the front row and points a wavering flashlight at them, and from the rear of the cavernous room another white beam, slightly rainbowed at its rim, hits the landscape and goes in and out of focus...
...The performance is directed (I wonder in what sense...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 10
