PRINCESS: It’s hard to be a princess when you’re lost and cold and scared / I’d ask that stranger over there to help me, if I dared.
-The Glass Flute, Scene iv
Working a puppet convincingly requires the same kind of brain-hand coordination that you need to be able to pat your head, rub your belly, tap-dance and sing the alphabet backwards, all at the same time.
The puppet gods who manipulate the Muppets make it look easy. It isn’t. Anyone can stick a sock on their hand and wave it about, of course. Anyone can speak in a funny squeaky voice and wiggle Bozo the fluffy dog while they’re speaking, to let the audience know that Bozo has the floor. In the world of puppet manipulation, we call this “jiggling dolls.” Jiggling dolls is about as far removed from true puppeteering as a Sunday school nativity tableau is from a full-scale production at the Canadian Opera Company. The only thing these two kinds of productions have in common is the temperament of the performers.
True puppeteering talent is immediately recognizable. The techniques can be learned, just as the rudiments of singing or painting can, but when there’s natural talent, the puppeteer simply disappears and the puppet transcends its inanimate state.
In rehearsal, it was my job (as puppetmaster, not as SM) to assess the abilities of each performer, introduce each of them to the puppets they would be manipulating, and let them loose in front of the studio mirrors to work. When the Flute was in performance, they wouldn’t be able to see what they were doing, so mirror practice was useful.
In addition to the handles and black dowels attached to each of the objects that appeared in the Flute, the speaking characters each had a mouth-mechanism that had to be coordinated with the speech of the performer. In Muppet-like puppets, you work the mouth by opening and closing your hand inside the puppet’s head. In the puppets we were using, the mouth-mechanism was a complicated series of wires and pulleys built into the frame of the head. The mouth was opened by a squeezable trigger at the back, like those spring-loaded exercise devices that muscle-men use to increase the strength of their grip. By the end of the tour, the actors would have forearms like Hulk Hogan’s.
The trick of co-ordinating speech and puppet-mouth movement is best practiced at home, when there’s no-one around to worry that you’re losing your mind. First, locate some lipstick. (This aids in the effect.) Make a loose fist and draw a set of lips on your hand, with the thumb as the lower lip and your knuckle and forefinger as the upper. If you want, draw eyes on your knuckles as well. Then start talking to yourself, making the lips outline every syllable. Go slowly at first, or you’ll get a thumb-cramp. Later, find a four-year-old and see if you can keep her attention for more than two minutes. If she talks back to your hand, you’ve got the idea. If she starts crying and reports you to the authorities, you need more practice.
None of the cast was a hopeless case, thank God. The audition process involved a “Here’s a puppet; see what you can do with it” section, and the inveterate doll-jigglers were weeded out.
Meredith, having worked with Steamboat puppets on many occasions, was quite adept at the trick of co-ordinating speech and mouth-movement, but the puppet was wooden in her hands and probably always would be. It was as if her puppet-manipulation were the stage version of low-budget animation. There was no spark, but she was competent.
She was, however, impossible to teach, and I shouldn’t have even tried. She was working with the pale and languid Mother puppet-head, which was attached to a fake body in the bed. Throughout the show, the mother-head is attached to various floating objects in dream-sequences. Later, at the end of the show when Mother revives and actually gets up, the mother-puppet is attached to the mother-body waiting backstage.
“Meredith, why not try a sort of full-body sigh with your arm under the blanket while she’s in the bed?” I suggested, demonstrating by slipping my hand under the covers of the small, prop bed and creating a lump there which moved with breath.
“Lift it up with the in-breath, and down on the sigh. Wiggle your fingers, and that’s her toes stretching. Then you can make her do that smack-smack mouth thing, like she’s about to go to sleep.”
Shane was working next to her with the Kevin puppet. He was a natural, the kind of puppeteer who can make a ketchup bottle come to life just by picking it up, walking it across the table and making it stare at you with Heinz-label eyes. He’d never done puppetry before—a director’s dream. He moved the Kevin-puppet over to watch.
“Hey, cool,” Kevin the puppet said.
“Polly, I don’t need any coaching from you. I have done this show before. I’m going over old material here, and I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me work.” Meredith said. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Kevin puppet staring at Meredith. Instinctively, Shane was living through the puppet, gazing intently at Kevin’s terrycloth, fluorescent-painted face. It’s a symbiotic thing; the focus of the puppet’s eyes is the key to the magic. If the puppet is looking at something, and the puppeteer is looking at the puppet, the puppeteer no longer exists.
“Who’s she?” Kevin the puppet said, giving his woolly head a little twitch to indicate Meredith. I couldn’t help myself. I chuckled and gazed deeply into his ping-pong ball eyes, which I’d painted with my own hands not two weeks before.
“Well, Kevin, she’s an actor who doesn’t want my help,” I said to the puppet. Kevin nodded slowly, sadly. Using the dowel attached to Kevin’s arms, Shane made Kevin’s foam-rubber and terrycloth hand reach out and pat my hand, still under the covers of Mother’s bed.
“Too bad. That breath-thing was a nice bit,” Kevin-the-puppet said. Shaking his head, Kevin moved away to join the others, pulled by Shane, who was smiling a little.
“Show-off,” the Mother puppet said, woodenly.
Amber was wrestling with the snake puppet, which is large and rather awkward. In order to make it move properly, its thirteen-foot, foam-rubber body is strapped to the puppeteer with a waist-belt. Its mouth is worked with a Brobdignagian version of the spring trigger, which takes both hands. During the show, the body is manipulated with the help of another performer, Brad in this case.
Neither Amber nor Brad had missed the Mother/Kevin/me exchange. Straining to coordinate the snake’s mouth, Amber commented with a somewhat-adapted line from the script.
“You’re brave and true and strong of heart,” the serpent said, “But what you seek . . . will make Mom fart.” Brad twirled the snake’s tail and blew a raspberry. They dissolved into giggles and Juliet lifted her head from her script, where she was making notes.
“Actually, that’s not a bad line, dear. Kids love fart jokes.”
“Oh sure, let’s put it in,” Meredith said loudly. “And while we’re at it, we could add a scene from Beavis and Butthead and make the whole show more accessible to our audience.” She tossed the Mother puppet to the floor and stalked out.
“Good time for an Equity break,” I said.
Equity rules state that performers are entitled to five minutes of break per hour of rehearsal. Generally, the breaks are loosely adhered to—say ten or fifteen minutes every two and a half hours. Finding a good moment to break is part of the stage manager’s art.
For many, the Equity break is synonymous with “smoke break”. If the SM is a non-smoker, she can make herself very popular with the cast if she remembers that the need for a cigarette tends to surface in the addicted mind every half-hour or so, and if it isn’t indulged every two hours, the work suffers. Being a smoker and an SM at the same time, this was not a problem for me. In every show I’ve ever done, the smokers share a special bond, as if they’re in a separate show called “Smoke Break”. On the Flute, the smoke break cast included me, Amber and Shane.
“That was weird,” Amber said, sucking mightily on a DuMaurier Ultra Light in the basement shop. Shane lit a full-strength Du Maurier regular and lit my Extra Light for me with an engraved, gold-plated lighter.
I don’t know why it is that so many theatre-type smokers choose this particular brand. It could be because the company is known for big time arts funding, but more likely, it’s just the monkey-see, monkey-do principle in action. My dating history can be traced by the brands I’ve smoked over the years. Get a new boyfriend; switch to his brand. Makes the sharing of smokes easier. The heroin addict hangs out with the heroin addict, after all; the cocaine snorter with fellow snorters, and the smoker likewise. Gotta quit, one day.
“What was weird?” I asked Amber.
“That thing with Meredith. She doesn’t like you much, eh?”
“I think she’s just trying to establish that she has experience,” I said, carefully. “She wants to be treated with the respect that comes from seniority.”
“Huh,” said Shane. “And she gives the rest of us the respect that she’d give a babbling toddler. Still, I’m glad it’s you SMing, Polly, and not Jason. Sorry, Amber. Had to be said.” Amber seemed to take this remark in stride, blowing out a cloud of smoke and gazing contemplatively off into the middle distance.
“You’re right, Shane. Like, he is my boyfriend and everything, but he wouldn’t have been able to handle Meredith. She would have taken over.” I noted that Amber was speaking about Jason in the present tense.
“Meredith’s a high-maintenance puppy, definitely,” Shane said. It was a joke-label, not very complimentary but quite accurate.
“Which reminds me,” I said. “I should call Jason’s parents and find out if they’ve seen him. We’re going to look really dumb if he’s gone home to Mommy. Where did you say they lived, Amber? Laingford?”
“Yeah. They’ve got one of those monster homes on a lake up there. It was supposed to be a summer cottage, but Dr. McMaster—that’s his Dad—moved his practice up here from the city when Jason was ten. I’ve never been to the house, but Jason showed me a picture. It’s like Kurt and Goldie’s place. Huge.”
Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, the American movie stars, had built a palace on one of the lakes in Ontario cottage country some years ago. They sold it eventually, saying that the locals were bothering them. The local papers retaliated by saying that if Kurt and Goldie had wanted privacy, they shouldn’t have built a mansion on the waterfront of one of the busiest, most tourist-infested lakes in the region.
Amber rummaged through the bulging purse she always carried with her and produced a personal daytimer. “Here it is,” she said, handing me the diary. Sunday, which was our official day off, was marked with stars. “Important” was written on that day’s page in a childish scrawl. “Visit the Gorgons.” I copied down the telephone number.
“Jason called them that. Like I said, they weren’t close. We were supposed to go there for dinner and a spring cruise on Dr. McMaster’s antique motorboat. I bought a new outfit and everything.”
“For the doctor’s benefit, or for Jason’s?” Shane said.
“Ha-ha, very funny,” Amber said. “I just wanted to make a good impression, that’s all.”
“Dr. McMaster used to take young girls out on the boat all the time,” Shane said. “Trust me, if the new outfit is skimpy, it would’ve made an impression.”
“You know them?” I asked, surprised.
“Jason and I went to Laingford High together,” he said, with a wry smile. “I’m a local boy, too, you know.”
“Holy Toledo,” I said. “When were you there?”
“About ten years ago,” he said. Something passed across his face like a grey shadow, and he extinguished his cigarette, along with the subject. “I gotta take a leak before we start. Excuse me, ladies.”
“High school can do that to some people,” I said. “Bad memories. I should go make that phone call.”
“Polly?” Amber said, “if Jason’s not there—at his parents’ place, I mean—where do you think he is?”
I was going to say “at the bottom of the river”, but thought better of it. Amber was hard to read, and she was, after all, wearing a honking huge diamond that Jason had apparently trothed his plight with.
“He’ll turn up,” I said vaguely. “Ummm . . . Jason didn’t know that Shane was going to be in the cast, did he?”
“No. It was a last minute thing. After he found out, just after I got up here from Toronto, he burst into my motel room and asked me to marry him.”
“May I ask why you said yes?”
“Polly, we have a show to do. It’s my first big break, and I didn’t want to ruin it by pissing off the stage manager.”
“You accepted an offer of marriage because of a puppet show?”
“Well, that’s not the only reason. We have been going out for three years. We get along okay. Also, I’m pregnant.”