Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 12:17:11 -0500
To: Puppet List <puptcrit-driftline.org-AT-lists.driftline.org>
Subject: [Puptcrit] Kudos to Bobby Box and the Center for Puppetry Arts


If you don't read the NY Times you might not have seen this great article
about puppetry that _isn't_ happening in New York!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/theater/newsandfeatures/25pupp.html?_r=1

There is also a slide show with photos from the show.

Here's the text of the article if you don't have the time to follow the
links.

Puppet Show With Dark Tale to Tell: Anne Frank's

By BRENDA GOODMAN

Published: January 25, 2006


ATLANTA, Jan. 24 - The idea of turning Anne Frank's diary into a puppet show
for adults sounds at first blush like someone's idea of a bad joke.

After all, her story is a classic. Her diary has sold more than 30 million
copies in 50 languages, making it the most popular secular book in history.
The warren of secret rooms in Amsterdam where the Frank family and four
others hid from the Nazis from 1942 to 1944 is one of the most frequently
visited places in the world. (Last year it had almost a million visitors.) A
1955 play based on the diary has been endlessly produced, challenged and
updated.

But Bobby Box, the creator of "Anne Frank: Within & Without" believed that
puppets could bring new depth and perspective to the wartime memoir.
Theatergoers apparently agree. Mr. Box's new version, which opened last week
at the Center for Puppetry Arts here and runs through Sunday, has been
playing to sold-out crowds. The show has been so successful that the center
is considering touring the production.

"Puppetry has had a bad rap," said Jon Ludwig, associate artistic director
of the center, which has collaborated with the Muppets' creator Jim Henson
and with Julie Taymor, who directed "The Lion King" on Broadway. "We always
think it's only for children and that it's like watching a bad birthday
party clown. And you think, 'How are they going to do something serious like
Anne Frank or Shakespeare with puppets?' "

But puppets have long been used to tell serious stories. When the Puritans
controlled England in 1642, they locked playhouses to prevent the spread of
subversive material. For the next 18 years, the only theater in England was
a traveling puppet show in which the workaday everyman Punch took swings
with a wooden club at Mother England's stand-in, Judy.

More recently, puppets have found a political voice in productions like the
acidly satirical movie "Team America: World Police" and the ribald Tony
Award-winning musical "Avenue Q." But part of the success of these works was
their tongue-in-cheek execution. A story with a backdrop like the Holocaust
could scarcely be approached so lightly.

Mr. Box tackles his subject by having two actresses manipulate the doll-like
puppets, which look like pose-able mannequins. The actresses, pin-curled and
identically costumed in prim knee-length gray wool skirts, white blouses,
gray cardigans and Mary Janes, are both introduced to the audience as Anne.
Sometimes they seem to be personifications of Anne's memory or different
aspects of her personality. Sometimes they seem like ghostly grown-up
versions of an Anne Frank who has been allowed, in death, to age and return
to tell her story.

The two performers move the puppets in and around a giant cutaway dollhouse,
an exact replica of the annex rooms where Anne and her family hid. Watching
grown women play with dolls this way turns out to be surprisingly macabre.

There are examples of the tender-turned-terrible throughout the show,
including a cradle that later becomes the cattle car carrying the residents
of the annex to their deaths.

It was Mr. Box's intention, he said, to take "the feelings that we have
toward certain objects and plug those objects into a place where they're not
supposed to go and see what happens."

The somber mood is also created by several impressionistic moments,
particularly dream sequences in which Anne puppets (of different sizes)
ice-skate or are rocked to sleep in the branches of a chestnut tree.

After a recent performance, a few audience members walked out of the theater
dabbing their eyes.

Rita Klein, 63, of Atlanta, who came to see the show with her husband, a
Holocaust survivor, pulled out the Kleenex early on. "It was very, very
moving and very disturbing," she said.

Andre Kessler, 65, who was also cloistered in an apartment as a child hiding
from the Nazis, said he thought it was an inventive way to revisit Anne
Frank's story.

As Mr. Ludwig sees it, the production succeeds because puppets, by their
very woodenness, force the audience to fill in movements, expressions and
interior lives.

"When it's a puppet, you're really invoking that spirit," he said. "You're
supplying half the work. You're going within. I feel like it's very
powerful."


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