‘Famous Puppet Death Scenes’: Yes, Puppets Can Die

Now, we contemplate with some wry rue the Christmas holiday offering by the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company.

It’s called “Famous Puppet Death Scenes.” In it, many, many marionettes and puppets die, often in gruesome, ridiculous or astounding fashion. They die, and they do.

Merry Christmas.

You were expecting, “God bless us everyone”?

This is Woolly Mammoth’s kind of Christmas, or to be more accurate, the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, a group of long-time pals and puppeteers from our friends up north in Canada. Like comic book heroes, they have an origin legend, about a large fish that lives in a swimming hole on a ranch in Alberta, Canada. Legend has it that if you swam deep enough into the water and find the trout, he will answer any question.

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop came to being on that ranch under the aegis of founders Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes and Judd Palmer. They did not jump in to find the trout but did get their name from the legend.

This was back in 1999, and the group of men have been exploring the arts and art of puppetry, marionettes, strings attached or not, in all of its forms ever since.

Often, their work elicits laughter as it is meant to do, from children and adults, and in this case, most likely cruel-minded adolescents as well.

“Famous Puppet Death Scenes” is a production that defies expectations. You expect to laugh, and people, myself included, do, and often, but what you don’t expect is that twinge almost from the outside that gets your head to moving toward the metaphysics of dead puppets or the death of puppets. Can puppets die? Are they alive?

In “Famous Puppet Death Scenes” they do (die) and are (alive … for a very short while.)

The title itself presumes a puppet history every bit as rich as say the backstage lore of theatre itself going back to the Globe, and terrible tricks played by Tallulah Bankhead, or what the horses in the ill-fated musical version of “Gone With the Wind” did on stage, or every treacherous story about the terrors of the Scottish play.

But puppets and puppetry does have an illustrious lore and in contemporary theatrics, they have become an increasingly large part of many plays—think “War Horse”, and the magnificent members of the masque in the Shakespeare Theater Company production of “The Tempest.”

“Famous Puppet Death Scenes” is one of the company’s most beloved works. Love may be a strong word for audiences, unless they are so hip that they can giggle throughout. The total effect is somewhere between the legendary short cartoon “Bambi Meets Godzilla” and reading too much Kierkegaard.

It depends entirely how you react to the puppets—they can be balloons on a string, sculptures, strings and stringless wood or pieces of made up wood with clothes on (or not). Or they can look at you with a jerk of a head—just before losing it—with big eyes, sad eyes, bright eyes and break your heart and drive you mad.

Just look at the titles, or some of them if you dare, along with the names of the authors: “The Feverish Heart” by Nordo Frot; one of my favorites, “Das Bipsy and Mumu Puppenspiel” by Freulicher Friedrich, episode 43, “Bipsy’s Mistake,” a cross between an old cruel German children’s tale and a quiz show set in a disco; “Never Say It Again” by Linda Snuck; “How the Spirit Entered Me” by the Reverend George Foote: “The Ship of Faithlessness Flounders” “La Nature Au Naturel” and so on.

There is an ongoing love story in which troll-like figures try to find each other, while avoiding the hammering hand (and foot) of fate. There are suicides and murders—shriek—and the complete destruction of an entire toy village. There is death, again and again.

There is, oddly, a lot of life. Barely in the case of your host Nathanial Tweak, a fragile, white-haired puppet who appears to comment on life’s cruelty. He speaks often like Shylock, almost asking the question, “Does not a puppet bleed?”

The production is lovingly staged with regular puppet theaters, but also puppets and the three puppeteers who move about the stage and move things along as participants. You can tell them apart from the puppets by their beards and their height but not by their movements.

The last play—called “The Perfect Puppet Death,” by the way—is just that. More I cannot say, lest I choke up.

And the thing is—far from the giggles, the sudden ill-timed word, the appearance of tragedy like a winter house guest, all of that, and sometimes the plain silly stuff, something else happens.

I remembered the puppets from my childhood. I noted, as they attempt to escape fate or a deadly foot, or walk right into life’s trap, which is finally death, that you end up choking up.

They look just like us, only smaller.