Today I watched a man nuzzle a small plastic dinosaur at the (clothed) breasts of a woman, as he made the dinosaur cry out in a wee, agonized, rapturous voice: “I’m not extinct yet – I can still desire!”

Existentially touching. And true, too. Once we stop desiring. . . .

Puppetry is everywhere.

Theodora Skipitares’ new production at LaMaMa (it looks amazing) blends people and puppets in a retelling of “Medea.” Shadow puppets, rod puppets, and “realistic life-size figures operated by actors” – this last is the configuration I was drawn to for my novel, the performers in closest conjunction with their human counterparts.

I’ve blogged before about the Alma Mahler sex puppet/doll, and what strikes me as saddest about it, or her, is the sense of abjection, the total victimhood: a mute slave, made of silk and feathers, meant to bear the heavy, slippery weight of frustrated human desires. When I envisioned my Poppy troupe, Homo ludens was what I had in mind: the one who plays, with the puppets as real partners in the frolic. Constructed they may have been, but constricted, no.

Which is what I tried to demonstrate in this scene:

This night he premieres a new playlet, “Castor & Pollux,” after the Gemini sons of Leda, brothers from myth, wherein he and his new familiar, himself named from myth, enact a fraternal union of a different sort, with LaDuchessa [another puppet] as its springboard and a giggling cousin of the marchioness its foil. If few in the audience take to heart the deeper import of the piece – a defiant affirmation of affinity deeper than blood, harder than lust, stronger than any method meant to part it, sung in eerie twain to the tune of Dusan’s feet beating time on the drawing-room’s rosewood floor –

We are two, we need none other

Cloven not by wife or mother

Even a mistress cannot twist us

We’ll just share, like goodly brothers!

- the rest are amply titillated by its lithe, if louche, athletics, not least the giggling cousin of the marchioness, who for not a little time afterwards pursues the traveling pair through various drawing-rooms, until her mamma, mortified, bundles her off to a boarding-convent in Switzerland, where she relearns virtue, but never forgets her romp with the wooden man.

* * * * *

Nor should she. How often does life offer us the chance to have a romp with the wooden man?

Last night I saw Miss Pussycat and her puppets enact a sideways homage to the power of art to ossify, and then provide release; or something like that. Fun to watch in a club setting, but what interested me most was the spectators’ response: like a medieval morality play, they whooped the most when retribution was handed down (via a tommygun-toting Santa Claus, but who’s counting?). Comeuppance! The balance of the universe restored . . . Made me think fondly of Barry Unsworth’s great novel of the same name, though all his players were human.