When I write, I surround myself with media – music, always (lots of Rufus Wainwright, Shearwater, Ute Lemper, some Dylan, some Roxy, and so on and on); and visual aids, many of them snippets or fleeting glimpses torn from magazines, newspapers, flyers, whatever. This intelligent personage, however, is a painting by Rick Lieder, that has been in my viewing field for months. Very nourishing, that face.

There’s no truth to the rumor that I had “help” with that essay post. None whatsoever.

For everyone who’s asked “So, what’s the deal with the puppets?” the short answer is transubstantiation, the object as both mirror and receptacle of desire, and the long answer is this:

STRINGS ATTACHED

They don’t have to have strings, you know, puppets. They can be made of wood, or paper, or wire, or shadows and light; they can be made by Italian masters in Parma, by you with your fingers, by a mischief-maker with a kneesock and a rotten attitude. They can be made of anything, be anything: they can even be you. And for the last year, the puppets have definitely been pulling my strings.

When you’re a writer, people always ask where you get your ideas, and I never know what to tell them. Who’s to say? Maybe ideas are all around us, endlessly drifting like neutrinos, or firing like nerve impulses, waiting to strike the right receptors. I’ve had my share of stories and novels that seemed to start out well but ended up going nowhere, because, great ideas or not, I couldn’t make them come alive: somehow they weren’t meant for me, they were dead sticks and detritus in my hands. But once I started digging into puppet theatre, I was instantly, hopelessly in love.

Of course when I say “puppets,” I don’t mean puppets as they’re usually construed by mainstream American culture, as cuddly and harmless entertainment, fun for all ages. The puppets I fell for had teeth. And genitals. And weren’t afraid to use either one.

The ur-puppet in my research was Mr. Punch; I picked him because I knew him, the way you feel you know someone you’ve never met, by reputation. He was, is, a badass and a baby-tosser, and in some of the play’s versions beats up both the devil and Death: because he wants to! Because he can! And he’s a popular fellow, too: throughout Western culture he surfaces again and again, with his red hat and under many names – Polichinelle, Pulcinella, Kasperle, Petrushka, Aragos; sometimes he dresses in shadow and is Karagöz, or Karakoz. Well, the world does love a bad boy.

And what’s best about Punch, what he wears as an emblem as brazen as his jolly red hat, is what I found I loved in the whole world of non-human actors: that unmoored, reckless, fantastic disregard: not only for the social niceties, or even good and evil, but for gravity, for all and any physical constraint: a puppet can be, literally, made to do just about anything, constructed to do anything, all that we watchers cannot – fly, or grow tall in an instant, or produce another head, or run without legs, sing without a voice, conquer the gods who move us. Time means nothing to a puppet: dummy in a box, figure on a shelf, it can rise again and again, and live each time for the first time, a perpetual opening night’s reincarnation.

Puppets can even navigate successfully the trickiest landscapes of, let’s call it emotional physics: they can and do express the darkest feelings, grasp and gobble and shred and relent, all without remorse or messy heartbreak and attendant after-effects: it’s just a show, after all. (In this way they most resemble human actors, who can nightly slip on the psyche of Macbeth or Annie without acquiring the permanent urge to rule Scotland in blood, or become a plucky singing orphan. One hopes.)

So in my research, I did what we always do when we fall in love: I wallowed. Basil Twist, Bread & Puppet, Julian Crouch, Erik Sanko, Eileen Blumenthal’s terrific Puppets: A World History, wherein she wittily groups the puppets by tropes, like “Politics,” “Sex,” “And Violence.” The more I read, the more I wanted to.

And puppets became my gateway drug for the theater itself, because the puppet is really the essence of theater, isn’t he? isn’t she? Pure artifice, all disbelief suspended though we know that that actress is pulled by a string, that actor made of foam and led by a rod: but not while they’re onstage; not while we’re watching. Then it’s not only real, it’s all that there is, and not us, our eyes and ears and asses in the seats, our own breath moving in and out of our bodies: those become only the vehicles to experience, the tools we use to ingest the feast of story happening right up there on that stage.

Which dovetails absolutely with the job of the fiction writer. I know and you know that these are only pixels on a screen, marks on paper; that the theater I built, Under the Poppy with its Victorian glamour and dirt, is a construct made to hold my other constructs, brooding Rupert and loveless Decca, beautiful louche Istvan with his puppets, constructs themselves….It goes on and on, a nautilus whorl of make-believe, fiction within fiction, a stage upon a stage. For a writer, for this writer anyway, it was a playground extraordinaire.

Because it was freedom, the freedom to write what moves me, to do as the puppets do onstage: go all out, deliberately ignoring all finitude, the knowledge that it’s all over when the lights come up, as all is over when you close the covers of the book. But if it’s any good, that story, that show, isn’t over, but continues to resonate in the mind, creating its own nautilus universe of associations and echoes, linking idea to memory to new impression or information, the effect slightly different – or vastly – for every reader, every time.

I’ve always been happiest, as a writer, in the house of the strange, the subcultures of periphery and intensity, where the powerless, the “different,” the fascinating, the vulnerable, the dangerous, intersect with normalcy, but prefer their own real estate in the end. And in all the art I love best – paintings and books, music and movies – my first and only rule is Make me feel it. Those outlaws on strings, those mute lovely timeless creations, did that for me, and in Under the Poppy, I attempt to do it for you.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where I get my ideas. I’m just glad that, this time, the puppets came and got me.

Another NY Times moment: the Andrea Dezso photo illustration for Jenny Lyn Bader’s Kafka article. Is that a shadow puppet getting it on with the bug, or are you just . . . well, you know.

Here’s the quote for the day, from the “Vows” column of the New York Times: Annie Evans talking about her husband, puppeteer Martin Robinson: “[H]e is full of life and passion. Not to mention that being around puppets is very sexy — just look at ‘Avenue Q’.”

Lest it be said that all I did on the trailer was write the song’s lyrics and be dazzled by my collaborators’ artistry: proof that I wasn’t idle. “Poppy trailer, scene one, take one.” Clack!

One more from Prague – see the ladies-in-waiting, backstage -

National Marionette Theatre
Zatecka 1
Praha 1

http://www.mozart.cz/ gives you the full details, pointing out that their production “celebrates Mozart’s period and the atmosphere of this era in a form of authentic 18th century spectacle.” There are other marionette versions of Don Giovanni to lure the Prague tourist – accept no imitations!

Paolo Parmiggiani also gives a shout-out, in his comment, to both Jan Svankmajer (whose version of Alice in Wonderland I watched fifteen years ago, on a godawful hot Manhattan night, and fell forever in love with) and Barry Purves, whose work I did not know, but am very glad to see.

Someone just asked me (well, not “just,” it was over the weekend) “Would a movie of Under the Poppy be shadow puppets, or people, or what?” I had no answer, being content, for now, with the question itself.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, artist and former (and future?) puppeteer, was kind enough to share some of the photos from a recent trip to Prague (all photos are by Peter Wakelin – thank you, too, Peter!). Have a look – they are just fantastic.

Enter the Unima Puppet Centre, in Prague, wherein you will see. . .

. . . this dashing fellow: a limewood skeleton puppet.

I love the insouciance of his cocked ankle. In death, all costumes are off (and the need for them, too).

These childlike, pastel, charming creatures are marionettes from the 1960′s. In his email, Clive notes that they “reflected . . .the kind of simplified design which was prevalent in Czech animated film at that time, which in its turn influenced film animation around the world, including the UK, Canada and the US.” They evoke quite a different feeling in the viewer than these next marionettes, from the 19th Century – much more Saturday night at the Poppy . . . As I wrote to Clive, seeing all these puppets (and the other photos he sent as well) makes me want to jump onto a plane and GO.