Federico Garcia Lorca was – is – a consummate poet of desire, so it’s entirely fitting and lovely that Blair Thomas and Co. would choose to dramatize several of his letters and poems in the haunting, comic, melancholy “Cabaret of Desire.”

In the playbill, Blair notes that as “Puppet theater is a bastard art form, hybridized and neglected, I felt it was my duty as a puppeteer to examine the only major 20th century writer who wrote scripts specifically for the puppet theater.”  The evening is formed as a cabaret performance, buoyed by the music of singing glasses and Victrola trumpets, a treadle-worked instrument I couldn’t begin to identify, voices, and various brass; the puppets appear, constructed from shoes and hosiery, from wood (?), from paper, as parts of paintings come to life (I wish to god I had remembered I had a camera in my bag).  The very talented performers bring both energy and mystery to their roles; more than one audience member commented, in the post-show Q&A, on the tenderness of the ensemble as they handled the puppets, more facilitation than manipulation. The hour passed as quickly as a sigh. . . If you’re in the Chicagoland area, or even if (like me) you’re not, you should see this show.  I’ll remember their “Ghazal of Dark Death” for a long time.

And on the drive along I-94, I noted a windowless highway club offerng $10 strip shows.  Which did not remind me of the Poppy, except in a slantwise sort of way.  While passion ends – or, occasionally, begins – in the brass tacks of flesh, its expression is a lot more haute and hot when it nestles as a seed and flowers in the mind: perhaps sown by vision, or a voice, or a scent, a certain smell, then reenacts itself in the lovers’ choreography, another kind of performance whose end has already been glimpsed if not scripted outright. Theatre is where you find it, or create it, and we are all actors and stagehands, objects and audience, depending on where and how the curtains fall.  Especially when the topic is desire.