In this week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella checks out puppetry in New York, and notes that one of the great pleasures of this branch of the moving arts “is the vivacity of puppetry, its carnivalesque quality, its ability to make things fly” – as well as resize the world to your liking, murder and animate at will, and make of a hand or a piece of string – or a hand and a piece of string – a figure both tragic and amusing.  True play admits the possibility of pain: how else properly savor the fun?…Nice to see the shout-out to Basil Twist, too.