Broken Pencil
>The Secret Lives of Puppets
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Lindsay Gibb on the renaissance of underground puppetry @ Broken Pencil.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The lady on stage is screaming. Her legs are splayed, her makeup is smeared and the crowd leans forward, eager to see what’s coming next. The menacing mute in white-face looms over her, a nurse’s hat perched on his head. His newly found voice channels through the screaming woman. Wait, another creepy character moves eerily across the stage. Neatly bearded and wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater, he talks the audience through the horrific scene with a calm intensity akin to a children’s show host leading kids through story time. At the pinnacle of chaos, the “nurse” reaches between the woman’s legs. “Ah, ah,” the lady shrieks. She’s giving birth! To baby dolls? No. The white-faced man pulls them out. It’s rabbits. Soaking wet rabbits.
The story of Mary Toft, a real 18th Century woman from the English countryside who claimed she gave birth to rabbit parts, plays out via a puppet drama sandwiched between a twisted waltz and the tale of a moose in municipal politics. The occasion is The Friendly Rich Show, a vaudevillian event held at a club in Toronto best known for its late-night salsa dancing. David Hannan, whose creepy silent stare almost steals the show, is the white-faced controller of Mary Toft. Richard “Friendly Rich” Marsella is the storyteller. The audience is riveted. They’ve never seen anything like it.
When we think of puppets, we think of children’s television and kid’s birthday parties. If we go any deeper, maybe we think, with a chuckle, about the cast of the musical Avenue Q, a coming of age Muppet show that jump-started convention by satirizing everything from racism to Internet pornography. A few of us might even have stumbled upon the Canadian TV show Puppets Who Kill, which ran for a few seasons and featured murderous puppets living in a group home. A cursory survey of pop culture would suggest that the puppet-as-adult-entertainment paradigm is already played out. Puppets who have sex and kill? It’s been done. Next?
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