Tweedster’s
Note: Let’s face it, friends: there’s no
such thing as journalistic objectivity. It’s common to refer to the “fair and
balanced” or “fit to print” notion as nothing more than an ideological
construct. Despite that, yours truly often feels constrained at times even
here, in the bastion of free performance-speech. Sometimes, dear readers, you
just have to spill your guts. So, in that spirit, OJ proudly presents the first
in a series of entries entitled “The
Mind-Body Connection,” a romp through the dissociative world of performance
criticism. The Mind Review is what you’ve come to expect from us—thoughtful,
informed inquiries into the epistemologies of performance (plus, we need to
feel that six years of grad school wasn’t a total waste); The Body Review is
the gut, visceral, perhaps inappropriate reaction of delight and/or horror. And what
better performance to begin with than Henson
Alternative’s Stuffed and
Unstrung at the Union Square Theatre.
The Body:
Holy shit! I’m in the same room as Brian Henson … this is probably the
closest I will ever get to a religious revelation.
If you grew
up as I did, you’ve retained a vast appreciation for the Muppets (even though
these, as the company jokes, are not
the M-words). You still laugh out loud at The Muppet Show and still need a
nightlight after watching The Dark Crystal. (On a visit to Ostrich Land, recently, I could not stop
yammering about how emus are creepy because they look like Skekses.) Nothing is more pure and joyous than the gaping maw of a
Muppet in revelatory bliss. Not even the laughter of children.
For you, Stuffed and Unstrung is a childhood wet
dream. Wait … bad metaphor. Oh well.
Thankfully,
it is nothing like Avenue Q (although the easy comparison
has been bandied about too much anyway). It’s more akin to Who’s Line Is It Anyway and Viola Spolin games, only much more
complicated.
The coolest
conceit of the piece is that, thanks to a camera set up down center and two
screens above the stage, not only do you watch the performers live with the
puppets, but you also get to see how it translates to the puppet-only
performances you know and love. Dangerously, then, the comedy is cool, but the
technical and choreographic elements upstage the main idea in a very cool way.
Add to that the re-performance of two early Jim Henson films (“Java” is particularly exciting), and Stuffed and Unstrung plays more like a
DVD’s special features that are more exciting (perhaps to the hardcore fan)
than the film itself.
The improv is
the piece’s boon and bane, as improv tends to be in form: some moments are
pee-your-pants funny, others don’t quite land. Some of the jokes that don’t
land are then turned around and made funny again. But all in all, fun fun fun
fun.
I am in the presence of Muppets! MUPPETS!!!
It’s a dream come … did that boar just shit a churro?...
The Mind:
Strange to
say, but Stuffed and Unstrung is a
fascinating case study in media culture and performance. Perhaps not staged
with a deconstructive eye, the conflict between the live performance happening
onstage and the mediated, filtered experience of the puppets alone on screen
are a reminder of Auslander’s mis-grounded warning in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, that concert-goers
of today tend to focus more on the Jumbotron than they do on the performance
they paid good money to see “live.” Although the screens are about the
enhancement of the live experience, much as they are in rock concerts, these
screens have the added bonus of creating a dialectic between puppeteer and
technical performers.
Three
particular moments come to mind that made this great tension feel palpable. The
first is when an audience member is picked to join a scene, and onstage, the
bumbling, almost slapstick attempts by the unassuming performer are hysterical
and desperate; contrast this with the screen, where the puppet appears
lifeless, lost, and, frankly, pathetic compared to the professionals. Second is
one scene which involves their new “digital puppetry” setup, where a CGI “puppet”
interacts with the live performers on the shared space of the screen. Onstage
however, puppeteer Tyler Bunch looks
more like he’s about to enter the world of the Lawnmower Man than toy about in typical Henson shenanigans.
Finally, and most tellingly, the audience is invited to Tweet at the show
during intermission, which subsequently appear on the screens in a glorified
screensaver. It is their moment to be on stage, on the screen, much like the
virtuoso performers. Messages were cheered for when recognized, and
conversations were even started among disparate sections of the audience.
It’s not a stretch to compare the puppeteers to the Twitterers, though: in an hyperreal age of instant communications
and overnight celebrities, our ability to perform “extensions” of ourselves
online, give voice to disembodied form, is a type of puppetry in the digital
age. But it also points to the mind-blowing commercial culture of becoming
puppeteers: common Tweets read “This is hilarious!” “U should come see this now!”
and, naturally, “ROTFL.” The line between pupeteering and marketing, it seems,
has been blurred almost entirely.