On December 7 & 8, 2007 at Wise Fool Studio (2778 Agua Fria Street), Santa Fe’s Theater Grottesco (John Flax Artistic Director and Co-Founder) produced a solo puppet show of six related stories by solo puppeteer Eric Bass (Co-Founder of Sandglass Players of Putney, Vermont).
The evening was appropriately titled Autumn Portraits as each vignette focused on the interplay of the puppeteer and a solo puppet that in each instance confronted its history, its present, and its imminent death. The puppet O’Neill, a vaudevillian that clearly had “died” many times on the boards and always faced his next performance with irony, courage, and persistence, enlivened the evening with his energy and wit while underscoring the serious nature of the play’s thematic concerns.
Master puppeteer Eric Bass’s performance was peerless. His puppets were gorgeously crafted, his miming of their voices was pitch perfect and the deft physicality of his movements was impeccable. Bass’s evening also reflected a poignant reinvention of storytelling subgenres, including Commedia Dell’Arte, Kabuki Theater, Chinese Ghost Stories, Yiddish Folk Tales, and British Music Hall. Puppets are not humans nor were meant to be. However, they provide a mirror (sometimes a funhouse mirror) on human existence. What an exhilarating evening at the theater!
Theater Grottesco’s presentation of Sandglass Puppet Theater was its first venture in presenting another company to the Santa Fe community. Equally important, Eric Bass conducted puppetry workshops for the community and Theater Grottesco’s company whose Fall 2008 performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night will incorporate puppetry into a few of its scenes.
