Labapalooza!

St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Labapalooza! puppet theatre is off to a touch-and-go start – but that’s as it should be with works in progress. Program A, which played last night, indicates how the puppetry rises or falls.

The high point was Adam Schechter’s Event Erasers, a mesmerizing live animation piece. Using two monitors, a projector and projection screen, and an assortment of objects to silhouette, Schechter and his collaborator Alan Calpe created a dreamy montage of sunrises and moonrises, the Manhattan Bridge and driving in the rain. When the images weren’t yet up on the big screen, watching Schechter and Calpe manipulate the small screens was a show in itself. The effect was, however, audio as well as visual. Without the ambient background music, the main event wouldn’t have had the same magic.

The low point was Elizabeth Ostler’s The Yellow Wallpaper. A puppetry adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book of the same name, The Yellow Wallpaper tried to create a narrative about a summer-long shut-in. This attempt precluded created an atmosphere that would emanate, in part, from the puppets. Not that Ostler and her collaborators’ show needed to create pure atmosphere like Schechter’s – they could have gone for laughs like the final show, Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith’s Mental Hygiene. The audience wanted to laugh at first – the overbearing husband seeking to cure his depressed wife with the rest cure could have been a one-sided comic figure. But Ostler opted instead for seriousness. A somber atmospheric piece could have worked, as could have a light narrative piece, but a somber narrative piece about being bed-ridden all summer doesn’t.

So what did I, the non-puppeteer, learn? That in a puppet show the focus has to be so clearly on the figures that everything else melts into the background. Event Erasers did that – the piece was entirely about manipulating objects on a stage. Yellow Wallpaper didn’t because the attempt at a narrative clouded the focus on the material objects dancing before us.

Program B premieres this evening, June 1^st, at 8PM. Both programs play on Saturday and close on Sunday. Tickets are available at http://stannswarehouse.org/ or at the door.