Just finished the local run of Rash Acts, getting ready to take it to Arcata in two weeks. Cleaning up studio and shop to prepare for the next onslaught. Starting to sculpt Tempest puppets, beginning modestly with the Boatswain. And thinking about what our experience with Rash Acts has contributed to the evolution of the new project. A few miscellaneous thoughts:

• Rash Acts brought me my first-ever experience using hand puppets, and I truly love the cranky little things. Their limited expression is their strength, a broad simplicity of emotion. Relevance to The Tempest? No, none at all.

• Discovered that my novel technical plan of adapting our head-on-rod style to be a hand-in-head sadly will not work. Operating the Red Queen (a variant of this style), I suddenly discovered that the reason I was holding her head at a sharp angle was because, egad, the human wrist won’t bend in the direction I was trying to bend her. You can hold the puppet over your head or at your side and be quite expressive, but you can’t hold it directly in front of you and still have flexibility in its wrist/neck. Can’t be done. So it’s back to refining the engineering of our rods and neck/shoulder structures: some of the Rash Acts puppets were very flexible, others needed radical chiropractic. More experiment required.

• The audience loves cheap theatrics, and this need is not to be disparaged. Biggest laugh in the show: Big Mama, the volcano, erupts, and the peasant farmers cry, “Get the kids!” Suddenly, ten little finger puppets in sombreros and bandanas pop up, and the audience goes nuts. The simplest, most obvious joke in the whole 90 minutes of the show, and the sweetest. We need those moments.

• How do I talk with the audience after the show? We bring out the puppets for them to see, and the questions are always, “What are they made of?” “How long does it take to make one?” “How do you make the eyes?” I answer as best I can, but I wonder if I should be deflecting that and trying to talk with them about the content of the work. Those questions are ok, but is that what they’re really asking?

• Hereafter, we must do what we’re doing with Tempest: produce in collaboration. Rash Acts has made clear to us that our life of independent producing is finished; on our own, we can’t get an audience larger than 20 to 30. Five months of my life to create a piece that’s seen by fewer than 200 people? But how do we foster these relationships? Thirty-eight years of doing it doesn’t mean shit, at least here on the West Coast. It’s bitter. And at the same time, it adds a greater pressure on Tempest: we must use it to help bring the next project into being, because otherwise it’s going to be the very sad swan-song of our artistic vision. Prospero drowns his book and goes back to be Duke of Milan, but I doubt he’s any the happier for it.

• Our main style of puppetry, with the live hand as the puppet’s hand, is extremely flexible and responsive to the actor’s impulse. But it’s seductive: the live hand tends to become too busy and the head static, whereas they must work in tandem, must create the illusion that there’s a real spine joining them. We’ve mostly gotten past the grotesquerie of an extravagant hand gesticulating in front of a stone-dead head, but still a long way to go.

• Our culture creates an extremely limited gestural vocabulary. Watch people talking. For most, gesture is almost non-existent, or confined to an occasional arrhythmic wave of the hand. Illustrative specificity, the sense of intimate connection with the “story” of the vocal message, is seen as something only flamboyant Italians do. Many stage actors, even with serious physical training, are even more restricted. But in this style of puppetry, the hands are the tongue, and choppy, generalized gesture is a serious speech impediment. For The Tempest we need to create an effective training regimen to overcome this cultural bias. The start, probably, is to begin without puppets, with a kind of neo-Delsartian technique to get full physical expression into the actors’ hands and bodies before transferring it into the puppet.

• Rhythm is fundamental. In Rash Acts we come and go with it. At times the dialogue has the intimate intercourse and forward thrust of a great jazz duo. But it’s too easy to fall into the line-by-line plodding of text-messaging. That’s not a “tempo” issue. It’s the degree to which one line is truly responsive to another, is part of an unbroken flow where even the pauses are part of that flow, is subject to change depending on the nuances of the line that’s immediately spurred it. When our comic sequences fall flat, it’s because the characters are doing “self-expression,” not really participating in a mutually-created absurdity. Shakespeare builds these linkages brilliantly, but performers can be remarkably oblivious to the tools he offers. Maybe the gateway is to begin, eyes closed, with nothing but the music of the words, divested of meaning. And maybe going from there to dialogue while in physical contact improvisation. We’ll see.

We’ve had a godsend during the course of Rash Acs in the form of Danny Brylow, a theatre/music major from Bennington College who’s interned with us for the past seven weeks and is now back to Vermont. He’s stage managed, papier-mached, postered, labeled & sorted bulk mail, catalogued six boxes of books for our regional puppetry guild, performed in our workshop, operated camcorder for rehearsals and performances, reviewed old videos from our archive to transfer to dvd, done set-ups and clean-ups ad infinitum. A true gift.

Next entry, Feb. 17.

Peace & joy—
Conrad