Lethally funny

A character named Nathanial Tweak introduces murder and mayhem in the puppet play Famous Puppet Death Scenes. Calgary's Old Trout Puppet Workshop is touring the production across Canada and the United States. (OTPW)

They’re killing puppets at Toronto’s Young Centre this week. “They” are Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop, and their lovingly carved wooden characters are meeting the Reaper in all kinds of grisly ways: they’re being hanged, shot, drowned or disemboweled, ravaged by a cruel sea, dismembered by a wicked wind or pummeled by what appears to be the Fist of Fate.

Famous Puppet Death Scenes, making its Toronto debut as part of the Old Trouts’ current U.S.-Canada tour, is a delightfully macabre little show that simultaneously riffs on mortality and spoofs theatrical genres. In the space of 90 minutes, it features no less than 22 morbid vignettes from such imaginary puppet classics as The Feverish Heart, a melodrama by one Nordo Frot (whose dumpy little hero is imperiled by the aforesaid Fist); Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel, a cheerfully violent German children’s show that would give Itchy & Scratchy a run for their money; and The Cruel Sea by Thorvik Skarsbarg, a glacially paced 14-hour Norwegian play in a style aptly known as “Theatre of the Insufferable.” Among the 50-odd puppets slain in this medley of bizarre works: an opera-singing priest and his monkey, a frustrated lover, a barn full of Fisher-Price farm animals, a lugubrious whale and a gaggle of aliens that look like Johnny Depp.

It’s a veritable feast of puppet annihilation, made gruesomely delicious by the Old Trouts’ fertile imaginations. For the uninitiated, it’s also a perfect introduction to these splendidly freaky puppet masters, who combine a passion for the baroque and surreal with a visual esthetic poised somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Edward Gorey. Not to mention a penchant for wearing their puppets on their heads.

Their latest and most popular work to date, Death Scenes has been gathering plaudits since it premiered to sold-out houses at Vancouver’s PuSh International Theatre Festival last year. Having already toured across Western Canada and to Ottawa’s Magnetic North fest, it’s on the road again this season, playing a string of gigs in the eastern U.S. as well as a handful of Canadian dates.

“It seems to be our breakout show, insofar as getting into the States,” says Judd Palmer, a company co-founder and one of the production’s creator-performers. “I guess people want to see puppets dying.”

Old Trout co-founder Judd Palmer holds aloft a puppet from the troupe's anti-Disney production of Pinocchio. (OTPW)

Americans are finally getting a taste of what Canadian theatregoers — and especially Calgarians — have been savouring since 2000. That was the year the Trouts made their critically acclaimed debut with The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, an obscure life-cycle allegory that involved murder, nudity and the slaughter of a pig — and still managed to be witty and charming. Since then, the troupe has turned out a succession of equally unlikely adult puppet shows, from a wordless version of the medieval Beowulf poem to a biography of 19th-century French chef Antonin Carême. For family audiences, they’ve also brought their skewed sensibilities to an original fantasy called The Tooth Fairy and traditional favourites like Pinocchio.

Palmer says the idea for Death Scenes came in 2004 when the Trouts unveiled their award-winning version of Pinocchio — a dark, anti-Disney adaptation in which the boy-puppet’s “conscience,” the annoying talking cricket, is smashed to death with a hammer, as in the original Carlo Collodi novel.

“There we were, murdering the cricket onstage, and the audience ran the gamut of emotions,” Palmer says. “You could hear the first gasp of, ‘Oh my God, can they really be doing that?’ Then they started to laugh. We realized there was something absurdly compact about the act of a puppet dying; it can be funny, tragic, offensive and absurd, all in one blow of the hammer.”

Death Scenes purports to be a compilation of such memorable moments from the world’s greatest puppet plays, as collected and introduced by an elderly puppet thespian named Nathanial Tweak. A dry old stick (quite literally) with a mad-professor’s shock of white hair and a fondness for rhetorical excess, Tweak hosts this puppet Ars moriendi as a lead-up to his own tour de force, a promised death scene to outdo all the others. “He’s been practicing it since time immemorial,” says Palmer, who provides Tweak’s voice, “and once he’s prepped us with this whole notion of the towering achievements of great puppet art, he’s going to cap it all off.”

The show is an excuse for the Trouts to indulge their love of the arcane by wholly inventing a canon of supposed puppet masterpieces. Palmer says they had a great time dreaming up what the classic plays might be. “The inspiration came from everywhere. You know, you’re watching Barbarella and you suddenly think, ‘Oh my God, there has to be some kind of famous puppet science fiction movie from the ‘60s.’ Or you think, ‘What would a German children’s television puppet show look like, viewed drunk in a Düsseldorf hotel late at night?’”

It also allowed the Trouts to dabble in — and send up — different theatrical styles, from the Victorian morality tale to the bleak, Sean O’Casey-type Irish domestic drama to the kind of excruciatingly slow and uneventful spectacle usually identified with avant-garde director Robert Wilson. “It’s one thing to do an existentialist, 14-hour-long piece of experimental theatre with humans,” Palmer says, “but when you do it with puppets, it makes its absurdity self-evident.”

The production is directed by Tim Sutherland and performed by original Trouts Palmer, Peter Balkwill and Pityu Kenderes, along with newcomer Mitchell Craib. The lineup has changed a few times since 1999, when a 27-year-old Palmer and a bunch of his puppet-loving friends founded the troupe while living collectively on his grandfather’s ranch south of the city.

A doomed puppet tries to dodge the Fist of Fate in Famous Puppet Death Scenes. (OTPW)

As teenagers, Palmer and his pals had all been afflicted with, in his words, “this classic Calgary self-loathing,” and had scattered elsewhere — Palmer himself headed to Toronto to work as a television puppeteer. But with Y2K looming, it seemed a good time to get their priorities straight. “Everyone was turning to this introspective place, thinking, ‘What do I really value in this world? Wouldn’t I rather be amongst my greatest friends?’” Palmer recalls. “The ranch suddenly illuminated itself to us all as being an aspect of Alberta that we really did love, that was part of us.”

Their rural retreat turned out to be a kind of puppeteers’ Big Pink where, between chopping wood and carrying water, their creative energies flowed. It was there that they perfected their signature mask puppet, worn on the puppeteer’s head and face. And it’s there that they conceived and built Istvan, performing it first for an audience of bemused local Hutterites before taking it to Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo. Unlike the Hutterites, audiences there were accustomed to innovative puppetry, thanks largely to native son Ronnie Burkett; nonetheless, they were blown away.

The Trouts eventually abandoned their neo-hippie experiment on the ranch and moved back to the city. “We lost our minds down there, living together in a coal-heated shack,” Palmer admits. “You can only handle so much of the sound of another guy chewing his granola.” New owners have recently bought the building housing their Calgary studio, forcing them to pull up stakes again.

Palmer says they’re taking advantage of the situation by relocating temporarily to Guanajuato, Mexico, after this tour. There, they’ll spend several months creating their next ambitious puppet work, based on the legend of Don Juan. “We’ll lodge ourselves in some grand, cheap hacienda,” he says. “It’s a beautiful opportunity to return to the puppet-making adventure we began with.”

Famous Puppet Death Scenes plays Toronto Oct. 24 to 27. Other upcoming Canadian dates include Whistler, B.C., from Jan. 3, 2008, to Feb. 2, 2008, Kelowna, B.C., from Feb. 3 to Feb. 9 and Edmonton from Feb. 12 to March 2.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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