Review: La Mama Puppet Festival 2024

Marcus David
November 2024

This season La Mama celebrates 20 years of puppet programming with a fresh crop of creative new theatre works showcasing a vast array of puppet artists from diverse backgrounds. Pushing boundaries has always the aim of experimental theater and by bringing us these thoughtfully crafted shows with innovative design and wonderful puppetry La Mama delivers on that promise with this year’s puppet festival.

LOVO

October 25 – 27, 2024 | The Downstairs

Teatro Lafauna (Spain)
Idea and direction: Carlos Cazalilla
Performers-puppeteers: Vera González, Esther D’Andrea, y Carlos Cazalilla

LOVO tells the story of three documentary filmmakers finding the last wolf in Sierra Morena. Sadly, she had been poisoned and is dying right before our eyes. With that said we are then transported to another world, a world where the innards of the beast are brought to life through the art of puppetry and projection. LOVO can be put on a long list of trippy microscopic travels inside the body that includes the likes of Rick and Morty, Mike Tyson Mysteries and most famously the 1966 Sci-Fi adventure classic “Fantastic Voyage”, where we actually get to see the great Donald Pleasence consumed by white blood cells while traveling through the human brain. But there is a one big difference here in that LOVO doesn’t involve the concept of miniaturization, a technology that can miniaturize matter by shrinking individual atoms thus allowing humans to get so tiny that they can travel inside the body and do procedures deemed too risky for surgery. Instead in LOVO we simply dive into the bowels of another living being and see the animal wage its own battle inside as the toxic poison spreads through the body. Ultimately, LOVO tells tale of shrinking biodiversity due to human intervention, a sad state of affairs that perhaps threatens the spiritual balance of life on this earth, or at the very least, as anyone who has actually heard the howl of a wolf at night will tell you, it’s a song that will be sourly missed.

The Scarecrow

November 1 – 3, 2024 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
A new musical inspired by the Scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz”
Created, Directed, Performed by Anthony Michael Stokes

Anthony Michael Stokes uses lively musical numbers to blend themes of self discovery with strong social messaging about racial injustices in America in The Scarecrow, a new imagining of land of Oz after the wizard’s departure. A newly appointed his Majesty the Scarecrow is called upon to deal with an overwhelming murder of crows that is threatening the citizens of Winkie country, thus compelling him to return to the town of his humble beginnings, discover his true self and find the strength to make a difference. On his journey the Scarecrow is accompanied by some new characters to the Oz mythos, namely Wogglebug, Sawhorse, and the Patchwork girl. Large scale puppets come to life in this musical tale of good versus evil.

Secrets History Remembers

November 1 – 3, 2024 | The Club at La MaMa
By Evolve Puppets
Created, Designed and Performed by Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil
Composer: Joel Phillip Friedman

They say a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and in this season Evolve Puppets offers up a heaping and entertaining helping of it as it subverts the notion of classic Americana in Secrets History Remembers. This witty, high-energy vaudeville act uses a seven-foot-tall doll as its stage and with inventive puppetry relentlessly throws huge doses of humor and sarcasm our way as it demonstrates how much television has been used as a vehicle for indoctrination and control and shaping our attitudes over the decades. Maybe it’s time to turn off our televisions forever, especially in lieu of the recent election results that show how television can also create monsters.

Kindred Widows

November 1 – 3, 2024 | The Downstairs
Co-production with Les Sages Fous
Creation, design and interpretation: Claudine Rivest
Directed by: Sophie Deslauriers and Claudine Rivest
Music: Isaac Beaudet Lefebvre

Pairing well with the Halloween season, Kindred Widows eerily presents us with one spooky tableau after another. A headless dress dancing and flying, a decapitated head on a plate and puppets committing murder are on offer in this dreamlike portrait of a family that is both terrifying and banal. Dark humor and personal narrative infuse this tale as Amanda, mute for the last 18 years of her life, takes us on a nightmarish stroll down memory lane where hand puppetry intermingles with human elements to create glimpses of grotesque surrealism that could catch Jan Svankmajer’s eye. The production is quite lean with Isaac Beaudet Lefebvre on the violin and Claudine Rivest  performing and doing all the puppet work to great effect.

The People Versus Nature

November 7 – 17, 2024 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
By Lone Wolf Tribe
Created by Kevin Augustine

Next, The People Versus Nature serves up heavy and personal fare with some fun, as the whole first and second row of the audience have the unique experience of participating in the puppetry. Kevin Augustine’s intense performance as a death row inmate jolts us with its violent outbursts that shrink to hushed gentleness as he reenacts the events that led to his incarceration. Care, kindness, and affection leads us to anger that boils over as we track the trial of this man, who is fighting to free an highly intelligent chimpanzee that has been purposely diseased in a testing lab from its medical captivity. The helping hands of audience members brought on stage help animate the withering body of the diseased chimp with great care. His suffering is for us, the manipulators of this dying puppet, creating a strange karmic circuit, as we, the humans, help the decrepit chimp as it in turn is helping us by dying from diseases introduced to its system purposely by us, the humans, in order to test medicine that may or may work for the benefit of us. Out of sight, out of mind, the cruelty humans impose on animals is carefully and purposely kept far away from our prying eyes because what we can’t see can’t hurt us. Such cliches do actually work up until the moment you turn on the news and see that 43 young rhesus macaque females escaped from a lab called Alpha Genesis in South Carolina. Then you realize, sadly, that it is all too real. Oddly, that great escape happened on the day The People Versus Nature opened at La Mama and at this time 25 of the monkeys have been recaptured and 18 are still at large.

Out

November 8 – 10, 2024 | The Club at La MaMa
UnterWasser Company
Concept, direction, puppet creation, scenes, sounds, lights, performers: Valeria Bianchi, Aurora Buzzetti, Giulia De Canio

Out is the fun lighthearted romp from the UnterWasser Company. This kid-friendly production begins with a childlike puppet at home in his self-contained world when a huge crisis befalls him: his pet bird flies out an open window and into the wide open world. Desperate from his loss our little friend is compelled to leave the familiar for the unknown as he embarks on a mysterious journey to search for his bird. The stage opens up as his adventure leads him to encounter a variety of strange and surreal puppets skillfully brought life. Haunting forest landscapes and colorful bustling cityscapes created with shadow puppets adorn the stage as our friend moves through this dreamlike world of uncertainties in this tale of loss and recovery.

For more information →

Twenty years ago, with the support of the Jim Henson Foundation, The La MaMa Puppet Series was launched! Dedicated to creative new puppet theatre works, an array of puppet artists from diverse backgrounds have consistently pushed boundaries and engaged our community through thoughtfully crafted shows with innovative design. This season, as we celebrate 20 years, we wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to all the artists, audiences and puppeteers who have made the festival an essential and vibrant part of La MaMa’s programming.