| Until this month, I was unaware of the existence of the
Czechoslovakian-American Marionette Theater founded in 1990 in New York by Vit Horejs, who
had come across a supply of antique Czech puppets in the Jan Hus church of Manhattan. The
company recently reprised a 1997 production of Hamlet, playing in the unusual mode
of Czech puppet theatre, which is, the puppeteers appear as actors alongside their
puppets. Mr. Horejs, besides directing the production, acted and manipulated the roles of
Claudius, Laertes and the Ghost, while three others rendered the balance of the roles.
Based on the program credits, I would say that the cast of four consider themselves actors
who have learned puppetry rather than puppeteers who have tackled acting, which is
unfortunate. For “The Mousetrap” or Gonzago play-within-the-play scene, Mr.
Horejs as Claudius came to sit partly on my right thigh and partly on the right arm of my
front-row chair – for only a moment – until settling on the floor, leaning his
spine against my right knee and leaning marionette Claudius against my left, all the
better for him and the marionette to view the Gonzago poisoning onstage. Since the actress
assigned to Gertrude was busy impersonating Ophelia, she was unable to sit with Claudius,
which means that Mr. Horejs’s gesture of reclining at my feet somewhat turned me into
Gertrude.
The actor/puppeteers were costumed not in black robes and hoods, as are
the manipulators in Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre, but in variants of conventional
Shakespearian dress. They were well lighted and towered over their 18–24”
marionettes with some as tiny as 6-8”. Reciting Shakespeare’s lines, they
provided the voices of the marionettes in addition to their movement. At times an actor
would lay aside his marionette and play a scene straight out, as did Hamlet and Ophelia in
the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene, likely so they could manage unencumbered
kissing. Of the four performers, Theresa Linnihan (manipulating a Harlequin-like figure
named Kasparek not to be found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) revealed the ability
to integrate acting the role with manipulating the puppet. We could see the puppet
Kasparek, we could see the actor/manipulator Linnihan working behind the puppet, and on
some intangible level of spirit we couldn’t see an iota of separation between them,
no matter that Ms. Linnihan is a lively woman of medium height and the puppet was a 1.5
feet, goofy-looking man made of wood.
In radical contrast the actor/manipulator of the Hamlet marionette
wanted us to see him, more so than he wanted us to see the marionette, or for that matter
Hamlet. He wanted us to admire his acting, but all we could recognize was a person with a
marionette who wishes to be seen playing Hamlet. There is an analogy here to traditional
theatre. The marionette is to the manipulator as the character is to the actor. In the
theatre, at least in the style of realism, we ought to be able to see the character as
well as the actor behind the character, and we ought not to notice any psychic separation
between them. What we hope not to recognize is someone trying to convince us he is an
actor by calling attention to himself.
Marionette mastery, wherein the manipulator does not an actor become
but is nonetheless at one with his puppets, can be viewed through John Cusack’s role
in Being John Malkovich. In the opening sequence of the film, Cusack as puppeteer
has his Cusack look-alike puppet turn to gaze up at him in kinship, as if garnering
agreement for the frenzy in which he is about to engage. Here the film reveals how the
puppeteer’s absorption in the dramatic situation of the puppet is the puppet
master’s talent.
There are no puppets on display at the Episcopal Actor’s Guild of
America, a charitable fellowship organization for “all performing arts professionals
and other interested persons, without regard to religious affiliation,” but there is
theatre memorabilia to explore. Situated at 1 East 29th Street in New York, the Guild
resides above the national historic landmark “Little Church around the Corner”
that held the 1893 funeral of Edwin Booth who at age 31 in 1864 played 100 consecutive
performances of Hamlet, a record unbroken until John Barrymore played 101 in 1922. Both
Booth and Barrymore performed without puppets. |
