4C Puppet Love

ting it to blow perfect smoke rings, until ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS the stage manager ordered them back. She was the heavy. “Take five!” “On- stage!” Twist was soft-spoken and pa- PUPPET LOVE tient, but he looked nervous. The show dates, April 12th and 13th, were only six The artistry of Basil Twist. weeks away. “The crucial point about puppets,” BY JOAN ACOCELLA Twist told me, “is that they are real and unreal at the same time.” At the begin- asil Twist, one of this country’s pre- those people were in North Carolina. ning of the twentieth century, many mier puppeteers, is preparing a Whereas the theatre in Chapel Hill has writers and visual artists (Alfred Jarry, pieceB to Stravinsky’s world-shaking bal- fifty-five line sets (stage-wide pipes in Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Sophie let score “The Rite of Spring” for the the flies, from which you can hang Taeuber-Arp), looking for something Carolina Performing Arts festival “The props and curtains), the church had just that was a little bit human, but much Rite of Spring at 100,” in Chapel Hill. one pole, installed on ropes by Twist’s more art, made puppets, or works for At the end of February, I went to a de- crew. But the cast was game. During the puppets. The trend continues. Opera consecrated church in Bushwick to see action, Twist stood behind a table, play- now routinely supplements its human how the rehearsals were going. The ing the score on a laptop, but he kept his casts with puppets, as in the Metropol- Twist in the studio. His version of “The Rite of Spring” will première this month at a centennial festival in North Carolina. church was unheated, with the result finger on the play-pause button, and is- itan Opera’s productions of “Madama that the pipes had frozen and the sued corrections: “Higher,” “Lower,” Butterfly” and “The Magic Flute.” So plumbing had given up the ghost. (Por- “You’re early.” If there was really a prob- do Broadway musicals, such as “The table toilets were brought in and set up lem, he would demonstrate. During Addams Family” (for which Twist de- in the vestibule.) The twelve puppe- breaks, the cast crouched under electric signed the puppets) and “The Pee-wee teers, in down jackets and ski hats, had blankets—cords snaked through the Herman Show” (where he helped), not to use their imaginations during their hall; you had to navigate around them— to speak of Julie Taymor’s blockbuster maneuvers. For the show, they would and drank tea from thermoses. They “Lion King.” Some visual artists now be joined by ten more, but right now also played with a smoke machine, get- use puppetry in a way that makes their 34 THE NEW YO R K E R , APRIL 15, 2013 PHOTOGRAPH BY LANDON NORDEMAN TNY—2013_04_15—PAGE 34—133SC.—LIVE PHOTO R23379_RD—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHTOOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN 4C work more haunting. Jim Dine has been pets, practically from the moment he making versions of Pinocchio for de- could sit up. Then, in 1976, came the cades. The recent Quay Brothers show spinoff “Muppet Show,” where Miss at the Museum of Modern Art included Piggy flirted with Rudolf Nureyev films of mechanical puppets performing and Roger Moore. Twist papered his vaguely obscene actions. bedroom walls with Miss Piggy post- Twist doesn’t think much of the idea ers. In 1977, “Star Wars” was released, that puppetry is necessarily linked with and Twist made a full cast of “Star the avant-garde. “The only connection Wars” puppets. (His R2-D2 was fash- is that both of them are marginalized,” ioned out of a L’eggs panty-hose con- he says. He seems to feel that insisting tainer, in the form of a silver egg.) on the vanguard angle betokens a cer- Around this time, his family took a trip tain insecurity, an effort to raise pup- to New York, where his mother wan- petry’s status, buy it a fur coat. To him, gled for him an invitation to the Mup- puppetry is fine the way it is: modest. pet Workshop, on East Sixty-ninth Still, you don’t see him performing at Street. “I held a Kermit on my hand,” the Y. He’s been presented by Lincoln he says, with renewed awe. He also Center and the Spoleto Festival. As for went to a show by the renowned French there being no important relationship puppet master Philippe Genty, who between puppetry and modernism, he is specialized, Twist says, in fabric, music, at this moment creating a show to the and emotion. (Go to YouTube, where defining work of modernist music. And there is a clip of Genty performing his it is largely abstract. Columns descend “Pierrot.” The marionette, suddenly re- from the flies. Scrolls rise from the floor. alizing that someone is controlling him, The production is also huge, stage wide, yanks the strings out of the puppeteer’s which is something that very few pup- hands and collapses—a thrilling and pet shows have ever been. horrifying spectacle.) Twist thus en- countered European puppetry: subtle, wist, who is forty-three, was given historical. Finally, when he was ten, his his first puppet theatre by his par- grandmother Dorothy B. Williams, the ents,T when he was three, and he began widow of Griff—he says she was his making puppets out of paper. When Auntie Mame—gave him Griff’s jazz he was ten, his father built him a seri- puppets: Harry James and the rest. He ous puppet theatre, out of wood. It hung them from a stand in his bed- may seem surprising that the father, a room. “I would say that that sealed the San Francisco businessman with an deal,” he tells me. M.B.A., indulged his first child in this With his entry into high school came obsession, but puppetry ran in the fam- a crisis. He realized that there was a ily. Basil’s maternal grandfather, Griff problem with his puppet-making. It Williams, a big-band leader, had a set was like playing with dolls, a “girl thing.” of large, realistic puppets representing Even just his love of puppetry made him jazz stars—Harry James, Cab Callo- seem strange to others. He remembers way, and others, including himself— a Halloween costume that he made, that he would pull out in the middle of a huge, elaborate construction. “You his shows and put through their paces. couldn’t even fit it through a door.” But Basil’s mother belonged to a puppetry he didn’t enter it into the high school’s club that put on shows in hospitals, for costume contest: “I didn’t want to win. sick children, and also at birthday par- I would have been embarrassed of my ties. Twist described to me one of the passion. My passion was so strong.” He group’s routines, about a Santa Claus took down his Miss Piggy posters. He who liked to chew gum and blow bub- stopped making puppets. “Suddenly, I bles. A bubble burst, and the gum got had friends. I even had a girlfriend, for all over his beard, whereupon the beard a minute.” had to be shaved off. But then Santa Though he didn’t have a stellar aca- looked terrible, so the beard was re- demic record, he got into Oberlin, a col- placed with colored ribbons, which lege that takes chances on applicants. It suited him marvellously. shouldn’t have taken a chance on him. Twist watched “Sesame Street,” He found the place small and insular: with Jim Henson’s great gallery of pup- “You know, I came from San Francisco. I THE NEW YO R K E R , APRIL 15, 2013 35 TNY—2013_04_15—PAGE 35—133SC. BW was sexually active as a gay kid, but it was a secret. And suddenly I was in this situation where there’s a gay league and NOCTUARY a gay student alliance and a gay this and that. Every day, you had to declare Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her final mythomania. yourself as something.” He left the col- lege before the semester was over, and If it is written down, you can’t rescind it. went to New York, where he enrolled in a few courses at New York University: Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now. “I took a deviant-sexuality class, I took French, I took a science survey about What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then. intelligent life in the universe. It was a good kind of overview.” And, for the Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle first time in years, he made a puppet: “A long, long dragon, out of this wonderful On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents scaly fabric I found at some craft shop. I fitted a tube inside him, so that he From breeding-in. I have not bred- could smoke.” In New York, he tracked down every In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not puppetry person he could get the name of. “I was very aggressive,” he says. “I Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin. would call up and say, ‘Hi, my name is Basil Twist. Can I come and meet you?’ The flower bed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

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