Puppet
‘Tis the season of bright spirits, gifts and cheer — not exactly the perfect time to be wallowing in doom and desolation. But in all this, puppets are dying onstage in Famous Puppet Death Scenes at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, with one intent throughout: Each one tries to prove itself as the greatest scene.
What constitutes a great death scene, you ask? It’s “not merely the most famous, or the most popular in their time,” as the show’s narrator Nathanial Tweak writes in a program note, but the best — as judged by him.
The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is one of the area’s go-to sites for experimental theater, having produced world premieres and hosted Chicago’s Second City. This time, it presents the Canadian Group Old Trout Puppet Workshop & Friends, who created Famous Puppet Death Scenes.
As far as death goes, the scenes run the gamut. In one scene, a puppet shoots someone dressed in deer antlers. Another has a grown man puppeting with toys, only to see them destroyed by children. Another is chain deaths in a house full of suicidal puppets. Some are stories. Some are moments.
Tweak, who is a naked puppet with white hair, talks about puppets suffering for humans. Another line in the show rings truer still: Without death, there is no desire.
We live our lives full of bucket lists and plans and dreams, trying to complete them within the limited amount of time we’re given in this world. Seeing the puppets in the moments before their lives are whisked away reminds us that life is short, and also cruel.
Some of the scenes are ambiguous, but perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps it fits better into the holiday season than it appears; Famous Puppet Death Scenes is as much about death as it is about living life.
