"Boneyard Prayers" by Redmoon Theater on April 1st in Chicago, IL

Puppet theater by nature has certain limits. The best puppet theater turns those limits into strengths. I'm always amazed by scenes in which you see three puppeteers manipulating a puppet in a sad or tender moment. The fact that a puppet is standing in for a human and that three people are visibly manipulating it would likely prevent the viewer from being drawn into the scene emotionally. Yet, sometimes this display of artifice actually heightens the emotional punch of the scene. Puppet theater also cannot move at the pace of a conventional show and, as a result, not as much can happen. Thus, puppeteers tend to condense stories to a series of emotionally heightened scenes, operating almost with the economy of poetry.

Redmoon Theater has mastered the spectacle, large scale performances that tend to eschew narrative for the joy of endlessly unfolding visual (and often musical) surprises. They've also done excellent plays more on the scale of traditional theater. These tend to be adaptations of literature. One of the reasons these adaptations have been successful is because the artists have managed to surprise us with an unexpected series of delightful images, whether puppets of various sizes and forms or drawings.

"Boneyard Stories" is not a literary adaptation but an original story with original songs. It's about an alcoholic who decides to go home after having fled 23 years prior. The set is largely piles of dirt and everything and everyone is always covered in dirt. This are constantly being unearthed, or dug up. Having fled home because he couldn't face something he's done, the protagonist has tried to bury his guilt and, consequently, has become an alcoholic. Thus, the point of the story: we harm ourselves by sublimating painful events and can recover our health only by facing, or digging up, the past.

The problem with this production is that the narrative is severely underdeveloped. Characterization doesn't work and we care little for the characters. As always, much of the puppetry is wonderful. In one of my favorite scenes, the protagonist and his former wife have a bitter argument. The puppeteers/actors manipulating them drop the puppets and retreat. The puppets they drop fall crumpled unto the dirt in positions that express their pain. The duality of puppet and actor conveying the same emotion is fun to watch and the placement of the puppets manage to reflect the pain even more than the actors and their doubles. In the way that a story can seem especially ridiculous when it tries to be moving but doesn't achieve its goal, this story gets there. And once it does, the wonderful set, music, and puppetry can't save it. In fact, it's the other way around. The weak plot infects lessens our appreciation of the puppetry.