Wayang Kulit

 

[Wayang kulit is one of Indonesia’s major art forms, with many stylistic and regional variations.  As found on the islands of Java and Bali, wayang kulit is both entertainment and ritual.

[Several epic cycles form the basis of the plays and provide characters with which new plays are created.  Of various origins, the epics have been altered and supplemented extensively, forming a distinctly Indonesian mythology.  Most wayang stories performed today in Java and Bali are based on the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic (though the Javanese are predominantly Muslim, while the Balinese are mostly Hindu).  

[I’ve only seen one wayang performance live—when I was in Honolulu for a Kabuki course at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. UH has an active Asian performance program.  Run at that time by James Brandon (1927-2015), it included the Festival of Ethnic Music and Dance, which in July 1988 a wayang performance by the University of Hawaii Gamelan Ensemble directed by Hardja Suslo. 

[I’d seen videos of wayang kulit, but this was my first (and so far only) opportunity to see it live. I have to say that dalang Marc Hoffman made those puppets do things I wouldn’t have believed was possible with inanimate objects!  I can tell you that shadow is somehow magical.  It sort of explained to me why spectators are drawn to the back side of the screen—to see that the puppeteer isn’t engaged in something paranormal back there.]

“LARRY REED, 81, MASTER OF SHADOW PUPPETRY 
WHO MADE IT MODERN”
by Richard Sandomir

[Larry Reed, an American wayang kulit shadow puppet master, died on 30 January.  His obituary, which ran in the New York Times on 28 March 2026 (Section B: “Business”/”Sports”), motivated me to blog on the Indonesian performance form. 

[I realized, though I had covered several other forms of theater from Asian cultures—noh, kabuki, gigaku, classic Sanskrit drama, and the Natyasastra, I’d never posted anything in the Indonesian shadow puppets, which are tremendously fascinating.  I decided to do it by commenting on Reed’s obituary, which was also posted on the Times website on 25 March 2026 as “Larry Reed, Master of Shadow Puppetry, Dies at 81.”]

Taking the intimacy of a traditional Balinese art form and making it a large-scale show.

In 1970, a young filmmaker named Larry Reed traveled to Pengosekan, a Balinese village, searching for a new theatrical experience, something different from the standard Broadway fare.

He wasn’t certain what he was looking for. But one night he found it.

“We came upon a clearing filled with people crowded around a small screen, with a flame behind it making flickering shadows,” he recalled decades later. “A single performer was manipulating scores of puppets, creating incredible sounds with his voice, leading the orchestra with a mallet in his foot and making the audience laugh and cry.”

What he had seen was the ancient art of wayang kulit, or Balinese shadow puppetry, whose stories are derived from the Mahabharata myth cycle. UNESCO designated the form a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.

[Wayang kulit (pronounced wah-YAHNG KOO-lit) literally means ‘shadow leather’ because the puppets are carved from leather. Wayang can refer to the puppet alone or the whole puppet theater performance. Furthermore, wayang can be used to mean ‘theater’ in general, as one of the forms of Indonesian performance is called wayang orang, which is theater performed directly (i.e., no shadows) by human actors. (Orang is the same word that appears in orang utan, the great ape whose name means ‘man of the forest.’)

[The Mahabharata is an ancient Indian epic poem, revered as one of the two major texts of Hinduism alongside the Ramayana. (The Ramayana is the story of the god Rama, a major Hindu deity.) Composed in Sanskrit between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE, the Mahabharata is the longest known epic poem in world literature, about ten times the length of both the Iliad and the Odyssey together. 

[The name means ‘the great (story) of the Bharata,’ who are the descendants of the legendary emperor Bharata, whose name is also the Sanskrit and Hindi name for India.  The Mahabharata is the story of the rivalry between two princely families, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas.] 

Mr. Reed, who died at 81 of a heart attack on Jan. 30, at his home in San Francisco, didn’t understand the language being spoken.

But the show “excited me because it was so worked out, yet so wild,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1984. “It involved the same old stories that we’re used to here, but a different mix — like ballet and a clown show all mixed together. It was like watching primordial cartoons.”

This would not be just a thrilling one-off. Over the coming years, as he trained to become a dalang, or shadow master, Mr. Reed returned regularly to Indonesia to study in the village of Tunjuk [on Bali] with the dalang I Nyoman Rajeg. Mr. Reed lived in Tunjuk for a year [ca. 1974] with his future wife, Jane Levy, before they married in 1976.

Back in the United States, Mr. Reed had formed the nonprofit ShadowLight Productions in San Francisco in 1972 to stage traditional shadow puppetry shows. But by the early 1990s, he began to realize that “not everybody in the world is as interested in Indonesian stuff as I am,” he told Mission Local, a San Francisco news website, in 2023.

So he created a modern version, or what came to be called cinematic shadow theater, “that emerged over many years through experimentation,” Caryl Kientz, ShadowLight’s managing director, said in an interview.

Mr. Reed turned the intimacy of traditional Balinese shadow puppetry into a large-scale show, using the age-old techniques to tell stories from around the world. Instead of a single dalang, there was a cast of performers — including puppeteers, masked actors and dancers — behind a 15-by-30-foot screen, and multiple electric light sources instead of a flame.

[The puppet figures of wayang kulit are rear-projected. They are flat leather figures carved and incised from water buffalo or goat hide and attached to rods which the dalang uses to make the limbs and heads move. The shadows are thrown onto the back of a large linen screen by an oil lamp (the traditional method) or, today, an electric light.

[The leather is used rather than other, more modern materials. Because in its thin state, after being worked and carved, it’s not only more supple than any other material, but it’s slightly translucent, make the shadows less opaque and more lively.

[The dalang manipulates puppets while sitting on the ground—wayang kulit performances are traditionally outdoor events—between the lamp and the screen. Audiences, who are free to come and go as they please during a performance, are clearly meant to be seated on the opposite side of the screen from the dalang. But it has long become common for spectators to come behind the screen and watch the dalang work and see the shadows from the “wrong” side.

[The wayang performance is traditionally accompanied by a gamelan orchestra, commonly an ensemble of bronze percussion instruments.  The dalang “conducts” the gamelan, who are seated behind the dalang. The gamelan is usually also accompanied by male and female singers.

[The dialogue of the puppets isn’t written down—there are no scripts in the western theater sense. The dalang, with all his other duties in a performance, makes up the words the puppets speak as the story unfolds. Furthermore, the story is tailored to suit the audience attending the performance. The dalang may even make references to current events and local affairs, especially during comic scenes.]

Drew Dir, a shadow puppeteer and a founder of Manual Cinema, a performance company in Chicago, called Mr. Reed a creative inspiration.

“When we were coming up, people would pass us DVDs of his performances,” Mr. Dir wrote in an email. “His tools were so simple — light, shadow, foamcore, the human silhouette — and yet the possibilities were endless. To the best of my knowledge, he was the creator of modern shadow play and performance.”

Mr. Reed’s productions, which he often directed and in which he gave voice to some of the characters, were multicultural in their subject matter.

“Monkey King at Spider Cave” (2006) was based on a 16th-century story about a Buddhist high priest in China. “Ghosts of the River” (2009), a series of vignettes written by the playwright Octavio Solis, explored stories about crossing the Rio Grande. “A (Balinese) Tempest” (2005), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, debuted in San Francisco and was also performed at the Public Theater in Manhattan.

[The Monkey King. a simian trickster with human characteristics and abilities, is one of the best loved and most enduring characters in Chinese literature. Armed with a staff and extraordinary powers, he comes from the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, attributed to writer Wu Cheng’en (c. 1500-82 or 1505-80). In the centuries since his literary debut, the Monkey King has been the subject of movies, TV shows, and games across both the East and the West.]

“In Xanadu” (1993) followed the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan’s [1215-94] quest to bring his late wife, Chabi, back from the underworld. It won puppetry’s highest honor, the Citation of Excellence from UNIMA-USA, the North American chapter of an international puppetry organization.

Steven Winn, a critic for The [San Francisco] Chronicle, praised that show’s “ingenious use of perspective,” which made shadow images of 13th-century warriors look three-dimensional on the screen [see what I mean about the dalang’s magic?]. The battlefield scenes, he added, had “a wonderful, illusionistic depth.”

Charles Lawson Reed III was born on June 21, 1944, in Los Angeles, and moved with his family to Cincinnati after World War II. His father, Charles Reed Jr., was an engineer who owned a valve-manufacturing company. His mother, Dorothy (Whittaker) Reed, was a homemaker and an active supporter of arts organizations.

Mr. Reed recalled noticing the effect of shadows from an early age.

“Once I woke up from a nap and found myself watching the shadow of a bug on a leaf, inches from my nose,” he wrote in Puppetry International magazine in 2009. “My first photographs were of shadows in the snow.”

In elementary and boarding school, he acted. At Yale, he studied French and theater, but left after two years to join a Peace Corps theater program, through which he worked at the National Theater of Costa Rica from 1966 to 1968. In 1970, he earned a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in film from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Following his first trip to Bali, Mr. Reed returned to the United States, where he studied Balinese instruments and the Indonesian language at the Center for World Music in the Bay Area [founded in San Francisco; relocated to San Diego in 1980]. One of the teachers suggested that Mr. Reed study shadow puppetry with his father, Mr. Rajeg, in Indonesia.

Returning to Bali for extended trips in 1973 and 1974, Mr. Reed recalled sitting behind the screen with Mr. Rajeg — watching him perform, learning how he gave voice to multiple characters and how he animated his flat, carved-rawhide puppets.

“I learned the entire repertoire, just note by note, the way the Balinese do it, except much slower,” Mr. Reed said in a video on the ShadowLight website.

His time in Mr. Rajeg’s village led him and the filmmaker John Knoop to make “Shadow Master” (1979), a docudrama about the dalang’s family — including his grandchildren, caught between tradition and modernity.

Mr. Reed’s troupe has collaborated with organizations like the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, the Santa Fe and Los Angeles operas, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, a Balinese music and dance company, the singer Coco Zhao, the choreographer Wan-Chao Chang and the actress Karen Kandel.

Mr. Reed is survived by his wife; his son Nik, who confirmed the death; another son, James; three grandchildren; two sisters, Janet and Dede Reed; and a brother, Foster.

His final show, which he performed last November on a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., was a wayang kulit story, “Arjuna Tapa,” in which the title character travels to secure a powerful weapon from Lord Shiva for an upcoming war. Mr. Reed, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD], was the sole puppeteer and used a portable oxygen concentrator to breathe during the performance.

Rachel Cooper [performing arts presenter specializing in cultural exchange], the director of performing arts, culture and diplomacy at the Asia Society [New York City], recalled watching him perform in Indonesia in 1996.

“People were so delighted,” she said in an interview. “I think they felt here was someone who really respected and knew the form. If you can make jokes in another language, and they laugh, it tells you something. He made that connection.”

[Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for the Times for more than three decades.  “I am . . .  assigned to write short biographies of the famous, the infamous and the obscure,” he says.  Sandomir joined the Times Obituaries desk in 2016 after 25 years covering sports media and sports business for the paper.  

[He’s worked for Long Island’s Newsday and other publications, and written several books, including his most recent, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic (Hachette Books, 2017). Sandomir’s journalism background of more than 40 years has helped him become a better storyteller, which is critical to writing obits.  He graduated from Queens College of the State University of New York in 1979 with a B.A. in communications.]