The Bread and Puppet Theater

 

[Bob Morris’s article on Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater ran in the New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section on 20 August 2023; it was reported from Glover, Vermont, Bread and Puppet’s longtime home base.

[Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Lüben, Silesia, which was then part of Germany (in 1945, it was returned to Poland).  In 1945, just before the end of World War II, his family fled to Germany and they eventually settled in West Berlin in the early ’50s and Peter finished his education there. 

[He worked in sculpture, graphics, and dance in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and, moving to Munich, he founded a dance company.  He met a young Russian-born American woman who was studying in Munich, and in 1959, they were married.

[In 1961, he moved to the United States with his wife, Elka, and together they founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City on the Lower East Side in 1963.  In 1970, the Schumanns moved to a farm in Glover, Vermont, and reestablished Bread and Puppet there, where it’s been based for 53 years.  (Elka Schumann died in 2021; her obituary is posted below, following “He’s Still Kneading Art.”] 

“HE’S STILL KNEADING ART, AND SOURDOUGH RYE”
by Bob Morris 

But Peter Schumann’s is 89. What happens to Bread and Puppet Theater when he’s gone?

Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.

“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.

In July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.

Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.

In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.

“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.

Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.

Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.

Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.

“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”

The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021 [see her obituary below], on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)

But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?

“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.

“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”

Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.

Inside a barn last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.

Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.

“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.

“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”

He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.

With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.

“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”

“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.

“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”

John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.

“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.

That seems an understatement.

At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”

After that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.

Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.

“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”

In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.

Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.

“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”

He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.

“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.”

[Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and is the author of Assisted Loving (Harper, 2008) and Crispin the Terrible (Callaway Editions, 2000).  He’s written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Southampton Review, Town and Country, and other publications, and has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.  He also collaborated with actress Diahann Carroll on her award-winning memoir, Diahann Carroll in Conversation with Bob Morris (Audible Audiobook; Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2009).

[I’ve written a great deal about experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) on this blog.  Shapiro came to New York City often as a young teenager, hitchhiking from his boarding school in Massachusetts in the early 1960s.  The young theater novice encountered Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater at that time, and they became a significant influence on the nascent theater artist.]

*  *  *  *
“ELKA SCHUMANN, 85, ANTICAPITALIST MATRIARCH
OF THE BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER”
by Annabelle Williams 

[Elka Leigh Schumann, Peter’s wife of 62 years and the co-founder of Bread and Puppet, died at 85 on 1 August 2021.  Her New York Times obituary ran in section B (“Business”/”Sports”) on 12 August 2021 (updated online 3 September 2021).]

She and her husband ran a Vermont-based troupe that has taken on social and political issues in productions featuring enormous puppets.

Elka Schumann, who with her husband, Peter, ran the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, known for its countercultural messaging through avant-garde puppeteering, died on Aug. 1 in a hospital in Newport, Vt. She was 85.

The cause was a stroke, her son Max Schumann said.

As its name suggests, the Bread and Puppet Theater is dedicated to two types of art: baking and puppetry. Fresh sourdough bread, milled and baked by Mr. Schumann, was distributed to troupe members and the audience while monstrous papier-mâché puppets, propelled by actors inside them, told stories that took on social and political causes like housing inequality and antiwar and anti-draft activism.

Among the recurring characters was the troupe’s first antagonist, Uncle Fatso, whose roles included a slumlord and allegorical representations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The troupe’s productions included renditions of plays by the leftist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and shows based on the diaries of the anarchist Emma Goldman.

The critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a visit to Bread and Puppet Theater in 2007 as surreal, “an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle experience.”

The Schumanns ran their operation out of a farm in Glover, Vt., in the northeast part of the state, and toured the country in a sky-blue school bus with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun painted on it. The company made a point of putting on shows in underserved communities and involving children from there in making costumes and sometimes performing.

But the troupe was best known for its annual festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a puppet-dense two-day Woodstock-like affair with a pageant, a parade and politically bent skits about climate change, global consumerism and nuclear annihilation. For many years the event, “a countercultural spectacle,” drew crowds of nearly 40,000 and was the troupe’s main source of funding, John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, wrote in a paper.

The Resurrection Circus started in 1970 but abruptly ended in 1998 after a fight broke out on the grounds resulting in a man’s death.

Ms. Schumann was an avowed anticapitalist, and the farm in Glover, complete with livestock and a maple-sugaring operation, became her own quasi-society operating on socialist principles. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.

She also managed the Bread and Puppet Press, which distributed pamphlets, broadsheets and posters delivering political and cultural commentary. In a manifesto titled “Why Cheap Art,” which Ms. Schumann printed on posters, her husband wrote: “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you.”

It continued: “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!”

Elka Leigh Scott was born on Aug. 29, 1935, one of two girls, in Magnitogorsk, a city in Russia about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Her mother, Maria Ivanova (Dikareva) Scott, was a teacher. Her father, John Scott, was an American who worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. Her parents had supported the Russian Revolution.

When Elka was young, as German forces invaded, the family fled the country, taking a train to Japan and an ocean liner to Hawaii before continuing on to San Francisco. They lived for a time in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City and spent four years in Berlin after the war before returning to the United States in 1949, settling in Ridgefield, Conn.

Elka attended Ridgefield High School for three years before transferring to the private Putney School in Vermont, where her grandfather Scott Nearing, a prominent left-wing economist, was a lecturer. She went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in art history in 1958.

In a 2016 oral history with the Vermont Historical Society, Ms. Schumann said that her first years at Bryn Mawr were somewhat disappointing: Her classmates spent more time darning socks for their boyfriends than anything else.

In her junior year she studied abroad in Munich, where she met Peter Schumann. They married in 1959 and had five children while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they started the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963. The heated political climate of the ’60s made the couple’s work more urgent.

Some of the company’s first performances were street parades and protests supporting rent strikes and the labor movement. One protest involved Mr. Schumann parading a puppet of Jesus in Manhattan holding a sign that simply said, “Vietnam.”

The family moved to Plainfield, Vt., in 1970, and lived on a farm there, owned by Goddard College, for four years until Ms. Schumann’s father purchased the Glover farm that became Bread and Puppet’s home, complete with a museum.

In addition to her son Max, Ms. Schumann is survived by her husband; another son, Salih; three daughters, Solvieg, Tamar and Tjasa Maria Schumann; five grandchildren; and her sister, Elena Scott Whiteside.

In 2001, Tamar Schumann and the activist DeeDee Halleck made a documentary film titled “AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet.”

Ms. Schumann was buried in a pine grove on the farm.

[Anabelle Willams was an obituaries fellow at the New York Times from June 2021 to June 2022,  She’s currently publishing editor at the Wall Street Journal.]

*  *  *  *
“DRAMATURGY AND THE THEATER OF MASKS AND PUPPETS”
by John Bell 

[This essay by the dramaturg of the Bread and Puppet Theater was originally published in volume I, number 3 (Winter 1988-89) of the LMDA Review, the journal of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas).]

If defining the job of the dramaturg in our present American theater is sometimes difficult because so many people in the theater have little understanding of the need for or function of that occupation, it should be apparent that explaining the function of dramaturgy in theaters of masks and puppets is that much more difficult because those theatrical techniques are in general so little analyzed and thus so little understood.  But there is an important role for dramaturgy in theaters that use masks, puppets, and other performing objects, and I would like to attempt an explanation of that role by exploring the formal necessities of mask and puppet theater, and then specifically focusing on the dramaturgy of one example of this performance style, the Bread and Puppet Theater.

There is an implicit difference of approach between the theater of masks and puppets and the theater of actors, and that difference can be clarified by considering the possible meanings of dramaturgy.  In relation to the theater of actors and dramatic literature, dramaturgy exists as liaison between dramatic text (the primary source) and that text’s transfer to the stage.  But another aspect of dramaturgy is possible, one that includes a more general concern with the art of theatrical representation that in the theater of masks and puppets is based on the movement of those performing objects.  The first rehearsal of a production of dramatic literature is a reading of the script by actors, while the first rehearsal of a mask or puppet production is probably one of movement of particular objects by performers in a particular space.  While a dramaturgy of images and a dramaturgy of language are essential to productions of both theatrical forms, these two dramaturgies appear with opposite emphasis in each.  But an understanding of both is essential, not only in order to work with today’s theaters of objects and images, but to understand where these various stage languages had their precedents.

Text and the Theater of Objects

Although the various theaters of masks and puppets around the world, which we shall categorize (with the possibility of including other theaters) as theaters of performing objects, generally utilize language they do so in ways often essentially different from the manner in which dramatic text tends to be used today on most American stages.  While language in the theater of dramatic literature is based on the playwright’s script, language in the theater of objects by tradition often involves the following features: narration or a narrator as opposed to dialogue or actors in conversation; epic as opposed to Aristotelian form; improvisation as opposed to fidelity to a certain text; poetry in preference to prose; and oral rather than written transmission of text.

As popular theaters often falling under the quasi-scientific purview of folklore and anthropological study, traditional theaters of objects are (rightfully) seen in relation to the storytellers of community history.  That is to say, the content of traditional mask and puppet productions often has to do with the legacy, cultural history, and the origin of the community in which the theater belongs.  Consequently, individual productions of (for example) Javanese theater, Indian puppet and mask theaters or Sicilian marionette theater have to do with episodes in the mythological or idealized history of the Javanese, Indian, or Italian people, much in the same manner that Greek tragedies and comedies (mask theaters) referred to stories of Greek epic history, the Ordo prophetorum [sic] of European medieval theater certified the historical rectitude of Christianity, and Shakespeare’s history plays explained England’s past to the Elizabethans.

[The Ordo Prophetarum, or Procession of the Prophets, was a drama that was part of the 12th-century rituals celebrated during the festival of Christmas Eve.  In this liturgical representation the arrival of the Messiah is narrated by the characters carved in the temple of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, accompanied by the instruments that appear sculpted in the Portico of Glory.]

In the traditional theaters of performing objects an episode of the epic is presented, improvised upon and made to comment on present-day occurrences.  In south Indian Andhra Pradesh shadow theater, for example, a typical performance presents one episode from the Mahabharata [a major Sanskrit epic of ancient India, principally compiled in the 3rd century BCE-4th century CE, revered in Hinduism].  The audience judges the performance according to the skill the performers show in presenting variations or improvisations on the theme of the particular episode.  Comic characters having little to do with the main story are utilized to comment on current events in the community.  The basic language of the performance is the poetry of some orally received version of the Mahabharata memorized with the aid of regular verse and rhyme patterns.

We should compare this to the very different technique through which that same epic was interpreted by Peter Brook in his version of the Mahabharata [1985; Brooklyn, NY: 13 October 1987-3 January 1988] which, Brook’s innovative performance methods (often involving performing objects) aside, inevitably depends on fidelity to Jean-Claude Carriere’s script.  In both versions language is at the center of the work, but in quite different forms according to the different functions each theater performs for the communities in which the works are staged—in one case the story of a community in and for that community, in the other a work of modern art for the specific community of modern culture consumers.

Not all theaters of objects. of course, are constructed on the epic form.  Japanese Noh [a heavily formalized masked theater form] and Bunraku [puppet theater employing doll puppets] theaters depend quite clearly on the exact transmission of a written play script but the way in which they do shows another different function of text in the theater of performing objects, the separation of theatrical elements.  This separation, one of the clearest examples of what Brecht termed verfremdungseffekt, is an essential aspect of the theater of objects in which movement, sound (spoken or sung text and music) and light are all presented separately to the audience, which then performs the active receptive function of combining those elements during the performance.  Thus, in Bunraku theater, one can variously choose to watch the puppets themselves, the operators, or the chanter and samisen player who present a musicalized version of the text.

An emphasis on oral tradition as opposed to written text in some theaters of objects has three aspects relevant to our discussion of dramaturgy.  First, the fact of oral transmission in non-literate cultures obviously negates the power of written text (although certainly not at all the power of the language of the poetry itself, the memory of which is of the utmost importance), and full written texts often first appear, as was the case with Commedia dell’Arte or the French Guignol theater, as the after-the-fact remembrances of the performers or folklorist observations by writers uninvolved with the productions.  Secondly, the element of improvisations circumvents the need for a script as the performers become on-the-spot playwrights (although we do know that improvisations have their own rules and forms).  Third, as we might infer from the preceding elements, there is a corresponding necessity of a dramaturg of images at work in the theater of objects that involves the understanding of mask and puppet languages of movement (various lazzi of the Commedia theater, for example) and are traditionally handed down orally, sometimes along with the texts, from one generation of performers to the next, but which now, especially in modern western theaters, tends to be created anew with new techniques.  It is that modern and postmodern re-discovery of the theaters of masks, puppets, and performing objects, from the avant-garde of the beginning of this [the twentieth] century (Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists in particular) to the recent works of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Squat Theater, Theodora Skipitares, Lee Breuer, and the Bread and Puppet Theater that makes an understanding of the dramaturgy of performing objects necessary.

A Contemporary Dramaturgy of Performing Objects

One of these theaters that bases its work on the dramaturgy of performing objects is Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, now entering its twenty-fifth year of existence [as of 1988; it’s now in its sixtieth year].  I would like to explain how this theater uses dramaturgy of text and dramaturgy of image in its productions, and begin by looking at the process of the initial choices necessary to begin work on any particular production.  In the case of Bread and Puppet, these choices, following the initial selection of theme, involve space and performing objects in that space.  The theater space, whether it is a proscenium stage (from a hand-puppet booth to a full-size theater), a circus ring, a 25-acre outdoor space, or a street site for procession implies certain restrictions for effective theater having to do with scale and design—giant figures might not work inside a small theater, and small two-dimensional figures will not be effective in a large-scale space with a surrounding audience.  More important are questions about the make-up of the ensemble of performing objects—i.e., masks alone, masks with puppets, puppets, puppets alone and the relative size and scale of each.  In the visually-strong theater of objects, color is also of immense importance.  The introduction of red, for example, in a show with a basically black and white color scheme (e.g., Bread and Puppet’s recent Life and Death of a Fireman [1987]) has an immense effect as important to this theater as the recitation of a strong soliloquy is to a Shakespeare play.  Finally, the design of the performing objects will determine their use and range of possible movements in any particular production, a factor the same for a theater like Bread and Puppet as it was for the classic Greek drama, which fact an Italian director discovered when mounting a production of Menander’s fourth century B.C. comedy Samìa [The girl from Samos/La Donna di Samo; dir. Mario Prosperi, 1979, 1981] with masks based on recently discovered [1973] originals.  “Each mask,” the director realized, “wants to be ‘animated’ in its own way . . . [.]  The actor must conform to the authority of a code [of movement for each mask].”  (Mario Prosperi, “The Masks of Lipari,” TDR 26:4 [Winter 1982] T96, p. 35).

The function of text in Bread and Puppet Theater generally falls into one of two categories.  At times, a prewritten text will serve as a structural element in a Bread and Puppet production, oftentimes as a libretto in a music-based piece as in recent theatrical productions of Mozart’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.  On rare occasions, a script is utilized from the beginning, as was the case with a 1981 production of Büchner’s Woyzeck.  But generally texts are selected and utilized as part of the production’s process, and finalized as scripts (if ever) after the show has been constructed.  Text in these productions is often the result of a type of collective dramaturgy the likes of which was attempted in Berlin by the Piscator-Bühne in the late [nineteen-] twenties and used more successfully by the Federal Theatre’s “Living Newspaper” in New York in the late thirties.  An aspect of Bread and Puppet’s two-day-long annual Domestic Resurrection Circus is an intensive period of research by various participants in the event on the Circus’s particular (and usually political) topic: the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution (1987), the Politics of Hunger (1986), Bach and Nicaragua (1985), etc.  In other production situations—workshop/productions, for example—Bread and Puppet employs a similar approach to collective playwriting based on the participants’ experiences.  In the spring of 1987 the texts for The Passion of San José de Masatepe, created and performed at Easter time in the Nicaraguan village of the show’s title, were written as collaborative reflections of the workshop participants (members of the campesino [farmworker] cultural organization MECATE) as a contemporary biblical exegesis based on Liberation Theology.

More often than, or in combination with, specifically written text the Bread and Puppet Theater utilizes “found” text as an element of a production.  Thus for the 1987 Domestic Resurrection Circus sections of the U.S. Constitution were juxtaposed with an earlier American constitution, the Iroquois Nation’s Kaianerokova [sic; Kaianerekowa, the Iroquois Great Law of Peace; thought to date from the late 12th century (ca. 1190)].  For The Story of Ben Linder [1959-1987], a political street show on the life and death of the young American engineer killed by the contras [a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U.S. government] in Nicaragua, a combination of newspaper accounts, Congressional testimony, Linder’s letters, original dialogue and rhymed couplets, and an Appalachian folk song were all employed as textual means to tell Linder’s story as a Dance of Death.  Finally, in addition to texts spoken or sung, by narrators, in dialogue, or in choruses, Bread and Puppet employs the visual effect of written text, as signs identifying characters, or in the case of longer texts, as the physical presence of a comment on a particular scene.

This brief effort has, I hope, served to outline the general nature of dramaturgy (of image and of text) in what night be the most widespread style of live theater in the world—the theater of masks, puppets, and performing objects, and to assert that although texts (and therefore the nature of that theater’s dramaturgy) are employed differently there than in theaters of dramatic literature, dramaturgy itself (and hence someone performing a dramaturgical function) is an essential element of that theater.

[I direct readers to my two-part post “A History of Dramaturgy,” published on Rick On Theater on 31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023.

[John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts, both at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, and was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1971 to 1985, where he was, among other positions, the company’s dramaturg.  

[Bell received his doctoral degree in theater from New York City’s Columbia University and is the author of many books and articles about puppet theater, an editor of Puppetry International, a founding member of the Brooklyn-based theater collective Great Small Works, one of the creators of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts, and a member of the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band of Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

Two Theater Personages of Note: Ralph Lee (1935-2023)

 

[When I read of the death of Ralph Lee, the mask- and puppet-maker who also created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, I wanted to post something in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries.  As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post.  So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts.  I’m starting with Ralph Lee and the homage to James de Jongh will be posted on Monday, 12 June.] 

“RALPH LEE, FATHER OF PUPPETS AND A NEW YORK PARADE, IS DEAD AT 87”
by Neil Genzlinger 

[Niel Genzlinger’s obituary of Ralph Lee, designer of costumes, puppets, masks, and stage sets, and the creator of the iconic Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, ran in the New York Times on 18 May 2023.  I’m posting it on Rick On Theater with a history of the Parade from its producing organization’s own website and a review of an exhibit of Lee’s theater artistry at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. which I visited back in 1998.]

In 1974 he decided it would be fun to parade through Greenwich Village with some of his creations on Halloween. A tradition was born.

Ralph Lee, a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses as well as one enduring New York tradition, the Village Halloween Parade, died on Friday [12 May 2023] at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His wife, Casey Compton, confirmed the death. She said his health had been declining for several months.

Mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer and director, but above all he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive designers. His evocative masks and figures were seen in productions by his own Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival [now the Public Theater], New York City Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies.

His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous puppets ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others — it was the “land shark” that turned up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch and returned several times over the years. [Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws was released on 20 June 1975.]

Masks were another Lee signature; his designs could be scary, sorrowful or phantasmagorical.

“There is something mysterious about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts was given over to an exhibition of his work [see Mel Gussow’s review of this show below], “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011.]

Mr. Lee brought all his skills and interests to bear in creating the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, which he first staged in 1974 with production help from George Bartenieff and Crystal Field of Theater for the New City. A modest announcement in The Times promoted the event.

“Starting at 5 p.m., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square,” the announcement said. The parade was to be “a transient entertainment” with musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to wear costumes and join the procession. [TNC eventually moved to 1st Avenue in the East Village.]

It was not an instant success.

“There were not many people around besides us — maybe bums,” Mr. Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all holding sparklers, kind of looking at each other.”

But the next year the parade grew, and so did the audience, earning Mr. Lee an Obie Award [1975]. Soon it was a flamboyant fixture of the city’s October calendar, so big that in 1985 it had to be moved off the narrow side streets of the Village and onto the Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Lee stepped aside from running the show around that time, but it has continued across the decades.

“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he said in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to act any way they want.”

Ralph Minor Lee was born on July 9, 1935, in Middlebury, Vt. His father, William, was a dean at Middlebury College, where his mother, Mary Louise (Minor) Lee, taught dance.

He grew up in Middlebury, getting his first few years of education in a one-room schoolhouse, where he appeared in his first play. He portrayed a cat policeman, he said in a 2016 interview for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, and he particularly remembered delivering one line, catlike: “I have neeews.”

“The news was that I was going to be in the theater,” he recalled, “because I was really hooked.”

Puppetry was also an early interest.

“When I was about 12 years old I started making puppets, and I developed my own little puppet theater with all hand puppets,” he said in an oral history recorded for the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. “I used to perform for school assemblies and birthday parties, things like that.”

He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, then studied dance and theater in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship before trying his hand at theater in New York.

He had small parts in three Broadway shows, starting with “Caligula” in 1960, and later in the 1960s began working with the experimental Open Theater troupe [founded by Joseph Chaikin]. After that group disbanded in 1973, he made his way back to Vermont, taking a teaching job at Bennington College.

It was at Bennington in the spring of 1974 that he staged an innovative theatrical event called “Casserole,” which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic piece which confronts the audience with a variety of levels of reality and illusion.” Its scenes, which incorporated Mr. Lee’s puppets, were staged all around the campus, with the spectators transported from one scene to the next in hay wagons.

“I’d never done anything like that before in my life,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “And it was the first time that I had actually seen any of my puppets outdoors, and it seemed like they took on a kind of life outdoors that they just didn’t have inside.”

From there it was a short leap to the Halloween parade, and for decades Mr. Lee continued to stage theater productions outdoors as well as in. He became artistic director of the Mettawee River company shortly after it was formed by some Bennington theater graduates (including Ms. Compton) in 1975, and it staged shows in all sorts of places over the ensuing decades — Moreau Lake State Park in upstate New York, the lawn of the Putney School in Vermont, Windsor Lake Park in Massachusetts, Central Park and the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and many more.

[The Mettawee River Theatre Company, founded in 1975, is based in Salem, New York, a town in Washington County 200 miles north of New York City in eastern New York State on the border with Vermont.  Bennington College is in Bennington, Vermont, 30 miles south-southeast of Salem.]

Those works and others Mr. Lee presented often drew on traditions and mythologies from a diverse range of cultures. For years he traveled to Mexico to work with Sna Jtz’ibajom, a writers’ group that seeks to preserve Mayan culture, creating a new theater work with the group each time he visited.

[Sna Jtz’ibajom is headquartered in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas. The name means ‘the house of the writer’ in Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the region.]

“Most of our shows are based on folk material from one culture or another, and I find that very inspiring,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “You’re dealing with forces of nature and how they operate and how they clash with each other, and how things become resolved.”

In February [2023], he and Ms. Compton received a lifetime achievement Obie Award for their work with Mettawee.

Mr. Lee’s first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Ms. Compton, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

Mr. Lee’s puppets were generally carefully made works of craftsmanship that bordered on art. But the Lee creature that might have been seen by more people than any, the “S.N.L.” land shark, was, he said, thrown together from foam, cloth and rubber laminate he had lying around the house.

“People still know about that shark,” he told The Post-Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For many people, it is my claim to fame.”

“When I was making it,” he added, “I thought it would get used once and shucked.”

In his 1998 interview with The Times, he acknowledged that some of his work could be ephemeral, but he said that when he carved wooden masks for puppets, he was hoping for something more.

“The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk.  Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.] 

*  *  *  *
“HISTORY OF THE PARADE” 

[Lee founded the now-perennial—and iconic—Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in 1974.  The “modest announcement in The Times” (“GOING OUT Guide” by Howard Thompson, 31 October 1974 on page 50) to which the obituary above refers read as follows:

AWAY THEY GO Starting at 5 P.M., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square. The parade, sponsored by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, produced by the theater and designed by Ralph Lee, will be a transient entertainment with its own musical score, singers, giant puppet figures and floats, apples and candy for children, who are invited to wear costumes and join the procession along the way.

Among the participants will be Tammy Grimes, John Guare, Joel Oppenheimer and Barbara Carson, the Active Trading Company, the Margot Colbert Dancers, the Open Eye Musicians and the Renaissance Street Singers. Procession stops en route to the Washington Square dance are at Abingdon and Sheridan Squares, the Washington Square Methodist Church and the Judson Church.

[A few pages earlier, among a collection of Halloween-themed articles, nary a word was written about the soon-to-be beloved annual event.

[The following history of the parade is from the Village Halloween Parade website (http://halloween-nyc.com/about.php), posted on 27 July 2014; I updated some of the details to 2023.]

Started by Greenwich Village mask maker and puppeteer Ralph Lee in 1974, the Parade began as a walk from house to house in his neighborhood for his children and their friends. After the second year of this local promenade, Theater for the New City [then located in the West Village] stepped in and produced the event on a larger scale as part of their City in the Streets program. That year the Parade went through many more streets in Greenwich Village and attracted larger participation because of the involvement of the Theater. After the third year, the Parade formed itself into a not-for-profit organization, discontinued its association with Theater for the New City and produced the Parade on its own.

Today the Parade is the largest celebration of its kind in the world and has been picked by Festivals International as “The Best Event in the World” for October 31.

After the 8th year [1981], when the crowd had reached the size of 100,000 Celebration Artist and Producer Jeanne Fleming, a long-time participant in the Parade took over the event. She began working closely with the local Community Board, residents, merchants, schools, community centers and the Police to ensure a grass-roots, small “Village” aspect of the event, while at the same time preparing for its future growth. Now, 30 years later [2013], the Parade draws more than 60,000 costumed participants and spectators estimated at 2 million. [Another 1 million watch the Parade on local television in New York City.]

[In 1985, Lee withdrew as producer of the Parade.  “In its early years,” he told the New York Times (“Neighborhood Report: greenwich village: The Parade: Too, too? Or Too Much?” by Andrew Jacobs, 29 October 1995 in “The City” section), “the parade had a wonderful spontaneity between onlookers and marchers, and there was no firm line between the two. But the number of onlookers began to overwhelm the participants, and that's what killed it for me.”

[Jeanne Fleming, Lee’s assistant, took over and the Parade continued.  In 2016, however, the puppeteer asserted in the New York Post (“He's TRICKEd OFF Father of Village Halloween Parade disowns creation” by Raquel Laneri, 30 October 2016): “What had started out as a community event had become a city event. The spectators were standing six or seven deep — it just seemed like they had become total onlookers.”]

Originally drawing only a postage stamp sized article in the New York Times [see above], now the Parade is covered by all media—local, national and worldwide. [WPIX television (channel 11) in New York City has broadcast the Parade live.]

The Parade has won an Obie Award [1975] and been recognized by the Municipal Arts Society [1985] and [inducted into the] City Lore [People’s Hall of Fame in 1993] for making a major contribution to the life and culture of New York City. In 1993 the Parade was awarded a major NEA Grant for Lifetime Achievement and in 1993 and 1997—it’s 20th and 25th Anniversary Years— it was awarded Tourism Grants from both the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in recognition of its economic and cultural contribution to New York City. Additionally, the Parade has been the subject of many books, scholarly dissertations, independent films and documentaries due to its position as an authentic “cultural event.”

In 1994 The Mayor of the City of New York [Rudolf Giuliani] issued a Proclamation honoring the Village Halloween Parade for 20 years of bringing everyone in the City together in a joyful and creative way and being a boon to the economic life of the City. The Proclamation concludes: “New York is the world’s capital of creativity and entertainment. The Village Halloween Parade presents the single greatest opportunity for all New Yorkers to exhibit their creativity in an event that is one-of-a-kind, unique and memorable every year. New Yorkers of all ages love Halloween, and this delightful event enables them to enjoy it every year and join in with their own special contributions. The Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village is a true cultural treasure.” In that same statement, the Mayor declared the week of October 24-31 to “HALLOWEEK in NYC in perpetuity.”

Perhaps our greatest honor came only 7 weeks after the tragic events of 9/11, when Mayor Rudolf Giuliani insisted that the Parade take place stating that it would be a healing event for New York. With the eyes of the world looking at us, we created a giant Phoenix puppet rising out of the ashes.

Hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide watched as the Parade provided tangible evidence that NYC was enduring, safe, surviving, and spirited in the face of great tragedy and hardship.

In 2005 we paid tribute to New Orleans and invited all Katrina evacuees to join us in a Funeral Procession Tribute to the stricken city. Over 8,000 evacuees showed up for the Parade and Benefit. [On 29 August 2005, Katrina’s storm surge breached various flood protection structures in and around the greater New Orleans area, inundating 80% of the city.]

In 2010 the Parade commissioned Haitian Karnaval Artist Didier Civil to make traditional Haitian Carnival figures in a themed element entitled “Memento Mori!” [Latin for ‘remember you must die’] in support of his efforts to rebuild the Art School in Jacmel, Haiti’s center for Carnival. Again, thousands of Haitians participated in the Parade to mourn and remember all those lost in the [12 January 2010] earthquake.

In 2012 Super Storm Sandy [which hit New York City on 29 October] forced an unprecedented cancellation of the Parade, prompting us to call for public support to save the Parade after it suffered serious financial losses.

[Less than four hours after eight people were killed six blocks west of the parade route in the 2017 New York City truck attack, the parade proceeded as scheduled. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo marched in the parade.

[(On 31 October at 3:05 p.m., Sayfullo Saipov swerved a rented pick-up truck into the Hudson River Greenway, a protected bike lane, at Houston Street. He killed eight and injured seven others. Saipov was sentenced on 17 May 2023 to eight consecutive life terms without parole and two concurrent life terms plus 260 years and is currently incarcerated)

[In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parade was canceled for the second time. The parade organizers cited concerns that social distancing would be impossible with the high crowds that the parade typically saw.]

[Unlike most parades in New York City, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is unique.  It’s semi-organized, unlike, say, the famous Easter Parade, which is really just an open promenade along the stretch of 5th Avenue that runs in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Participants flaunt their spring finery, especially the vaunted Easter bonnets, which are often elaborate and fanciful.

[Second, unlike, say, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, anyone may join the march up 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village—as long as she or he wears a costume.  There are a few other rules (no alcohol, for instance, and marchers must follow the Parade’s designated route), but it’s free (both to march and to watch) and there are no other qualifications.

[Third, it’s a nighttime procession—the nation’s only night parade.  After all, it is Halloween!  What self-respecting goblin comes out in the daytime?

[The costumes can be simple and are often homemade, but they can also get quite elaborate—remember, Lee was also a costume and mask designer, so his confreres are drawn to the Parade.  So are the LGBTQ+ community, whose garb can be quite outrageous—and entertaining.  There’s also often a little (or even a lot) of politics on view—mostly of the lampooning variety.

[The usual Parade path goes up 6th Avenue—the place of congregation before the march used to be Washington Square, but the Parade has grown too big to be accommodated in the short distance from the park to the mid-teens, so it’s been extended down to Canal Street—and then turns east onto my street as the procession breaks up, and participants walk back down to the Village via 5th Avenue.  They pass right under my apartment windows as they make the turn from eastward bound to southward.  Of course, the raucous noise accompanies the marchers in their get-ups.] 

*  *  *  *
“FLEETING BEASTS COLLECTED IN A FANTASY HEAVEN”
by Mel Gussow 

[From 4 February to 2 May 1998, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center was the site of Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs, an exhibit of Lee’s multifarious design work.  Mel Gussow’s review of the show ran in the New York Times of 13 March 1998.]

“Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs,” an exhibition that includes whimsical and scary images from theatrical productions created by Mr. Lee.

Fiery dragons and horny-toed demons, a mountainous boulder that turns into a giant, lords of death and destruction and a gigantic spider that for many Halloweens danced merrily on the facade of the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village as the arachnidan version of King Kong – these and other fantastical creatures fill the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. This phantasmagoric cavalcade, which runs through May 2, is the invention of Ralph Lee, for more than 35 years a master mask maker in the American theater.

Tomorrow at 12:30 P.M., Mr. Lee will lead a tour of the exhibition, one of a series of tours free and open to the public.

In his creations for theater and dance companies, pageants and parades, Mr. Lee also acts as puppeteer, designer and director, dramatizing folk tales and legends from diverse native cultures. In the past, his work has often been seen fleetingly in shows that offer a limited number of performances at places that range from La Mama (masks in the 1986 revival of “The Emperor and the Architect” by Fernando Arrabal) to the New York City Opera (a dancing rooster for the 1977 production of “Ashmedai”).

Collected under one roof, the mystical and metaphorical beasts seem to raise that roof, ready to fly into some outer space of Mr. Lee’s vivid imagination. Those who visit the Lincoln Center show may feel as if they have entered a world of dreams and nightmares. Standing in the middle of the exhibition, with his sculptured white hair and beard, the 62-year-old mask maker could himself have posed for a portrait of a mythological figure, somewhere between Pan and Neptune.

Although he has created towering totemic creatures like those that march for social progress for the Bread and Puppet Theater, his work is not overtly political. With its emphasis on the folkloric, it is closer to the puppetry of Julie Taymor. In common with Ms. Taymor, Mr. Lee draws inspiration from Indonesian, Japanese and Latin American sources. Most of his work begins with his Mettawee River Company, a traveling troupe whose home base is in Salem in upstate New York. His latest play, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” based on an Iroquois story, will be performed in May at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and in September in the garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Because his work is often supplementary to dance or drama, it can easily be undervalued. In Mr. Lee’s hands, masks become embodiments of character, emotion and motion. “There is something mysterious about masks,” he said, “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” referenced above.]

In demonstration, he stopped at an exhibit of his production of “The Tempest,” which Mettawee presented on tour in 1996, and put Caliban’s mask over his head, swimming his arms and transforming himself into a scaly amphibian emerging from the sea. Then he switched to the face of Stefano and, lolling his head, became a drunken sailor. His production used a cast of seven actors, doubling and tripling in roles, rushing on and off stage to change masks and characters.

Across the room are characters from “The North Wind,” a Yupik Eskimo story in which a Lee puppet played the title role, manipulated in performance by three puppeteers, two of whom billowed the wind’s sky-sweeping train. High over the exhibition is a 30-foot snake, inspired by an 18th-century cartoon depicting the American Colonies as a snake divided into 13 pieces with the slogan “Join or Die.”

As he moved among the displays, Mr. Lee talked about the mystique of mask-making: “When you’re wearing a mask, you have to find the way that mask would move -- the rhythm, the shape and the dynamic behind the movement.” Just as myths inspire him to expand the world of living creatures, “masks allow the performer to explore realms that he couldn’t reach by using his own face.” At the same time, he acknowledges that especially expressive actors like the late Zero Mostel can, in effect, turn their own faces into the equivalent of masks.

Necessarily, some performers are more adept than others at performing behind masks. When Mr. Lee was doing “Popol Vuh,” a Maya creation story, for his Mettawee company, he held auditions in which actors were asked to improvise with a toadlike mask, a “totally gruesome and despicable character.” One man put the mask on and the effect was “incredible – marriage at first mask.” Actors can feel possessed by masks or they can feel robbed of their own personality.

The boundary between masks and puppets is narrow. Generally masks “are inhabited by the performers and puppets are not,” but many of Mr. Lee’s most fanciful puppets are manipulated by shadowy puppeteers in the style of Bunraku or become costumes to be worn by actors. Similarly, masks are related to makeup, especially so with Chinese opera. For Mr. Lee, makeup means “painting a mask on your face.”

Several years ago when Mr. Lee had a smaller exhibition in a gallery at the City University of New York, he was stopped by an admiring student who said, “You have voodoo in you.” He took that statement as an affirmation of the magic in his art.

Ever since his childhood in Middlebury, Vt., Mr. Lee has been involved in theater. On exhibit at Lincoln Center is his first puppet stage, built when he was 14. After majoring in theater at Amherst College, he briefly studied dance and mime while continuing his interest in puppetry. In 1960, he shifted to masks, designing them for productions at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., and the New York Shakespeare Festival. He also worked as an actor and designer with the Open Theater and other experimental companies.

In 1974, in collaboration with Theater for [the] New City, he created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, a friendly neighborhood pageant that filled narrow downtown streets and brownstone balconies with a vast theatrical panoply. A dozen years later, he stopped working on the parade as it became more of a citywide tourist attraction than a community celebration. Still, he is known more for the Halloween parade than for any individual production. Many of his colorful figures have been recycled into other roles and have become members of Mr. Lee’s extended family. They return to life at the Lincoln Center exhibition.

His most intensely creative artistic relationship was with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. With his “wonderfully bare-bones approach” to choreography and design, Hawkins was, he said, a primary influence on his work and a constant spur to Mr. Lee to challenge himself. At the Hawkins display, he put on a raccoon mask from the dance “Plains Daybreak,” a facial fringe with a halo of feathers. With a quick shift of his body, he mimed the movement of a dancing raccoon. During the exhibition, Hawkins dances (with masks by Mr. Lee) are shown on video monitors.

Under the supervision of Barbara Stratyner as curator, this is a comprehensive retrospective. But it can offer only a sampling of the mask maker's work, much of which still inhabits his Westbeth studio and home as well as his farmhouse in Salem. In their home, he and his wife (Casey Compton, who is also his collaborator) are surrounded by a menagerie of realized figments of Mr. Lee's imagination. ''They start to take over,'' he said.

[Westbeth is a subsidized development of living and studio space for artists at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets in Greenwich Village.  It was also TNC’s first home, so the theater and Lee were neighbors.  (TNC moved to another nearby venue in the West Village by the time the Halloween Parade started.  Later it moved to the East Village, working in several different spaces before settling into the 1st Avenue location it currently occupies.)]

Hanging on a wall is a lobster the size of an octopus, jettisoned from a production of Sam Shepard's ''Cowboy Mouth,'' and perched atop a bookcase is a squat, bulbous puppet of Hadrian VII. Hidden in crannies and corners are other small and large lurking creatures. Mr. Lee's studio has enough bamboo to feed a giant panda. Bamboo, papier-mâché, clay and wood are his raw materials, along with objects he finds on the street, in hardware stores and in fields and forests.

Most of all, he likes to work with wood. Carving masks and puppets, he acts as a sculptor. Although he knows that by nature his work is ephemeral, he aims for solidity and durability. ''The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,'' he said. ''I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.'' As the Lincoln Center exhibition proves, Mr. Lee's chimerical visions can have a longer life than the theater and dance pieces in which they first appeared.

[Mel Gussow (1933-2005) was a theater and movie reviewer, and author who wrote for the New York Times for 35 years.  He joined the Times in 1969 and over his 3½-decade career wrote more than 4,000 reviews and articles.  In 2008, Gussow was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame (see my post on Rick On Theater on 10 February 2020).

[Long associated with Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, the traditional home of experimental writers, Gussow championed the writing of many of the major playwrights of the theater of the post-World War II period, and was among the first to take the young, emerging playwrights seriously. 

[A native of New York City, Gussow grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Middlebury College (where Ralph Lee’s father was dean and the future mask- and puppet-maker grew up), and in 1955, he earned a bachelor’s degree in American literature and a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.]

Noh Theater of Japan

 

[I’ve posted a number of pieces about Kabuki, the dynamic traditional theater form of Japan, on Rick On Theater.  (See, for example, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” [1 November 2010]; “Grand Kabuki (July 1985)” [6 November 2010]; “Two Kabuki Reviews (2014)” [20 January 2018]; “‘Kabuki: Inside the Japanese Artform with its Biggest Star, Ebizo’” by Jon Wertheim [1 May 2020]; “‘The Ancient Art of Kabuki Made New, With Computer Animation’” by Micheline Maynard in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021].)   

[I’ve even posted one article on the ancient performance form Gigaku (26 July 2011); but I haven’t run anything on Noh (14th century), which is older than Kabuki (17th century) and younger than Gigaku (7th century).

[On a recent Sunday, the New York Times published an interesting piece on a new movement in Japan concerning the making of Noh masks in the paper’s T Magazine, its periodic style publication.  The report, Hannah Kirshner’s “A New Face,” is short, and it doesn’t say anything about the theater form itself, so I decided an introduction to Noh was in order.

[The name Noh (sometimes written ‘Nō’) is probably familiar with most readers, but I suspect most Westerners are unfamiliar with the theater form itself.  So, before I present Kirshner’s report on the modern-day take on Noh masks, here’s a brief history and description of this classic drama.]

Noh is a Japanese classic theater form involving music, dance, and drama, originating in the 14th century.  It was developed together with Kyogen, which are comical pieces performed during interludes of the main Noh performance.  The dual art of Noh and Kyogen is known as Nohgaku, and has been designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Noh, as we know it today, was popularized and formalized by a dramatist named Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1444) during the Muromachi Period (1333-1573).  Of the known 240 Noh plays in the current repertoire, Zeami wrote 100, and he codified the acting and production techniques in use today (1400-33; On the Art of the No Drama [Princeton University Press, 1984]).

It was Zeami's work that attracted the government's patronage of the art form.  Zeami later fell out of favor with the government and was banished to Sado Island.  Four main Noh troupes were subsequently established, receiving sponsorship from shrines and temples.

During the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867), the shogunate, the administration of the supreme military commander (shogun) of feudal Japan, made Noh its official ceremonial art and issued regulations for its governance.  Noh thus became increasingly standardized, with an emphasis on tradition rather than innovation.  A fifth troupe was added during this time, making five main Noh troupes which survive and perform till this day.

Noh theater is structured around song and dance.  The movement is slow and stately, the language is poetic (and spoken in a highly stylized form of 14th-century lyric Japanese that few modern spectators can understand), and it’s sung in a monotone.  

The name ‘Noh’ means ‘skill,’ ‘talent,’ or ‘to accomplish something.’  Zeami used the term ‘elegant imitation.’  When executed with excellence, the result is the experience of yugen, or ‘supreme beauty.’  This is the ultimate goal of the Noh performer. 

The rich, elaborate, and heavy costumes consist of multiple layers and textures that create an effect of resplendent elegance but also a bulky, massive figure.  Expressiveness is enhanced by props, most notably a folding fan.  Closed, partly closed, or open, the fan may represent any object as suggested by its shape and handling, for example a dagger or a lantern.

Plots are usually drawn from legend, history, literature (primarily Japanese or Chinese classical poetry and Zen Buddhist verses), and contemporary events of the era.  Themes often relate to dreams, supernatural worlds, ghosts, and spirits.

Noh plots are essentially dance-dramas, not concerned with dramatic action.  The plays seek to explore the essence of a situation or emotion in lyrical form.  All Noh plays reach fulfillment in dance.

Noh is performed on a square stage with a roof which is supported at its four corners by pillars.  The stage, made of planks, is hollow and resounds like a drum which the actors can use for sound effects.  All sides of the stage are open except for the back which consists of a wall with a painted image of a pine tree; in addition to no walls, there’s also no curtain to separate the audience from the performance space.  (All Noh stages are virtually identical.  Even the dimensions are standardized.) 

A bridgeway (hashigakari) runs at an oblique angle off the rear left corner (i.e., “up right” in western theater jargon) of the stage (to a small structure that serves as the “wings” of a western theater) for performers to enter and exit.  Noh used to be typically staged outdoors, but modern indoor theaters have also now become a common venue.

All performers in Noh are traditionally male (though that tradition is being successfully challenged more and more).  The roles are traditional and codified:

•   shite – the leading player.  Depending on the play, the shite (pronounced shi-TAY) may act as a holy old man, a deity, a demon, a spirit, or a living man or woman.  His movements express various moods.  (The shite is the only performer who wears a mask.)

•   waki – the supporting actor.  The waki plays roles such as a priest, monk, or samurai.  In contrast to the shite, the waki always portrays living people.

•   jiutai – the chorus.  The chorus of eight to ten people, including the chorus leader, sits stage left (i.e., the right of the stage from the perspective of the spectator) and assists the shite in the narration of the story.  (Unlike the chorus of a Greek classic play, the jiutai doesn’t enter the action on stage.)

•   hayashi – the orchestra.  Four musicians provide accompaniment for the performance with a flute (fue), shoulder drum (kotsuzumi), hip drum (otsuzumi) and stick drum (taiko).  They sit upstage, at the rear of the platform.

•   koken – stage attendants.  Dressed in black (to indicate they are unseen), the stage attendants are not part of the play but assist the performers in various ways, such as handing them props or adjusting their costumes.

The cast of a Noh play is a minimum of two (the shite and the waki), which is the usual, to up to six, plus the chorus and musicians. 

The roles each actor may play are rigidly conventional, unlike in western theater.  A waki one night can’t play a shite’s part the next, and a shite wouldn’t play a waki’s role in another production.  Training starts at around age three and it takes decades for a Noh actor to move up the ranks.

A Noh play generally runs around 60-90 minutes, some divided into two acts, and a Kyogen play lasts for around 15-30 minutes.  Traditionally, a Noh program includes three to five plays, one from each of several different categories of styles.  

Each play is separated from the next by a Kyogen, usually a comic version or parody of the main Noh play, making a total performance of between 3:45 and 10:00 hours (though probably more like 4-5 hours; spectators would come and go and bring food and drink).  Modern Noh performances, with fewer plays, are considerably shorter.

The lines of the play preceding the climactic dance establish the circumstances which motivate it.  The jiutai sings the narration of the shite’s dance-story; the hayashi furnishes a musical setting and establishes the timing of the shite’s gestures.  The dancer’s every movement of his hands and feet follows set rules.

Each gesture, each pose, each movement, each vocal inflection, each musical sequence has a specific meaning.  (These codified performance techniques, passed on from generation to generation, are called kata.)  The actors and musicians must learn these and execute them precisely, and devoted Noh fans understand them as if they were speech.

One key element of Noh are the masks which the shite wears.  They tell the audience what kind of character is being portrayed.  Some masks are general characters who may appear in many plays, while others are specific and are used in only one or two plays.  Frequently used masks represent demons and spirits, as well as women and men of various ages.  

The masks, which cover only the actor’s face, are carved from blocks of Japanese cypress.  Their three-dimensional properties allow skilled actors to evince a variety of expressions with changes in head orientation.  Some Noh masks, for example, are so carefully designed that the face smiles cheerfully when the actor looks up and takes on a dark, melancholy expression when the actor looks down. 

The masks are as codified as the actor’s kata.  The traditional mask-maker (unlike the ones in the article that follows), who’s an artist as well as a craftsman, can make only the subtlest modifications to the face, but master mask-makers have more leeway to do so than an apprentice.  Like the actors and the musicians, mask-makers have their traditions that are passed on to the next generations.

                     

— Pat Byrnes, New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001 

 “A NEW FACE”
by Hannah Kirshner

[Below is Kirshner’s New York Times report on the recent development in Noh mask-making (T Magazine 26 March 2023).  It’s also available online as “MAKING IT: The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks” (The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).  There are several nice photo illustrations by Bon Duke, which I didn’t reproduce for ROT.]

Both honoring and departing from the tradition of Japanese Noh masks making, women are expanding its possibilities.

One of the world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.

But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.

Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue -- with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow -- was a craft largely handed down from father to son.

That’s changed somewhat in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.

For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.

In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.

For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”

While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story -- which appears in both folk tales and Noh -- of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.

[Ubasute (‘abandoning an old woman’) is a mythical practice whereby an infirm or elderly relative is carried to some remote, desolate place, and left there to die.  It appears to be the subject of legend and doesn’t seem ever to have been a common custom.]

Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”

[A little more than a dozen years ago, I published a post on Rick On Theater on “The Magic of Masks” (17 September 2011; Rick On Theater: The Magic of Masks).  I looked at masking in a number of different circumstances, including various performance forms—Noh theater among them—and from several different perspectives.

[The interested ROTter might want to have a look at this post (which also touches on puppetry, an allied art form, in passing).  If anyone wants further information on masks and masking, the afterword of “The Magic of Masks” is a list of the people whom I referenced in the post and some of the sources I consulted. 

[(A few words of caution: the mask post, and therefore the list, is 12 years old.  Some of the life-dates included in the list of names are out of date and the person named has since died.  Some of the sources, too, are old and may no longer be readily available.)

[Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist.  Her reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Food & Wine, among others, and on the Proof podcast from America’s Test Kitchen.  She’s the author and illustrator of Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021).  

[Kirshner’s the winner of an International Gourmand “Best In The World” award for writing on Japan.  She grew up on a small farm outside Seattle, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Ishikawa, Japan.]