In lower Manhattan, in the unassuming former kitchen of the Lower Eastside Girls’ Club, a trio of cut-ups are making theater magic.
Even more improbable than running away to join the circus, six years ago Emily DeCola, Michael Schupbach and Eric Wright formed a collective — The Puppet Kitchen — to design, build and operate puppets for plays, operas, cruise ship shows and Internet commercials.
If you saw the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s The King and I last season, you have seen the Kitchen’s handiwork. They created the stage-wide Thai shadow puppets for the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” sequence that had audiences and critics raving. And this month, the Kitchen returns to the Maltz with a more major collaboration on The Wiz, to be staged by producing artistic director Andrew Kato.
This past spring, I subwayed down to East Fourth Street to meet a couple of the Puppet Kitchen principals to learn what they have cooking for The Wiz. Work on the show, which begins performances Tuesday, was still in the brainstorm stage, but DeCola and Wright sat and talked about the process and the state of theatrical puppetry.
Kato had observed them closely as they worked on The King and I and hired the team to design the numerous puppets for The Wiz before The King and I opened.
“He had a great menu of ideas he was interested in pursuing,” recalls Wright. “His ideas ranged from ‘I want to have something magical happen here’ to ‘I think this should be this style puppet’ or ‘I want the puppets to be around the actor’s body in this way.’”
Kato grew up around puppets; his mother was a professional puppeteer. “One of the real pleasures of working with Andrew is that he has both theatrical literacy and puppet literacy,” says DeCola. “That’s absolutely not always the case. Sometimes we sit down with a producer to design and direct a show and our ideas are met with blank faces.
“But because Andrew has had some puppetry experience, and he’s seen a lot of shows, his ideas are interestingly multidisciplinary. And he speaks a wonderful puppet language of shifts in scale and space.”
Asked what he thinks the scope of their work on The Wiz will be, Wright says, “Well, it’s going to be a wide range of styles, that’s for sure. It’s going to fall into that American style of puppetry where some puppets look really like puppets and some are going to be closer to performed objects. Either part of the scenery or big abstract shapes that work to convey a feeling, and then everything in between. Puppetry will permeate the whole show, everything from the tornado to the flying monkeys.”
Asked why The Wiz is a good candidate for puppetry, Wright responds, “I think it’s the reliance on magic in storytelling. It’s a show that’s about a sense of wonder, following Dorothy into this brand-new world of wonder where magical things happen. And it has characters that do things that only puppets can do.
“It’s also essentially a story about living in a world where anything is possible,” chimes in DeCola. “Shows that need puppets or that suit puppets are ones that ask the audience to engage in a more accountable way with the performance and really invest themselves in it, whether that’s as goofy as ‘Avenue Q’ or as beautiful and elegant as the work in ‘War Horse.’”
Fortunately for the three Kitchen crew members, we seem to be in a boom for theatrical puppetry. “There’s a ‘War Horse’ boom, but behind that was ‘The Lion King’ tide and an ‘Avenue Q’ tide,” says DeCola. “I think we’re in the middle of a real rolling push for puppets.”
Those three shows are largely responsible for the acceptance of puppetry for adults in the commercial theater. “I think the idea that puppets are only for kids is a bit of a stereotype,” carps Wright. “The theater is magical anyway, and using puppets in a production can make things more magical. We know it’s not real, but we totally buy into it.
“All in all, this is a great time to be doing what we do.”
The Wiz opens Tuesday at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre and runs through Feb. 1. The cast includes Brenda Braxton, Kingsley Leggs, Tyrick Wiltez Jones and Destinee Rae. Tickets start at $54. Call 561-575-2223 or visit www.jupitertheatre.org.