ETC Article: November

Wonderful Weirdness & OZ

When I was growing up, we had one regular option for movies beamed directly into the house, and it was called UHF.  (Those of you under the age of 25 might want to Google it.) Sure: VHF had actual reception quality and lots more interesting toy commercials, but only UHF had channel 50, which showed a movie just about every night and several on the weekends.  I love movies, so I endured the constant static and frankly terrible films, but when the holidays rolled around (and for me, “the holidays” start with Halloween)  I didn’t have to.  Holiday-themed films would enter heavy rotation on the VHF stations, and two Hollywood ones would air over and over again: It’s a Wonderful Life, of course, but also The Wizard of Oz.

It’s weird: We’ve had some head-spinning progress with the development of The Puppeteers in the past month.  As quickly as we lost an actor from the show, we gained one of Scranton’s favorites: Heather Stuart.  After some lost time from that kerfuffle, Heather, Conor, Elizabeth and I managed to rush to the theatre in a weekend and determine a tremendous amount about characters and the play’s direction, so that we are now creating the story itself.  The actors even brought along their own puppet creations, thereby effectively doubling our cast.  The designers are working right alongside, adapting brilliantly to what we come up with in the room, and there are some exciting possibilities percolating toward promoting the shows in an interactive way.  You can as always follow this behind-the-scenes business (and join in the conversation) at The Puppeteers’ development ‘blog.

One defining moment in our development that weekend at the theatre was in discovering connections between the story that is sprouting up around our characters like a field of poppies, and the vast world of Oz created by L. Frank Baum.  There’s the superficial similarities of course - the old-fashioned puppet-show aesthetic reminds us of Professor Marvel’s wagon and Oz’s colorful cast of characters - but there’s also a deep thematic resonance.  Our story is about strangers with problems finding one another and exploring a weird new world together.  We’re going to be taking our audiences along with us into an uncharted territory of transformation, laughter...and maybe a little fear?

It can be easy for me to forget how I felt about the antagonist - that weird wicked witch - in that old movie when I was young.  Now she seems little more than a caricature comprised of some long-forgotten Salem misconceptions.  However.  When I really cast my mind back, I can remember part of what I looked forward to all year was the utter thrill of that witchy theme music, and what it might portend.  The giddy border between terror and excitement is a place we love to to explore when we’re young.  We give it names as adults.  Nerves.  Anticipation.  Stage fright.  It’s all the thrill of the unknowable.

The unknowable is what we embrace and return to over and over at this stage of things.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has some much-quoted (and often truncated, not to mention translated from German) advice on that: "...[H]ave patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

The days of our next meetings in Scranton are December 11th and 12th, and 18th and 19th, and by the end of that we aim to have a sequence of plot to follow.  In a little under a month we’ll begin rehearsals in earnest, and in a little over a month we’ll have our last piece of the puzzle - you, the audience.  It’s going to be improvisation, so the thrill of the unknown will still be there for all of us, but by January we’ll all be having our own journey to Oz in technicolored VHF clarity.  We can’t see the details yet, but what’s coming through is weird in the most wonderful ways.