ETC Article: March

And We All Float On...
Tucked into a closet deep in the inner workings of the Electric Theatre Company there are a few things of mine: a pay-as-you-go cellular phone, an old Charlie Chaplin marionette and a new-but-somewhat-used rod puppet named Rudy Lippers (né Kalinowski).  These are of course some of the trappings of The Puppeteers, which performed its last show on February 6.  The fate of the rest of our cast of some thirty puppets, prefabricated and made specifically for this show alike, I don’t know.
          Well, a good many of them went home with Conor, as he provided them and owns them.  With him too, and with Heather and Elizabeth as well, went their respective “doppelgänger” hand puppets - closing gifts from yours truly.  But that leaves quite a few more.  Some, I suppose, may have been scooped up by their makers, or by the amazing Chris Estevez or his brother, who spent hours beautifully and creatively applying color to our creations.  No one could take them all though, and many of them were made of otherwise disposable materials.  So, while some I’m sure got boxed up and shelved somewhere (this is a not-for-profit theatre, after all) many might have had existences as fleeting as a work of theatre.
          That is to say, now many of the puppets probably exist only in our memories.
          Nowadays, there’s a temptation to describe theatre as a uniquely temporal entertainment.  We’re so focused on recorded media that it presents a context for something as fleeting as a theatre production to seem oddly archaic, when in fact the theatre is the more common experience.  Sure, there’s all this stored and saved information - more and more every day.  But life itself is temporal.  The very experience of our day-to-day is a series of moments that can never be relived, no matter how repetitive or familiar they may seem.  It’s commonly held that this is part of what gives life its value, the fact that it ends.  In a way I find very similar, a show exists in the moment and, eventually, only in memory.
          So, some memories, incredibly partial and in no particular order:

• Almost as soon as we discovered that golf-club covers could be made into wonderfully simple puppets, we fell in love with them and the Veedoots (as they came to be called) seemed to take on a life of their own.  And to think: When we went shopping at the craft store for general supplies, I almost ruled out the little white cardboard circles that became their eyes for being too generic.
• In Prohibitive Standards, I broke Heather’s toe with a chair.  In The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet, she tore something in her calf.  In The Puppeteers she re-injured that calf, and in every case she continued on with the show, incorporating her injury.  (Heather may have to be the director next time, for her own safety.)
• Come to that, we had illnesses and injuries galore during this process, from actors to company managers.  Only Conor escaped unscathed, which seems about right somehow.  We came to refer to ourselves as the Spider-Man of Scranton, in reference to the Broadway show now racking up injury liability left and right.
• When rehearsal got too overwhelming or we needed time to refocus, we set to work on coming up with puppets.  For a couple of weeks there, the theatre space was an amazing pastiche of trash, and we kept being nervous someone had left the glue gun on.  It was a lovely mess.
• Before proper rehearsal, when everything was still unformed, we had these amazing improvisations that might even as time goes on become confused in my mind with the show itself.  We might have made three whole shows in our process, if only someone could have had the organizational super-power to gather our scraps.
• The first night we all went out for a nightcap as a company, to Jack’s, midway through rehearsal.  The warm light, relaxation and an icy snow outside.
• “We have another interview today.  We have another interview today?!”  I think there was a week or so there where I was continually surprised by strangers in our rehearsal space.  The frenzy of production and the torpor of bedtime, and all that permissible obsession.
• How worried we grew about technical support as time marched on, and how Jim Langan and Drake Gomez swooped in and performed miracles on the space akin to the ones Chris and his brother performed on our puppets.
• The many moments in rehearsal when, as we innocently explored the characters’ personal conflicts in this whimsical comedy, I was surprised to find myself deeply moved by the actors’ portrayals.  Leonoria’s never-ending battle with her crippling fear, Tina’s amazing discovery of deep wells of emotion and, of course, Bob’s heart-breaking crisis of confidence.
• Those first audience laughs.

There’s no shortage of memories with this production and, ultimately, that’s the best I can hope for.
          That sentence proves my assertion from the first of these articles - that I’m an excellent liar.  The fact is, I can hope for more.  I can hope that our show created some memories for those who participated in it with us, behind the scenes and from the audience.  Undoubtedly some of the people who joined in the action of act two will likely remember their roles as either Dorothy, the uniform Ozian or the Wicked Witch of the West.  More than that, however, I hope for a few of the children from our audiences to grow up remembering fondly our unworthy scaffold and its little story.
          One of the messages of The Wizard of Oz is that we each carry a little bit of our home with us, no matter where we find ourselves.  I like that idea.  It’s important that a memory of home lives on in us because, as they say, no matter where you go, there you are.  I look forward to my next visit to Scranton (which I often refer to as my artistic home away from home) to collect my little talismans.  There will be no stories to write, or windows to dress, or crocodiles to construct, but many friends to see. And though things will be different, they will also be new, and that’s a good way for life to be.
          One last thought. (I promise, because if I go on much longer we’ll have gotten WAY too introspective.) There’s another idiom about home that strangely in all my thinking about the themes of the show I never came up with. That is: You can never go home again. I think that one’s true as well, and it terrifies me, and that’s life - nothing stays the same. The trick is in learning to go with the prevailing winds when you can. Like a good balloonist. Don't worry, we'll all float on. Even if things get heavy, we'll all float on, all right...