The Marionette Theatre of Meyer Levin

The Marionette Theatre of Meyer Levin Alisa Solomon American theatre was thriving in 1926 both commercially and in lively experimentation . Two hundred and sixty-four shows premiered that year, including long-running musicals such as Mae West's Sex in which she appeared , an endless variety of revues, and over 120 new serious dramas, O'Neill's The Great God Brown and O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock among them. From the frivolity of follies to the unmitigated experimentation of O'Neill, theatre in New York was vibrant and various. This vitality did not, however, spill over or find analogues in other cities of America as it does now. So, it was a great anomaly that Meyer Levin was experimenting with new European plays on a marionette stage in a basement on the north side of Chicago. Meyer Levin founded the Marionette Studio in the Relic House of Chicago in 1926. In one of the only buildings left standing after the Chicago fire, he developed his progressive concepts of the marionette theatre, which he tested in production. With his collaborators, the artist Louis Bunin, and the director, Elleanor Lee, Levin brought contemporary experimental plays to Chicago and to the marionette stage for the first time. The guiding principle of Levin's Marionette Studio was his concept of "ideal type casting," the notion that carefully designed puppets could ideally express , visually, the tone and themes of plays, in some cases better than actors . Levin contended that marionettes uniquely afforded the artist the opportunity to maintain unified artistic control over his interpretation of a 103 dramatic work. Unlike the actor whose personality could obtrude, the marionette was designed to harmonize exactly with a play's style. "The very materials out of which marionettes are made, the sculptural style in which their heads are modelled," Levin wrote in a 1931 New York Times Magazine article, "must be expressive of the world of their play." No less influenced by his teacher, the modernist painter Leger, than by Gordon Craig, Levin also argued that the marionette was the most expressive medium for the mechanical plays of a mechanical age. Unlike the practice in commercial puppetry that existed at the time Levin developed his marionette theatre, and that persists today, Levin and Bunin made no attempt to make their puppets look human. Instead, they devised puppets that visually conveyed the tone and thought of the period's experimental plays. The marionette theatre, Levin wrote, served as "a laboratory of theatrical art and as a means of performance for the fanciful, the extravagant, the poetic, and non-realistic play." One of the best examples of Levin's application of these principles was his Chicago Marionette Studio production in 1926 of Georg Kaiser's expressionist play From Morn to Midnight. This play had been produced by the Theatre Guild in New York only four years earlier. The puppets for this Marionette Studio premiere were 8-10 inches tall, designed by Levin, and constructed by Bunin. Actors such as Will Geer and Art Smith from the Goodman Playhouse read the parts while Levin, Bunin, and Lee manipulated the puppets. The characters and settings changed gradually as the play progressed to reflect the dissolution of the protagonist's logic and perception. As this bank clerk despaired more and more over his inability to find an honest person, Levin's puppets became progressively cubistic, until they were a series of cones and cylinders. The salvation army woman whom the man encounters, for example, had a small tambourine for a head, a black cape, hands, and nothing more. A prostitute was made out of generic shapes-conical breasts, big round lips. From Morn to Midnight, performed only four times, was warmly received by its audience of local literati, intellectuals, and theatre people who became a loyal following. Nonetheless, the Marionette Studio had trouble making ends meet. In an attempt to increase revenue, they added afternoon performances of children's plays, such as Jack and the Beanstalk, to their adult fare which included Faust, the authentic ancient puppet play, The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, and Affairs of Anatol by Arthur Schnitzler. But, as Louis Bunin explained, "we weren't properly...