Interview: Working with Puppets

interview Working With Puppets Bruce D. Schwartz Theodora Skipitares Julie Taymor Interviews by C. Lee Jenner BRUCE D. SCHWARTZ Bruce D. Schwartz has been writing scripts, making puppets, and performing since he was nine years old. His solo evenings The Rat of Huge Proportions and Other Works (also known as The Stage That Walks)have been produced in New York at Dance Theatre Workshop and the American Place Theatre. He has also performed at the Company Theatre in Los Angeles, Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, and London's Young Vic. Schwartz was the recipient of the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Theatre Fellowship for Residency in Japan in 1981. He has also been seen on Jim Henson's Muppet Show. What drew you to puppets at such an early age? It's my theory that puppets appealed to me as a child because I liked to do things by myself. I think It's temperamental. One of the family stories is that I liked to go into the closet in my bedroom, turn on the light, shut the door, and look at picture books. I think puppet theatre lends itself to that taste. 103 As you were growing up, were there any puppeteers performing whom you particularly liked? Burr Tillstrom. I think he is the greatest living puppeteer in the world. I suspect he will prove to have been the greatest puppeteer of the century. He has the biggest soul. He's sort of the Rembrandt of puppet theatre. He uses rags, the ugliest of puppets, but they're full blown and they get to you, move you. I have tried to catch something of that spirit with my Elizabethan glove puppets, which are nothing but tatters of cloth. How do you explain the renaissance in puppetry and other popular theatre art forms? When off-off-Broadway started in the 1960s, the movement led the new generation to search out forms that had been neglected. People were looking for something different from what Hollywood and Broadway offered, alternatives to conventional plays. They took up pantomime, commedia, and folk arts like puppetry which had fallen by the wayside. The whole climate in the arts changed. It doesn't have to be a painting anymore, it can be a quilt; it doesn't have to be a realistic play, it can be a puppet show. Our ideas of what is worthy of our attention have been modified. The whole crafts movement is a major influence on my work. Your word, renaissance, is a good one, because it was through the Renaissance Pleasure Fairs on the West Coast in the early 1970s that the folk revival touched me. You could buy something from people who had made it with their own hands and see others in raggle-taggle costumes up there on stage doing commedia plays and singing madrigals. Puppetry is about as handmade as theatre can get. I make everything to do with my shows myself: story, characters, dialogue, puppets, scenery-everything, except I do use some taped music. Up to now I have also acted all the parts myself, too. I think people appreciate that kind of giving and the handmade aspects. I got a lot of my so-called street sense working the fairs, and met others of like mind. The idea was to take it all away from the merchants, Hollywood moguls, TV, and the legitimate stage, and do it yourself. The Renaissance Fair as a concept has become dated and has lost its original vitality, but some of the spirit lives on. You mentioned meeting "others of like mind" at the Fairs. Did any of them have an influence on your work? I met the two puppeteers from whom I learned about rod puppetry, Craig Victory, a San Francisco puppeteer, and his then partner, Winston Tong. Craig showed me that a puppet could move gracefully. Winston changed my ideas about what a puppet should look like. Up until I met them, I'd been doing glove puppets in a crude, scrap bag style. Winston showed me that a puppet can be exquisitely beautiful. That was a real revelation. I have very 104 THE RAT OF HUGE PROPORTIONS...