Reviews
Puppet production explores adult feelings
By: SPECIAL TO CITIZEN-TIMES
Posted: April 19, 2002 4:13 p.m.By Arnold Wengrow
SPECIAL TO THE CITIZEN-TIMES
ASHEVILLE - Pamella O'Connor makes puppet plays. But for her upcoming production at the Diana Wortham Theater, forget small and cute.
And with a name like "The Anatomy of Melancholy" forget just for kids.
The Asheville-based puppeteer has teamed up with writer Jessica Klarp to turn Robert Burton's 1621 compendium on human emotions into an adult look at contemporary life that mixes large-scale mechanical figures with actor-dancers.
If you're going
The Asheville Puppetry Alliance and P.O'connor puppets present "The Anatomy of Melancholy" at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Diana Wortham Theatre. Tickets are $10 and are available at the Diana Wortham Box Office, 257-4530.
"My definition of melancholy is perhaps not how some other people define it," O'Connor said. For her it's "a sweet sadness, the feeling that washes over you on overcast days, when there might be a light drizzle, and you've got a slightly blue feeling."
O'Connor's rainy-day feeling comes with its lighthearted moments. She asked Klarp to inject humor throughout the script. "I think there are times when melancholy is humorous," Klarp said. "I think of myself when I was an adolescent and writing poetry on a rock in the middle of a stream."
To give her story a universal quality, O'Connor has created a series of 3-foot-tall puppets that she refers to as Everyman characters. They are molded from neoprene and covered with paper painted to look like wood. "Where there are bolts and nuts, I've left all of that visible," she says.
"Anatomy of Melancholy" starts with a visual pun on its title, as well as a comment on modern life: Everyman wakes up one morning to discover he has a hole in his belly. He looks at his puppeteer and swears. The audience sees him in various scenes looking for ways to plug the gap in both his physiognomy and his psychology.
The puppeteers, Rupa Vickers, Yoko Myoi and Robyn Strawbridge, are dressed in black in the Japanese Bunraku style but keep their faces visible to interact with their puppets.
They move in choreographed patterns on a multilevel structure of steel towers designed by Asheville sculptor John Payne.
"Anatomy of Melancholy" is O'Connor's first work for adults since founding P. O'Connor Puppets in 1996. Her two children's productions, "Rapunzel" and "Vasalisa," a Russian version of Cinderella, have performed at the Diana Wortham Theatre as well as touring schools and libraries in the region. They have also been seen at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C.
O'Connor came to puppetry after a career in Atlanta as an actor and director. She was invited by Janie Geiser, a visual artist who had branched out into puppetry and film animation, to be one of the voices in a production geared to adults at the Center for Puppetry Arts.
When that production toured to a European puppetry festival in Dresden, Germany, in 1989, O'Connor went along. "Here I was, just a regular actor-type person," she said, "and all of sudden I'm doing adult puppetry and seeing puppetry from all over the world. I didn't have a clue what was going on out there, and it just blew me away."
O'Connor continued to do vocal work for Geiser and three years into their collaboration Geiser "asked me to put hands on my first puppet." Geiser also encouraged her to begin making her own puppets and her own productions.
"I thought this seemed to be a great form for her to use all of her theatrical talents and to have more control over her ability to initiate and create work," said Geiser, now director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.
Attracted to Asheville's arts scene, O'Connor relocated in 1996. "I felt fortunate that I was working in both people theater and puppet theater, but I reached a place where I just wanted not to be a spoke in a wheel," she said. "I always heard Asheville was a very artistic place and a very spiritual place."
O'Connor describes the 50-minute "Anatomy of Melancholy" as a work in progress. She plans to continue developing it after its April 25 performance and pair it with another work for adults in development called "Worn Shoes." She hopes to premiere the double-bill in Asheville next year.
In the meantime, area theatergoers can get a look at such O'Connor inventions as a cocktail party represented by a flat puppet with five heads nodding up and down and a lovesick Everyman who gets tangled up in a red string his girlfriend unravels from his chest.
Who would have guessed that melancholy could be so witty?
Arnold Wengrow is an Asheville-based theater director and arts writer.
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