Playwright: Various sources At: Blair Thomas & Company, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln. Tickets: 773-871-3000; www.victorygardens.org; $25. Runs through: Aug. 8
Your response to Hard Headed Heart will depend on your taste for puppetry, which always appears child-likeor toy-like, more accuratelyeven when it's adult. In this instance, performer Blair Thomas ( co-founder of Redmoon Theatre and his own Blair Thomas & Company ) serves as solo puppeteer, musician, editor, actor and designer. Hard Headed Heart offers three short and disparate pieces linked by love or lust, running just 75 minutes in total. Each piece is played on a separate mini-stage with its own unique character, but all featuring Rube Goldberg-style mechanical devices and recycled objects such as an old iron bed frame or tin funnels.
"The Puppet Show of Don Cristobal" leads off, a brief farce by Federico Garcia Lorca about a scoundrel doctor who marries a slut and reaps cuckoldry as his reward. Done with hand puppets that really are hard-headed and head-banging, it's a variant of a traditional Punch-and-Judy puppet show derived from the stock characters of the classical commedia dell'arte. Special flourishes include the musical surprise of a rare, real hurdy-gurdy, and the influence of non-realistic Asian theatrical masks and make-up in the multicolored faces of the puppets. It's a fine curtain-raiser for the trio of works.
The second piece, featuring marionettes, is a literal playing-out of the old New Orleans slow-drag jazz lament, "St. James Infirmary," about a hard-drinking, hard-gambling man mourning his dead lover. Central to this is Thomas as a one-man band using sound sampling to record tracksbefore your very earsfor percussion, toy piano, ukulele and brass bass merging into a crude orchestral loop against which he crudely lines out the old song, as he manipulates the puppets against a scrolling backdrop of New Orleans streets, parlors, barrooms and gambling dens on his way to an amusingly macabre ending.
The final little work, the shortest and most beautiful of the three, features shadow puppets and four scrolling screens to highlight portions of Wallace Steven's poem, "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," presented without spoken words to Ben Johnston's String Quarter #4, which pays homage to "Amazing Grace." With its echoes of the relentless march of time and hints of the loss of love, it's the most profound and emotional of the three pieces. Thomas is visible throughout the works not only as puppeteer but as a clown with whiteface make-up and fiery-red eyelids. For this final work, he wipes off the make-up.
There is no question about the imagination and skill with which Thomas and his associates create their miniature world, which immediately draws you in and holds you. The brief evening may impress, delight and surprise you more than it moves you, but you'll never doubt its singularity and creativity.