Playwright: adaptations by Blair Thomas
At: Noyes Cultural Arts Center, Evanston
Phone: (773) 722-3248; $15
Runs through: Sept. 28
In this evening of three short works, Blair Thomas uses puppet theater as a springboard for kinetic sculpture involving painting, mechanics, design, lighting, construction, the distortion of familiar objects, and the puppeteer himself as a costumed character as if he, too, were a carved and painted doll. To this, Thomas adds an inventive audio collage of music, digital sampling and the spoken word.
Critical evaluation is difficult, and written descriptions inadequate: one either likes this type of performance art or not. I like it, and find it an unusual blend of simplicity and sophistication, combining some of the oldest theatrical techniques with utterly straight-forward storytelling, to achieve unexpected emotional depth. Each work is presented on its own fantastic stage containing a bag of tricks specific to the piece being performed, with each stage larger than the one before. Thomas works above the stage in the first two pieces, and below the stage in the final entry. The works themselves grow progressively longer and more abstract, although sharing a common theme of death and loss.
The first work, the traditional blues song, 'St. James Infirmary,' literally is about death, as a man bids farewell to his sweetheart, 'laid out on a cold white table/so young, so fresh, so fair.' The one puppet, a zoot suited marionette dude, dances on the coffin of his love, while a black-and-white scrolling backdrop provides the story's other visuals. The gold-trimmed little stage is framed by stretched and altered brass musical instruments. Thomas kicks off the sequence by playing tuba live, and digitally looping the music to form a constant instrumental track for the verses of the song, which he sings (feelingly but badly). Later, he adds banjo to the digital loop.
The title work is up next, a story by Federico Garcia Lorca, played on a slightly larger stage of silvery colors and tufted white curtains. This stage, too, is framed by distorted brass instruments, plus a disassembled piano and bicycle wheels (part of the machinery that scrolls the backdrop). In Lorca's absurdist tale, the great silent film icon, Buster Keaton, casually kills his children and walks to Philadelphia. Thomas and several associated designers physicalize the story's non-sequiturs using cut-out puppets, and a black and white presentation—like a Keaton film—punctuated by an unexpected burst of color. Again, Thomas records and loops the music, this time a tango.
The final work brings to life Wallace Stevens' poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, wordlessly performed to Ben Johnston's pre-recorded String Quartet #4. Thomas uses shadow puppets and hand-cranked scrolls to create a romantic and elegiac atmosphere, with Stevens' text written in the scrolls. This largest stage is dominated by red, and minus the musical instruments.