powerful, profound puppets

Moving, poetic, amazingly human.

Who knew puppets could do so much?

Apparently The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, that's who.

Based out of Calgary, the troupe are currently performing Famous Death Puppet Scenes at the Young Centre in the Distillery District.

Far from being a collection of eerie reenacements or a long one-note joke in the key of macabre, the production presents various scenes from famous puppet shows through the ages, using scenes from Nordo Frot's The Feverish Heart as a thread linking other more disparate elements.

For those not previously familiar with The Feverish Heart, prepare to be... uh, hammered... by hilarity. The returning theme of our feckless hero is awfully funny, (as in, awful and funny, at once) like a lot of the show. But Famous Puppet Death Scenes is much more than squishy-headed puppets meeting untimely ends.

The genius, for me, lies in the narrative and dramatic arc with which director Tim Sutherland has shaped the piece. What could have been a connection of disconnected elements lacking any cohesiveness or momentum (or heart, most importantly) becomes a fascinating musing on the nature of death -and life, in the process.

The Old Trouts are adept at dismantling any preconceptions the audience may bring concerning puppetry.

So we see strings, sticks, mechanics, masks, and the man (or men) behind the curtain. That doesn't diminish the magic, however, but rather adds to it.

The chosen piece from The Cruel Sea (by Thorvik Skarsbarg), is sparsely dramatic. Using a combination of lighting, sound, and basic special effects (one of the puppeteers blows a handful of white flakes representing snow), we see the dismantling of the "main" chartacter, piece by piece, until he is literally the core of his old self, as another puppet, female and robed, slowly passes outside the window. It's a slow poetry, a strange one, but a moving meditation on the nature of temporal in relation to the physical, mental, and spiritual.

Watching Famous Puppet Death Scenes, I was reminded of the value of surreal art, the sense that there is value in the bizarre and seeingly-random. I kept picturing Salvador Dali sitting there, twirling his moustache, a strange smile crossing his lips, with every twist of the strings and tug of the sticks.

And I kept hearing Marcel Duchamp's words: "This desire to understand everything fills me with horror".

So I stopped asking "what does it all MEAN?" and instead allowed emotions, including confusion, to surface. In so doing, I enjoyed the very essence of great theatre, noting how basic theatrical elements are utilized in service of the story being told onstage.

King Jeff the Magnificent, by William Dingo, is a perfect example. The audience is given a bird's eye view of a puppet being elevated from a building top, into space, close to the moon, then cradled, by two giant hands coming from either end of the little procenium arch stage that had been set up across the stage of the Joseph Young Theatre.

Maybe it is, as the show's skeletal narrator suggests, that "we puppets suffer on your behalf", even as they also reveal profound truths about love, life, death, and the connection that drives us in the short time we're given. Note the simple beauty of scenes like The Last Whale or Lucille Arabesque; the combination of the solitary with the surreal suggests a profound truth about interconnection and isolation within the human experience.

The silence that envelopes the theatre at the play's end, as the narrator is quietly carried off, says more than any voices or script ever could.

There's nothing else like this on in Toronto. And this isn't going to last very long.

See it.

Famous Puppet Death Scenes runs at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts to October 27th; for more information, go to www.youngcentre.ca