Review: The Crapstall Street Boys by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Perhaps it's inherent to the art form, but I did have a moment of wondering whether we ought to be concerned about our Connor.
The Crapstall Street Boys is captivating puppetry and story telling, as is always the case with the Trouble Puppet Theatre Company, a crew of talented and devoted colleagues and acolytes who've gathered around Connor Hopkins. This time the approach is announced as "Czech puppetry" -- small articulated figures at the end of a long rigid wand. The characters are anything but stiff, for with the deft and delicate handling of that single attachment, TP members achieve convincing body English and even give those glassy little eyes a hint of emotion. Or, often, a suggestion of wonder, sometimes one of bewilderment.
The presentation of this fable imagined by our Connor takes place on a lengthy table provided with folding cut-out scenery constructed on the scale of the tiny boys. Hopkins puts a narrator into the piece to assist the puppeteers. Steve Moore sits at stage right in a comfortable chair with a large book before him, setting the scene and explaining some of the action as it occurs. Connor, Caroline Reck, Rob Jacques and Lucie Cunningham move a number of tiny folk through the story -- the protagonist, addressed only as "You, lad!" and his dull-witted and venial parents, a factory owner who buys young boys for a mysterious assembly line, a dog and a chicken, a couple of ravening monsters that sail in as hand puppets to gobble the unwary, and the boys of the factory at Crapstall Street.
The table action is quick and menacing, presenting a grim dog-eat-dog story -- almost literally -- as YouLad is cast into subhuman circumstances similar to the pitiless meat processing lines depicted so vividly by the company in their adaptaion of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. In the miserably exploited work team YouLad makes a friend, the equally lost young fellow named Little Pig who counsels him how to survive. One by one, while struggling frantically for food, young workers disappear and the monsters are afoot.
Erin Meyer is assigned a puppetcam. She follows the action at times and grainy black-and-white images appear on a screen high behind the puppeteers. The duality between puppet action and video action is disconcerting, probably deliberately so. The video presentation was intermittent and somewhat erratic; whether that was deliberate or due to equipment malfunction was unclear.
Crapstall Street is a grim place, friends, and the message is one of ceaseless, animal exploitation of man by man, children by parents, humankind by lurking evil. The medium is accomplished but the message is harrowing.
Has our Connor experienced unhappinesses that must be worked out through fable? Puppeteers are necessarily manipulators of their story-telling instruments, and perhaps that shapes a world view -- elsewhere, more commonly, a Howdy Doody happy freneticism, but here the sophisticated, emphatic conviction that the characters embodied by these puppets are either powerless or brutal.
Perhaps we should sit Connor and friends down with their opening act, Darren Petersen the juggler, patter man, dog trainer and unicyclist of Circus Chickendog, who's as breezily upbeat as the TP piece is gloomy. That would make for some very entertaining group therapy. And for this FronteraFest Long Fringe production made of roughly equal parts of Chickendog and Crapstall, it would achieve an average mood of just about, "It's all right, mate!"
Review by Cate Blouke for the Stateman's Austin360.com Seeing Things blog, January 25
Comments by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, January 26 (215 words)
Comments by Georgia Young for austin.culturemap.com, January 31 (302 words)
EXTRA
A message from Connor Hpopkins in the program leaflet:
Director's Note: If you've ever seen a Trouble Puppet show before, it will be quite clear to you what a departure from our usual form this one represents. A different sort of puppet, a different sort of story (although our traditional themes get in there: capitalism, cannibalism, corruption ... ), and a new technological tool in the live-feed camera traveling around onstage with the puppets: these all make this show a big experiment for us. So our hope is that what the show lacks in mastery and technique it makes up for in innovation, and, well, the puppets are real cute. Plus we've got Steve Moore. So how far wrong can you go, in that situation? I know, I shouldn't ask.
Anyway, thanks for coming out, and we hope you enjoy our stab at this style. Also, we're taking a poll: I originally conceived Crapstall as a kids' show. Having seen it, do you or do you not think this show could be a kids' show? I say yes; others say that would be a prosecutable act. Tell us what you think. And if it goes well, look for a more developed version sometime in the future. If it doesn't go well, let us never speak of this again
Click to view the program leaflet for The Crapstall Street Boys
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The Crapstall Street Boys
by Connor Hopkins
Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
