Theatre--Review (AUI/Wanderlust/UL-Lafayette)

The art of puppetry on stage is a wonder to behold, and I’ve been privileged to see it both New York and London. My first experience was the unforgettable Lion King, now Disney’s longest running Broadway musical , having surpassed Beauty and the Beast. My second was the delightfully irreverent Avenue Q, an R-rated Muppets Show now running Off-Broadway in New York City. While both of those shows were excellent in their own way, I never quite escaped the human bodies manipulating the puppets, and to be honest, Avenue Q doesn’t require that. The play that set the bar was London’s War Horse, where three puppeteers were needed to bring each of the two main horses to life. The actors disappeared; the horses came alive, and the horses got the final ovations in the curtain call. Originally designed for a limited six-month engagement when it opened in 2009; War Horse runs still with no signs of stopping, and it has crossed the pond to play to audiences here in the US.

 It was such a pleasurable delight to see puppets at the Burke-Hawthorne theatre on UL’s campus. The Wanderlust Theatre Company has combined with AUI/AURA to produce the delightful Wolves in the Walls, an adaptation by Cody Daigle of one of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels. Brady McKellar and Elsa Dimitriadis, artistic directors of Wanderlust Theatre Company, crafted the puppets into the show that works on many different levels. (A disclosure: I contributed to the Wolves in the Walls’ kickstarter event.) The show is a must for people to see, and it runs another weekend, with Thursday, Friday, and Saturday performances at 7:30, and a Sunday matinee at 3:00 pm. Call 484-0172 for ticket information.

The show revolves around a young girl named Lucy, who is living an idyllic suburban life with her mother, father, and brother, until she discovers that there are wolves in the walls. She merely hears them, but the audience confirms her fears with a wondrous use of red backstage lighting and a sheer wall to see the wolves in the walls. Every family member dismisses her fears, claiming that she must be hearing mice, rats, or bats, in that order. Those three creatures show up in cut-out cardboard fashion, with the rats being the funniest, looking like an assembly of military Hogan’s Heroes. The family finally takes her seriously when the wolves burst out, chase the family away, and take over the house. Lucy has left behind her favorite pig hand-puppet, and she wants to go back to her house to retrieve it, though her family tells her not to go. Lucy gets advice from several different creatures (polar bear, camel, and strange aliens) and even from a batty Queen of Melanesia . In the end, she befriends the youngest wolf, and the wolves decide to live out in the open so that Lucy and her family can have their home again. But leave it to Gaiman to add one last surprise at the end. You’ll just have to see the show to find out.

Technically the show was almost flawless, and the puppeteers were seamlessly hidden from the audience. The red light provided an eerie, sinister backdrop with which to see all the cardboard characters and yet still hide the puppeteers holding the characters some distance away with sticks. The polar bear, camel, and aliens were skillfully hidden with shrubbery, cut from 150 yards of burlap material and then painted to look like bushes straight from Edward Scissorhands. The ovation came, however, when a full-size replica of Lucy’s pig came on stage to beg Lucy to save her. The walking motions and the subsequent dragging away of the pig produced audible “Awww’s” from the audience. They reacted similarly to the walking alligator near the end of the play. The costumes for the four wolves were creative and visually striking, allowing us to see the facial expressions of the four actors playing the wolves. The only thing that unnerved me was something I have since learned is a convention with puppetry. At two different times, when Lucy was talking to her pig hand-puppet, a figure dressed entirely in black stood nearby saying Pig’s lines. Seeing the figure dressed from head to toe in black made me think of the shrouded figure from The Woman in Black, an image washed in dark tones that do not match the lovely dialogue between Lucy and Pig. The audience, myself included, should eventually not see the figure at all, but against the bright yellow of Lucy’s bedroom, it was hard not to notice. When the puppeteers moved Pig and Alligator across the black floor of Burke-Hawthorne hall, it was easier to forget they were there.

Wolves in the Walls was paired with another show by Cody Daigle, The Book of D, which was performed first. It was a cute, quirky show designed to give more stage time to some of the actors who were helping with Wolves. The Book of D is essentially a tale of acceptance and friendship, but the story has an unfinished, rushed tone, more like a draft than a finished product. Problems like a family divorce are mentioned once and never again, and the friendship between the lead character D and her friend Blu was not long enough to establish that they were best friends. Still there are some promising thespians in the bunch, and they need shows like this to hone their skills.

When I was in London watching War Horse, I could hear people comment with wonder how the two lead horses on stage appeared so lifelike. The Great War, the term for World War I, holds a special place in hearts of the British, and while the show focused on the special connection between a boy and his horse, the play demonstrated the special connection between the play and its audience. When the audience focuses on the puppet and not its master, you’ve conjured a lovely bit of magic. When a young boy at the Wolves in the Walls performance reacted to seeing the wolves walk by menacingly with scary noise effects, he whispered loudly to his mother, “I heard it too!” I knew then the magic had worked.
---Vincent P. Barras