Puppet Theatre Press

February 28, 2002
Arts Section

Liz Joyce: A World of Puppets
by Carissa Katz

A brightly painted sign set at kids' eye level on East Union Street in Sag Harbor points the way to Liz Joyce's Goat on a Boat Puppet Theatre. Walk down the few steps to the basement of the Christ Episcopal Church parish house and you enter the world of talking sloths, chattering monkeys, pigs in suits, and a goat named Billy Jack.

For seven years Ms. Joyce has taken her show on the road under the name Liz Joyce and a Couple of Puppets. When she became the resident puppeteer at her own theater last summer, she did so with high hopes and a limited budget.

"I just had a feeling it was going to work," she said on Friday after presenting her version of "The Kapok Tree" to two dozen youngsters and their parents.

The momentum built slowly. By the fall, Ms. joyce had a core of regulars coming to her performances, workshops and play groups. "Then Christmas came and I started selling out all the shows."

As she sees it, Sag Harbor is the perfect place for a puppet theater. "It really works in a community like this," she said. "I used to call it my two-bit backyard organization because it's this really small thing. It's old world. It's something from the past that doesn't really exist these days when everybody's moving so fast and everything is so corporate."

Hand Carved Wood

She makes her puppets by hand, carving, painting, and sewing each character herself, then brings them to life on stages as small as a suitcase or as big as a living room.

Most of her puppets are constructed primarily of basswood from the linden tree and leather. "I like tapping into the tradition of carving the puppet out of wood," she said. And, unlike papier mache, a wood puppet will survive for years. "Some characters just chisel themselves out. Others, it's labor and nothing goes right."

She sews some of their clothes by hand and others on her mother's old Singer Featherweight sewing machine.

As Ms. Joyce creates them and later as she performs with them, she finds that the puppets begin to "take on a life of their own." It is as if their characters develop independently of their creator. "Sometimes they'll say things and I'll just stop. It's almost like the character takes on his own dialogue," she said.

"You have to perform it and rehearse it a lot, but as soon as you're comfortable performing the show, those things come out." She writes an initial script, but the shows always change once she brings them to an audience. "It's not a puppet show until your perform it in front of an audience 20 times. The audience will tell you where it needs to be."

A native of Virginia, Ms. Joyce studied drawing at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and then taught art "as a backup" after graduation. To satisfy her creative urges, she started making little dolls for friends. The dolls gave way to a series of puppets and soon Ms. Joyce had been convinced to stage a few puppet shows at a children's museum in Richmond, Va.

Her teaching experience helped her to know how young audiences might react to the shows. "Five-year-olds will focus on something completely different from two-year-olds," she said.

Puppetry seemed to be just the right fusion of her various talents. "When I found out I wanted to do the puppet thing, everything fell into place. I was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, but as a puppeteer, you need all the trades to be a master."

Having no formal training as a puppeteer, she apprenticed herself to experienced mentors. The first was Terry Snyder, a Richmond puppeteer who toured up and down the East Coast. And when Ms. Joyce moved to New York in 1997, she found many other apprenticeship opportunities and a network of fellow puppeteers to work and share ideas with.

She volunteered and performed at Los Kabayitos Puppet Theatre, a sort of puppet club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan started by people who had been involved in the well known Bread and Puppet Theater and Great Small Works.

Her association with Los Kabayitos put her in touch with a pool of professional puppeteers not found anywhere else in the country. "If someone had a puppet project, they dipped into the pool and got each other to help out," she said. Puppeteers "don't usually have these huge budgets to hire people and train them, so we work with each other."

All the big names in puppetry passed through the theater to give talks, lectures, and performances geared largely toward adult audiences. There were also puppet "slams," modeled after the marathon poetry sessions, that brought new talent to the stage.

"New York is a great place to do that because you have an audience," she said. Outside of a big city, people tend to think puppets are exclusively for kids. But her puppet adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," which she performed at Los Kabayitos, probably would not go over well with young audiences at the Goat on a Boat Puppet Theatre.

Sometimes even the seemingly innocuous characters of familiar fairy tales strike fear in the hearts of children. "They get really scared by the bad guys, but that's the character they remember," Ms. joyce said.

She finds that adults love puppets as much as the children do. "They get to be kids. It's just such a novelty in the states."

Ms. Joyce was strongly influenced by the campy, almost vaudevillian puppet theaters of Europe. "I loved that the kids were part of the show. That interaction, it's important because they don't get it anywhere else."

In her puppet shows she leaves plenty of room for the kids to talk back, heckle the puppets, and change the direction of a scene. "It's a very dangerous thing when you invite your audience into the show, but when you do it over and over you can kind of prompt them. It's a magical thing."

"So many kids get their experience of puppets from television. Television does all the thinking and imagining for you. This is something they can participate in. They don't get lost. They're present and accounted for," she said. "When you're watching a puppet show you have to work."

Kids may be the most enthusiastic audience, but they are also the toughest. "You can lose them in a second," Ms. Joyce said, and if they do not like something, they are not afraid to say so. "After a performance with kids I get all charged up. It takes a lot of energy, but they give me their energy."

Ms. Joyce has a repertory of about 10 shows that she performs regularly, most of them based on familiar childhood stories such as "Little Red Riding Hood."

"I don't want every show to look exactly alike. I like to challenge myself and try a variety of styles and approaches." She uses hand puppets, tiny table puppets, marionettes and rod puppets in her shows. In her "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" the entire stage is the size of a television screen and the audience can see her manipulating the little marionettes throughout the show.

She has been working in her studio for the past few months on a new show based on "The Three Little Pigs" and won a Jim Henson Foundation grant to put together a show for adults based on Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."

Ms. Joyce continues to take her puppets on tour, but the theater is her main focus. "If it didn't work I would have just kept on touring, but it feels good to be building on an idea and watching something grow," she said. "For once in my life I know the people in my community."