✭✭✭✭✭

by Shawna Reiter & Kyla Read, directed by Peter Balkwill

Clunk Puppet Lab, St. John’s United Church, SpringWorks, Stratford

May 15-18, 2014

Fred: “Memory is the distance between moments”

Part of the fourth annual SpringWorks Festival in Stratford is a mini-festival devoted to puppetry.  One of the companies, Clunk Puppet Lab, is presenting a remount of its first-ever show, How I Became Invisible, that premiered in Calgary in 2011.  It is a cleverly multivalent puppet show for the whole family that where adults and children will likely see the action in very different ways.  The whimsically designed set and puppets and the fascinating story make this one of the must-sees of the Festival.

In the three years since its premiere How I Became Invisible seems to have mutated so that its meaning has become much wider than was originally intended.  The play’s synopsis found both on the SpringWorks website and on that of the Clunk Puppet Lab runs as follows:

How I Became Invisible is a surreal puppet performance that unearths life, death, and the memories that linger in-between. What happens when you disappear from everything you hold dear, the people you remember, the place you call home? Saija, an 81-year-old woman struggling with Alzheimer's, has moved in with her overbearing daughter who lives in a dilapidated apartment complex. In an attempt to find clarity in an increasingly confusing world, she writes stories for her granddaughter. As her illness progresses, she finds herself lost between reality and fiction ....

Not having read the synopsis before seeing the show, what Clunk Puppet Lab says the show is about is not quite what I experienced.  We do see Saija, who has stopped speaking since the death of her husband, typing stories non-stop at her typewriter in her bedroom filled with boxes of paper and clippings from newspapers.  The words “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” are never mentioned.  Since, as we learn, Saija was a writer before she retired, she seems merely to be continuing her work and her urgency seems unconnected to any mental problem but merely the desire to write as much as she can while she is still able. 

The lack of appreciation Saija’s daughter Vivian shows for her mother and the messiness of her room seems o say more about Vivian’s callousness and obsessiveness than it does about Saija.  The first time we see a blurring of reality and fiction is when Saija’s granddaughter Fred reads one of Saija’s stories and we see the story enacted before us. 

In the space under the set for Saija’s bedroom, curtains open and we see the bedroom of the character in the story called Gordon.  Gordon has terrible dreams, so bad that they make him float up towards the ceiling.  Gordon’s mother,

represented by just a pars of huge white lips, is so worried that she puts Gordon on a diet of junk food to make him weigh more.  All that happens is that Gordon becomes more balloon-like eventually floats out of the window.  At various times in the show we see Gordon floating about, sometimes holding Saija’s hand, sometimes Fred’s, so that it seems rather that Fred has become immersed in reading her grandmother’s story, imaging how Saija came to write it rather than Saija becoming lost between reality and fiction. 

During the course of the show we learn that Saija has based her stories on various news items she has collected, thus transmuting these faits divers by means of her imagination into art.  In one story we learn of an aged super hero called Super Ogorki, who is forced to realize he has come to the end of his career when he can no longer open even a pickle jar for a young girl.  In another we learn of a woman who was taking a bath when her apartment building completely burned down except for her bathroom.  To save herself the woman slid under the water in the tub, but she remained there so long she eventually turns into a fish. 

All this action takes place on the delightfully bizarre set created by Shawna Reiter, Jonathan J. Davis and Peter Balkwill consisting of rusty pipes, drains and culverts covered with indeterminate yuck, with plumbing as a metaphor for the subterranean links that exist among people and among their stories.  Clunk’s style is tabletop bunraku with usually two manipulators per main puppet, although for Fred’s final speech all three manipulators are used as in classical Japanese bunraku.  The puppets range from the wonderfully expressive head of Saija to the hilariously grotesque figures of the floating Gordon or the fishlike Mrs. A.  The coordinated movement of the three puppeteers – Shawna Reiter, Brian Webber and Madlen Sopadzhiyan – is beautiful to watch and is as tightly choreographed as any ballet.  Reiter voices the engaging and inquisitive Fred while Webber provides the more comically exaggerated voices of Vivian, Gordon’s mother and Super Orgorki. 

Saija does eventually disappear after Vivian tries to take away her typewriter and clears out her boxes of papers.  We don’t feel she has disappeared because of Alzheimer’s from everything she held dear.  Instead, her absence becomes a mystery that we can interpret in a wide number of ways.  We are even free to wonder whether the show is just Fred’s memory of when her grandmother used to live with her.  What comes across in the show is not a lament for the loss of memories but rather just the opposite – the preservation of memories and the passing of these memories to a new generation.  The self-centred, obsessive Vivian stands as an example of the threat to creativity and imagination that always exists, but Fred’s attraction to Saija’s life and work balances hat threat with the hope that youth can recognize the value of what age leaves behind. 

How I Became Invisible is a lovely play lovingly crafted and performed.  By bringing the work of Clunk Puppet lab to Stratford, SpringWorks has done everyone in the area a great favour.            

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Fred and Mrs. A.; Saija. ©2011 Clunk Puppet Lab.

For tickets, visit www.springworksfestival.com.