Prop: Joyce Carol Oates sock puppet.
Appearing in: “Recent Tragic Events,” Uma Productions.
Playwright Craig Wright included a role of sorts for Joyce Carol Oates in “Recent Tragic Events.” He was adamant about having a sock puppet play the highbrow novelist, who visits a group of young people in Minneapolis the day after Sept. 11.
Costume designer Aly Greaves was in charge of creating Oates out of floppy footwear for the Uma Productions staging. The transformation seemed to be a cinch because the director, Mikhael Tara Garver, wanted the sock to be pulled out of a pile of laundry onstage. Greaves was just going to draw eyes with a marker on a white sweat sock.
Then Garver decided he wanted a more realistic looking double for Oates. Greaves, who used to work on puppets for “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood,” was ready.
She coiffed the sock with a black wig that came down to the puppet’s “shoulders” and sewed red felt lips on the face. She used black paint to add eyelids and eyelashes on top of big eyes–and put a circle of foam underneath them. “I wanted to create a multilayered look because Oates has prominent bags under her eyes,” Greaves says.
She then added a mini-replica of Oates’s signature huge, round dark-rimmed glasses. (The pair was originally intended for an American Girl doll.)
Actor Audrey Francis portrays a character named Nancy who brings the limp Joyce Carol Oates to life during a 25-minute scene. To make the inanimate face express human emotions, Francis spent hours sitting in front of a mirror. She’d make facial expressions and try to scrunch up the sock puppet’s face so it showed the same feelings–and she’d make it sing along to songs on the radio.
The puppet also presented another challenge. “I had a hard time separating my right arm with the puppet from the rest of my body,” Francis recalls. “My body as Nancy is relaxed and completely out of it, like a slob, and Joyce Carol Oates is the most sharply deliberate woman ever, so it’s like I have a split personality and the movements are more like a dance.”
Francis says she was struck by the paradox of the scene with the Oates sock puppet. “She talks about her belief that we all have free will and that we control our destiny with the little choices we make every day,” she says. “But she is being controlled by Nancy.”
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“Recent Tragic Events,” through Saturday, Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St., $15; 773-347-1375.
