Prop: 36 marionettes
Appearing in: “Mabou Mines DollHouse,” presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Court Theatre
In “Mabou Mines DollHouse” — a deconstructed staging of Henrik Ibsen’s classic performed in a miniaturized Victorian setting — female characters of normal height or taller are dominated by male actors under 4 feet, 5 inches tall. When director Lee Breuer saw a collection of Victorian dolls, he decided he also wanted marionette couples in an opera house as audience members watching a scene in which Nora rejects her husband Torvald.
Jane Catherine Shaw spent a month and a half creating 36 marionette opera-goers for the 2003 New York premiere of the production. To give a sense of perspective, she crafted puppets that were 3 feet tall for the first tier of the opera house, 2 feet for the second tier and ones a little more than 1 foot high for the third.
Although Victorian dolls had porcelain heads, Shaw had to make the puppets from a lightweight material so they would be easy to manipulate. She layered them with a mixture of plaster of Paris and glue to give them the look of porcelain. “I had so many piles of heads and hands and bodies all over my apartment that you had to tiptoe over them,” she recalls.
Shaw bought inexpensive, elegant-looking fabric to make the women’s Victorian-style dresses and stitched black tuxedos and white shirts for the men. “They are all very sweet and they each have their own eccentricities because they are hand-made,” she says fondly.
Behind the scenes, six actors from the play manipulate six marionettes each to make them imitate the gestures of Nora and Torvald. “I tried to pre-solve the problems with the rigging so that they knew what gesture a marionette would make when they pulled on each line,” Shaw says. “But when we first opened, we didn’t have much time to rehearse — so I had to stand back there and direct them like a symphony conductor.”
She adds: “I think that since the play is about a woman who is being manipulated in a very male-dominated society, Lee Breuer liked the idea of having female puppets manipulated by unseen forces — but there are also male puppets because they [men] were being manipulated by society’s ideas of how men and women were supposed to behave.”
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“Mabou Mines DollHouse,” Sunday through Dec. 18 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., $35-$50; 312-397-4010
