Course:Actors Being Super Serious in Scenes with Puppets
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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My siblings and I were raised on The Muppets, Sesame Street, Labyrinth and Star Wars. The 80’s/90’s of our childhood were peak-puppet, and I will forever miss that cinematic era of blatant theatricality and analogue, tactile effects. The camp! The craftsmanship! The zaniness!
Most of all, I loved the human actors who wholeheartedly inhabited those worlds. Tim Curry in Muppet Treasure Island? A tour-de-force. Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth? Terrifying. I will never stop marvelling at the commitment with which sweaty Marc Hamill flips and swings through the sound-stage swamp of Dagobah, the puppet Yoda riding on his back, urging him not to succumb to the dark side. That scene (Star Wars Episode V) is sinister and dreamlike and very weird. But it works!
My all-time favourite human-with-Muppet performance is Michael Caine as Scrooge in A Muppet Christmas Carol. This is the definitive adaptation for me, and I will always love Michael Caine for acting his heart out while a family of frogs and pigs sing around a dinner table. He is so vulnerable and mean and transformed as Scrooge that even Kermit-Bob-Cratchit matches his pathos with legit gravitas (problematic content warning: cultural appropriation as comedy... by British puppet rats.)
How, you might ask, does this relate to poetry? For me, absurdity elevates realism and turns it into a metaphor, transcending what it seems to describe. It’s what I’m trying to do with passages like this one from my poem ‘To my thirties’:
In a rented bed in Brussels
Sick and damp
You fed me chocolate while a
Giant spider skittered across the wall
Click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click
Or this one from ‘Camera Obscura’:
yes death
was tapping his beak
so close beside me in the passenger seat
scratching talon, rustling
which is what he always does when it is quiet
and I
trying not to make my human noises
wondered if he would burst through
the lid that wasn’t fully closed
You can see the poetry, but it almost seems to be simply telling a story. The blatant interweaving of real and absurd unleashes the audience’s imagination, freeing it to absorb what is true. It makes for art that is moving and memorable and fun! Like humans talking to puppets, the audience knows it’s make-believe and, thankfully, we remember how to do it!