When theatre professor Tony Vezner decided to direct a children’s play involving two large puppets — a penguin and a monkey — he contacted good friend Everett Stanton, husband of Rebecca Stanton, the senior director of teacher education in Concordia’s School of Education. Everett, who has a Ph.D. in history, had taught creativity and puppetry at Concordia before, and now was asked to build life-size puppets using the training he’d received because of his close association with puppeteers who had also worked at the Jim Henson Company.
“I have loved puppetry since I was a kid,” says Stanton, recalling his first puppet, a guitar-playing marionette purchased in Mexico. While his career took him down many paths — as an illustrator and children’s author for Holt and MacMillan, and Scholastic Books, for example — he leapt at an offer some years ago to work for the publishing arm of the Jim Henson Company.
“Now puppets and these amazing puppeteers were all around me,” he says. He learned how to build and operate puppets from some of the finest puppeteers in the world, including Kathy Mullen, the woman who operated Yoda’s right arm in the original Star Wars movies, and puppeteers who worked on Muppet movies and shows. “It’s such an old craft and has such a history to it,” says Stanton. “People like to share it. It’s not just a job but a hobby and a passion.”
After leaving the company for other opportunities, Stanton kept up his craft, and for Concordia’s production he created two four-foot-tall walking puppets in his personal 3-D workshop. He used a derivative of the Japanese style of puppetry called Bunraku, now in use at many theme parks. Bunraku has the puppeteer visible and connected to the puppet via a harness and connecting pieces so that when the puppeteer walks, the puppet walks, too. Natural fibers keep the large creatures very light — and durable — in spite of their size.
Stanton’s first iterations of Penguin and Monkey were skinless rehearsal puppets for student-actors to practice movements and get used to the harness and connectors. “You’re basically performing two feet out in front of your body so you have to translate your physical and emotional information to this inanimate object,” says Stanton. “That’s a weird thing to do.”
To make it more interesting, the student playing Penguin was Timothy Sloan, a then-sophomore mathematics major who had no theatre ambitions or experience. He auditioned to receive extra credit in a class and won the part of the Spanish-speaking South Pole creature almost against his wishes.
“I had never acted before, so I was learning simultaneously how to act and how to puppeteer,” Sloan says. “I had to embody a penguin.” His counterpart in the role of Monkey was Rebekah Michel, a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor’s daughter from Palm Coast, Florida, and a vocal performance major. Unlike Sloan, she had acted in a number of shows at Concordia already. Her challenge, at a diminutive five feet tall, was the puppet’s size.
“I was surprised when they explained how big it was,” she says. “You think sock puppets when you hear the word ’puppet.’ But these were life-size, and that was a little bit scary. I was like, what did I get myself into?”
The two students dived into long rehearsals with Stanton, which settled their nerves and called out their better actors. “I trained them as I was trained,” says Stanton. “They were really, really good. Timothy surprised me for the better. I was so pleased with his work. He threw himself at this, becoming very natural with the movements, almost like a dancer. I was so impressed. You could see the dedication and hard work he put in.”
As for Michel, she grew accustomed to “having this massive thing strapped to you that moves when you walk,” she says. The puppet — initially taller than she was — was cut down to match her stature and “she came through like a superstar,” Stanton says. “She had a natural motion. She made the best of every little nuance that puppet could do. Both of them absolutely shone. Not only did they perform well, they took my coaching well.”
The puppets sported working eyelids, eyebrows, mouths, and arms for greater expression. (“Eyebrows are more expressive than eyelids, which are overrated,” Stanton counsels.) Stanton employed pro-level Jim Henson techniques such as giving Penguin a fixed gaze — by creating a triangle between the tip of the nose and the pupils of the eyes — which make a puppet appear to be looking at you.
“Ev made the process of dealing with such a big puppet so much less stressful,” says Michel. “He was such a calming presence in rehearsals which was fantastic, because for me and Timothy this was so new and so different. To hear about his experiences, his career, to talk about the intricate things to design a puppet that I didn’t even realize. He was a great mentor throughout this process.”
The most challenging aspects for Sloan involved the limited range of motion for his feet, and the need to waddle quickly across the stage in a set amount of time. He also found it eerie to interact with fellow cast members when they were relating to the puppet, not to him.
Intent on playing the part well, he watched videos of actual penguins and took note of their vocabulary of movements. It didn’t hurt that Sloan speaks Spanish nearly fluently, and all of Penguin’s lines are in Spanish. “I didn’t say a single word in English during the show,” he says.
The play is about two children ages four and six who are staying at their aunt’s house while their mom is away, and they don’t want to sleep because they think there is something scary under the bed. They imagine an adventure that takes them to the North Pole and then to the South Seas. The whole show ran a little under an hour.
Penguin proved a comic hit from the moment he stepped on stage. “People were so surprised as to what was going on,” Sloan says. “I walked out to this goofy music with goofy-looking footsteps, and we essentially took a brief pause for laughter before I began saying my first nonsense poem in Spanish.” The applause “was such an uplifting thing,” he says.
So, too, was working with Stanton. “Working with Ev was absolutely fantastic,” Sloan says. “Throughout the process he was very understanding that neither of us had puppeted before. He had so much patience with us.”
Sloan, in addition to playing the part of Penguin, also operated the Monkey’s right hand, which required the pair to be “insanely coordinated,” says Michel.
“I was doing one of the arms, and the eyes and mouth. Timothy was doing the other arm,” says Michel. “Every decision I made as an actor, Timothy had to follow, so it was a lot of teamwork between the two of us.”
They had what Stanton believes is the toughest audience: children. “They will let you know in two seconds if they’re bored or if they don’t like something,” Stanton says. “They call it out live.”
But the children were enchanted, and Sloan came away with a new appreciation for the rigors of theatre. “I never understood just how draining the process is,” he says. “I have a whole new appreciation for what my theatre friends go through.”
Michel’s favorite times were when Monkey sang and danced, and when she — or rather, the puppet — got to greet young audience members afterward.
“Some kids wanted high fives, hugs, or pictures with their parents,” she says. “It was so cool to see the joy on their faces.”
Sloan still intends to be a math teacher, not an actor, “but I definitely enjoyed it while it lasted,” he says. For Stanton, “It’s fun to share puppeteering with up-and-coming kids,” he says. “The actors did an amazing job, the sets were beautiful. It was super-high quality. It was nice to be part of that group, and I hope they do more shows like this.”