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Blogs by Ian Thal
Two Weeks with Bread & Puppet Theater: Part XI 1/12/2004 6:37:00 PM
A short account of repair work I had to do on two of the puppets assigned to me during the two week run.
In the process of traveling from city to city and using the same props, puppets, masks, and other objects in production after production, many of them get damaged over time and it becomes necessary to repair them. Since most of the objects we manipulate are made of corrugated cardboard and paper mache and thus cannot be expected to withstand years of abuse and B&P can afford to travel neither with a tech crew nor with the paper mache molds and raw materials to make replacement props, it becomes incumbent for the performers to do their own repairs, thus, all performers become somewhat self reliant and many of us make repeated visits to the yellow toolbox kept on a table backstage alongside masks and percussion instruments. Because certain pieces for the Oratorio are assigned to me, it became my responsibility to maintain them in some reasonable working order for the duration of the run.
My chair hat has seen many a show judging by the number of names written on strips of masking tape on the back. The cardboard head band is sound and the support strut that reaches from the back of the head to the tip of the flat cardboard on which a chair has been painted is just fine. However, the cardboard flat is creased and already noticeably bending and flopping during the second night of rehearsal. That night, I mark my name on the back: "IAN CAMBRIDGE 2003" and start the first round of repairs. I take three strips of cardboard and tape them vertically against the back of the chair, careful not to obscure the prior history of this hat/mask. When I realize that the tape is insufficient, I fasten the new cardboard struts with heavy duty staples used to attach posters to telephone poles.
Two nights into the production I realize that the two times the chair hat flies off my head when I leap off the stage during the exit fromt the chairs and wings act is not a fluke. Seeing no elastic bands in the tool kit after the show, I return the next day with elastic that I originally bought for the masks that I had made at home for my own performances. The chair works perfectly for the rest of the production.
Halfway through the run, I see the layers of paper mache on my arm puppet begin to come apart right where one of the support rods attaches. I can't afford to let it come apart in the middle of a show and end up using a bunch of staples and gaffer's tape on the back to hold it together. I hope that a new one can be molded when the company returns to Vermont.
