Bringing poetry to life through puppets Paper Moon Puppet Theatre animates classic fairy tales BY KATHY HALL Correspondent SCOTT PILLING staff James Racioppi (r), artistic director of Paper Moon Puppet Theatre, demonstrates how to manipulate a marionette while puppeteer Eric Hunt watches. Puppets are more than cloth, strings and wood to James Racioppi, artistic and stage director of the Paper Moon Puppet Theatre. “Puppets are a distillation of life — it’s like poetry to me,” said Racioppi, whose puppet theater is based at First Avenue Playhouse in Atlantic Highlands. Racioppi sees puppets and the stagecraft associated with them as physical metaphors. For example, he uses a cloth blown by a fan to represent waves on an ocean. “You see the cloth but you also see the water,” he explained. “The vocabulary for each type of puppet is different,” he added. “Like writing different types of poetry, there are demands and the disciplines. Each type of puppet is just a different type of metaphor.” The element of visual metaphor makes puppets appealing to children and adults alike. Although all puppets are poetic to Racioppi, marionettes, head-to-toe jointed puppets manipulated from above by strings, are his favorites. “They represent an opportunity for a lot of lyricism that you don’t always get with other puppets,” he said. “I love the 3-D element; they move through space … You can do a whole world.” Paper Moon Puppet Theatre takes its name from the Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg song “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which begins, “Say, it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea. But it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” Racioppi’s interest in puppets grew out of a childhood desire to play with dolls. They weren’t acceptable toys for a young boy but puppets were. At the age of 9, he took some books out of the library and built his first puppet, a princess made entirely out of blue cloth. “She even had a blue face,” he recalled. After earning a degree in fine arts, Racioppi began creating puppets professionally. His work has been featured on “The Captain Kangaroo Show,” in films and off-Broadway. In 1971, he designed puppets for and performed in the high camp “Kumquats” with Wayland Flowers and Madame at New York’s Village Gate. Racioppi draws on his skills as a painter, sculptor, actor and craftsman to create Paper Moon productions. He builds the puppets, clothes them in authentic costumes and surrounds them with detailed sets, lighting and music. He also directs the show, choreographs each puppet’s movement to interpret the dialogue and is one of two to three puppeteers that manipulate the puppets during the performance. Each marionette is controlled by a single operator, although one person may work two puppets during the production. Paper Moon’s repertory is based on classic fairy tales, folk tales and fables, subject matter that Racioppi feels is appropriate for puppets. “I don’t think you should use puppets to do things human beings can do better,” he explained. “Human beings give you a more naturalistic view of theater. Puppets shouldn’t be too naturalistic. Classics are distillations that are handed down over time. Puppets can handle extremes.” Paper Moon performances last an hour and each production runs for three months. The shows are designed for children but enchant adults as well. The repertoire currently includes “Hansel and Gretel,” “Beauty & the Beast,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “The Magic Flute.” Racioppi has designed and built between 150 and 200 puppets for Paper Moon, and he is currently building two new shows, “Peter Pan” and “Snow White.” All the sound and dialogue are prerecorded. “If you get the timing right, it looks completely spontaneous,” assured Racioppi. Although the majority of Paper Moon’s puppets are marionettes, Racioppi can build other types of puppets if he needs them, such as the shadow puppets he uses for the ball scene in “Cinderella.” The puppet’s design reflects his interpretation of the story. “Some are more realistic, some more stylized.” he said, “I would not do ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ with the same style puppet as ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ I see as more realistic.” Different puppets have different abilities. Marionettes don’t pick up things as easily as hand puppets, but they excel in graceful movements and flying, according to Racioppi. “For me they are easier to manipulate as far as the dramatic moments go, [and] seeing the full figure to me is very important,” he said. Each puppet is made through trial and error. “You study human movement and interpret it,” he explained. “Where you put a screw determines how an arm will turn — if it moves too much, it will look broken. They are like little machines, 1 millimeter can throw the whole balance off.” There are usually nine to 11 strings on a marionette, including two on the arms, two on the legs, two on the head, one on the nose, one on the back and, if appropriate, one on the tail. If you want a marionette to do something special, you add a special string. They are manipulated by tipping a wooden frame called the control and plucking the strings with the other hand. According to Racioppi, marionettes with conventional human proportions are more difficult to coordinate than shorter, more stylized puppets because the center of balance is different. A human-like puppet’s height is six to seven times the height of its head, while a more stylized puppet may be only three heads high. Racioppi prefers his puppets to be between 18 and 24 inches high, approximately one-third normal human size. “I don’t like the way bigger puppets move,” he said. “There’s more of a pull of gravity on them — you have to pull harder, swing them around more.” Before each performance children interact with the marionettes, and at its conclusion they are introduced to the characters they have just seen. Racioppi believes that the combination of poetry’s visual metaphor and the opportunity for interaction with the puppets produces compelling theater even for today’s video-game generation. “We walk them right out to the floor and they start to talk to the puppets right away,” Racioppi said. “We’re standing there and they don’t look at us. It’s absolutely magical.”