at the intersection of study and practice lies …

Martina Plag demonstrates how puppets’ eyes are carved deeply into their skulls so as to convey emotion.

Mum Puppettheatre’s production of The Master and Margarita opened last week (our review is forthcoming), but before it opened, I was invited to Mum’s basement to see how the dozens of puppets needed for the production would take shape.

It’s key to remember that, despite the title of this article, Mum is a puppettheatre: one that presents legitimate works of theatre with puppets. No kindergarten-like puppet shows here: even the “family” shows have a certain degree of artistry and craft that you wouldn’t find at a kid’s birthday party.

And it’s not like watching an episode of Sesame Street, either. In fact, says Mum’s puppet designer Martina Plag, “talking puppets are about the only kind of puppets we don’t make here.” The only talking puppet to appear on Mum’s stage, to her knowledge at least, was a found one: a giant bird that appeared in The Fantoccini Brothers Return during the 2007 PLAF. But the hand puppets, the trick puppets, the Chinese rod puppets, even the marionettes you see onstage during a Mum production are all made on site.

For some productions, like last season’s The Fantasticks, this is an easier feat, with only about a dozen characters in the play. But The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1967 (it was published posthumously after a thirty-seven year ban) novel, has hundreds of characters, making Plag’s work a little harder. Although director Adrienne Mackey cut many characters from her adaptation, The Master and Margarita was still an overwhelming task for Mum Puppettheatre.

So, how does one go about making dozens of puppets by hand?

Above: The original designs for the Master and Margarita puppets, drawn to scale. The photo of Robert DaPonte is pasted over the Master’s head because the puppet’s face would later be crafted to resemble him. Below, right: The design for Azazello, one of the “grotesque toys” accompanying Woland.

Plag, educated not as a puppetmaker but as an architect, approaches the design and construction of her puppets as you’d expect someone with her background would. The designs are all drawn to scale (in exact size, if possible, and typically, at least in the case of the human puppets, in normal human proportions) before initial construction can begin. Drawings must be approved by the director of the play, and often, the actors are consulted to be sure that they will be comfortable with both the mechanisms being used and the weight of the materials employed in the construction.

After designs are approved, the actors begin rehearsing with dummy puppets—that is to say, puppets that can be maneuvered more or less like the final puppets with which they will be working—and Plag and her volunteers and interns can get down to work. They try to get the puppets into the actors’ hands as quickly as possible, however, because each handcrafted puppet moves differently. For instance, she tells me, during one production, they had a puppet “whose wrist just flopped, all on its own. The actor figured out how to make it work for emphasis, and the audience loved it. But any other puppet? It couldn’t do that.”

On the left, each shaded region represents a “layer” of the puppet’s face. Each layer is created individually, like a slice of the head, and then the three layers are put together. Finishing touches, including the covering of any lines indicating where the layers start and stop, are done by hand. The face (seen completed on the right), like most other faces crafted at Mum, is asymmetrical so that each side can convey a different emotion and catch and reflect light differently.

For The Master and Margarita, the completion of some puppets was easier than others: the Satanic Woland’s retinue was mostly composed of modified toys, and the puppets in the toy theater are mounted one-dimensional drawings – but the human-like puppets had to be carefully and uniquely created by hand. The rod puppets in the “Pilate” scenes of the play were carved in wood and covered in leather, then carefully jointed so as to lend a degree of elegance to their movement. But the most complex puppets to create for the show, it seems, are the “tabletop” puppets that appear in the “now” of the play, which is to say 1930s Russia.

Although their foam bodies are essentially made in a one-size-fits-all kind of way, with adjustments made for body type and puppet size, each neoprene head is sculpted by hand in three layers. The layers are designed in profile: first one cheek, jaw, and eye socket, then the nose and chin, then the other cheek, jaw, and eye. (See image immediately above.) After the layers are completed, they are fit together and their seams smoothed over until the head seems to be one cohesive piece, and shaping is done to the face overall. Although psychology tells us that a perfectly symmetrical face is a sign of beauty, “that doesn’t work onstage with puppets,” says Plag. From the audience it’s often hard to tell that the sides of the face don’t match one another, but the effect works. “I make one side with angles and one side with curves. That way, if I turn him this way, the feeling is different than if I turn him that,” she explained, demonstrating how the curved side of the face gave a gentler, more feminine feel to the puppet, and the angular side appeared more masculine and harsh. “People say all the time that they think they see their faces moving, maybe that they see the puppets wink.” This, she continues, is probably because Mum rarely gives eyes to their puppets, opting instead for deep-set eyes under a heavy brow (see top image in this piece) that simultaneously dissipate the puppet’s gaze and make it seem as if the puppet can actually focus on the people or puppets with whom he is speaking. “We suspend reality, but we also infuse a lot of reality into these puppets.”

On the left, a demonstration of how a rubber mold for a puppet’s hand is created. On the right, two neoprene puppet heads are mounted onto their foam bodies.Details are then added to the puppets: if they are meant to resemble wood, for instance, as they are in The Master and Margarita, Plag applies a carving tool to the neoprene that makes the rubber look grained and rough, as if it had been carved by hand. “People would have been making these by hand in Russia back then, with wood and a sharp knife,” she said, explaining Mum’s aesthetic choice for this production. Hands are made from polyurethane poured into rubber casts (traditionally, they’re made from leather, clay, or wood—”Things that have been alive”—but this process saves a great deal of time and effort and “is easy for the volunteers to help with”), and then both hands and head are affixed to their foam bodies.

After the puppet construction is completed, there’s nothing left to do but dress the puppets. Because, says Plag, “you can’t really change a puppet’s clothes,” several variations of any character requiring costume changes are created, and the actors change puppets accordingly, rather than having to redress them in the dark. All costumes are sewn on-site, specifically for the production.

Before the puppets are officially completed, they’re given back to the actors for rehearsal. Both they and their directors take note of what works and doesn’t work, often sending the puppets back downstairs for tweaks. “Sometimes, we’re still building and changing through previews,” Plag said. It’s the price to pay for perfection.

All photos by author, with thanks to Martina Plag and Judy Walker.