Toys are us

“This coffee’s not strong enough,” grumbles Redmoon Theater’s veteran associate artistic director, Frank Maugeri, as he stares down at the tiny proscenium of his toy theater, plotting the next precise move of a three-inch puppet. It is 10:15am on a Thursday at Redmoon Central, the company’s 18,000-square-foot warehouse headquarters, workshop and performance space in West Town, and Maugeri needs a caffeinated kick in the ass. He’s had consecutive sleepless nights tending to his two-month-old twins. And in three hours, the four-person cast of his bold new 2-D miniature projected puppet fairy tale Once Upon a Time (or the Secret Language of Birds) will perform the first complete run-through after two weeks of rehearsals. As the title suggests, Joe Meno’s script for Once Upon a Time makes use of many familiar fairy-tale tropes. But, as can be expected of Redmoon, the form through which Maugeri delivers the story is innovative and technically ambitious. After the disappearance of all the world’s birds—whose songs cause people to dream—the central character, Emily, a lonely young girl from an industrialized American city in the 1920s, and her neighbor Bruno, a dejected wrestler, go on an odyssey to try to save humanity from dreamlessness.

The centerpiece of the production is the elaborate hand-crank toy theater designed by Erik Newman. As Emily and Bruno make their way past the city’s skyscrapers, through the zoo and into the urban outskirts where they come upon an abandoned clock factory, the toy theater unfurls to reveal multiple backdrops, hidden compartments and even tinier stages. The three puppeteers don bowler hats and fingerless gloves, while talented Lindsey Noel Whiting, who also starred in Redmoon’s The Cabinet, impressively provides all the voices. The toy-theater performance is then filmed by two video cameras and projected onto a large, framed screen on the wall behind the toy theater, creating a live puppet cartoon.

“Those mediums in combination,” Maugeri says, “ are so hypnotizing…And if you are a really conscious viewer, I think that you understand that the mediums are speaking to one another.” Considering a small-scale, Old World medium like miniature theater is being placed under a magnifying glass by modern technology, Once Upon a Time’s devil is certainly in the details. But Maugeri—who directed a similar miniature puppet projection piece, Jane and the End of Time, at Collaboraction’s Sketchbook 2005 and had much recent success directing the small-scale puppetry of Redmoon’s The Cabinet—is a stickler for the small stuff. “It’s like, okay, move Emily an inch from that garbage can and lean her a little bit. I thought very carefully about where that garbage can is and where she is.”

At one point during rehearsal, Maugeri, playwright Meno and assistant director Seth Bockley spend 25 minutes trying to perfect the choreography of a 25-second zoo scene in which a jazzbo bird gives Emily and Bruno a clue as to where all the birds have gone. As the trench coat–clad wise-guy bird enters from a crocodile’s mouth to a bopping jazz beat, the puppeteers look and listen for Maugeri’s input. “How about a slide there,” he tells them. He’s suddenly very awake, a living embodiment of the puppet, arching his legs and snapping his fingers like a big-band leader prowling the stage. “The crocodile’s mouth closed too fast…okay, a turn there, now,” Maugeri says, abruptly twisting around on his stocky 38-year-old frame. Puppeteer Matt Parker does the same with his bird. At the same time, Maugeri keeps a close watch on the blown-up video on the projection screen. “There’s too much stage in the frame right now,” he tells the cameraman several times during rehearsal.

When it’s finally time for the first run-through, Maugeri emphasizes to everyone in the room that he’s looking for effective storytelling not perfection. And after 70 minutes he’s pleased, yet aware that his days of creating meticulous puppet choreography, getting inadequate sleep and drinking weak coffee won’t soon be through.

“It’s exhausting, but in a good way,” he says about the business of helping three-inch pieces of wood come to life on a tiny stage. “But there are two types of exhaustion: the exhaustion you feel when you’re defeated and the type you feel when you’ve successfully run a marathon.”

Once Upon a Time (or the Secret Language of Birds) plays at Redmoon Central.