Pulling the strings

When puppeteer Meredith Miller says, “A lot of people have this idea of puppeteers as controlling people who want to make their own worlds they can live in,” a number of examples of this familiar trope spring to mind: from Fantastic Four villain the Puppet Master to The Puppetmaster of Lodz. Charles Traeger’s Rhymes with Evil, receiving its Midwest premiere in a production by InFusion Theatre Company, presents another. In Traeger’s play, a father creates puppets as a way of connecting with his daughter.

On a warm, recent day at Navy Pier, while on break from her day job at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Miller tells us about her puppet designs for the show. “He lives in a fantasy world and contains himself in his house with his memory of his daughter, who’s no longer alive [though] he believes she is,” Miller says. “So they’re characters themselves, but they’re also created by a character in the show. That’s something I have to take into consideration.”

In 1998, the Ann Arbor native moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute, where she had her first exposure to puppetry, working with Blair Thomas as an intern at Redmoon Theater. “I really only took the internship because one of my roommates said it was a cool theater that did these cool things in Logan Square around Halloween,” she recalls. Yet Miller continued to work with Redmoon for several years.

“What’s interesting about puppetry is you’re coming up with a narrative, you’re doing character design, you’re doing sculpture, painting, sewing, engineering,” says Miller, now 28, who’s also worked on puppetry for Victory Gardens and Chicago Children’s Theatre. “It incorporates all of the elements that go into a theatrical production to invent something show specific but that also shows your own design aesthetic.”

The soft-spoken designer—it seems incongruous that she also does burlesque, performing as Claire de Lune—describes her creations for Rhymes with Evil as “rooted in puppetry traditions.” The script calls for, among other things, a pair of Punch and Judy–style marionettes, a ventriloquist’s dummy and a couple of life-size dolls meant to look like the play’s actors.

Her materials run the gamut. “I sort of grab whatever’s at hand,” she says, rattling off an abridged list of items she’s using for InFusion: papier-mâché, plaster, latex, foam, tin foil, Sculpey, hot glue and contact cement.

“Until they’re finished, they look pretty bizarre—there’s, like, 15 different colors: insulation over here, bright-green foam over there, a bit of old T-shirt,” she says. “The head [might be] papier-mâchéd out of half paper towels and half newspapers.”

She uses the same skills at CST, where her job title is costume crafts and props artisan. “In general, it’s hats and swords and sword belts. Anything that’s worn but isn’t exactly a garment,” she explains, though she does get the occasional puppet-related task. She created the parrot Iago for this summer’s Disney’s Aladdin. And for the current Richard III, “I did some work on the bleeding corpse of King Henry,” she says. “Here I end up doing a lot of gory stuff—severed head making, that sort of thing.”

While she works collaboratively, directors and other designers are often hands-off when it comes to puppetry. “People tend to think puppets are pretty mysterious and that I have all these secrets locked in my brain that they could never understand,” she muses. The reality is much simpler: “If you have a pile of cloth and some trash on a stick and you’re able to make it move like an antelope, that’s stunning.”

Rhymes with Evil starts previews Monday 5 at the Storefront Theater.

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