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Hard Headed Heart
Redmoon founder Thomas’s idiosyncratic puppet work gets a fine showing in this collection of three short works, even if the pieces’ tones are unevenly matched. Performed on three self-contained, Thomas-designed mobile sets that line the rear of the stage at Victory Gardens’ studio theater, each moving down center as needed, the pieces showcase a wide range of puppetry styles.
In the first piece, Federico García Lorca’s satiric The Puppet Show of Don Cristobal, Thomas uses Punch-and-Judy–esque hand puppets, punctuating the action on a drum kit. While Thomas’s one-man-band work here is impressive, the manic slapstick of both Catherine Brown’s translation and Thomas’s characterizations is soon wearying.
Matters improve with the second piece, St. James Infirmary, based on the traditional New Orleans dirge. Here Thomas becomes a literal one-man band, using audio loops to accompany himself on drums, trombone and toy piano before singing the lost-love tune, which he performs with astoundingly expressive marionettes (by Jesse Mooney-Bullock) and a scrolling pictorial narrative. Though the sound mix makes it difficult to hear the lyrics, the visuals fully convey the story. The evening’s third piece, The Blackbird, inspired by Wallace Stevens’s poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” is all visual. It has Thomas cranking four backlit, illustrated scrolls and projecting shadow puppets, depicting stages of a couple’s relationship to the recorded strains of Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 4. Thomas’s quietest piece is also his most evocative.
