Puppet Theater

In one of the more charged moments of Robert Smythe's haunting and provocative Rocking the Boat, a surgeon draws a pen across a diagram of two joined hearts. The line he traces marks the path his knife will take to separate conjoined twins - an act that will mean a chance at life for one and death for the other. The point of Smythe's production at the Mum Puppettheatre is to remind us that medical issues we tend to think of and discuss as profound moral dilemmas involve matters of the heart, in this instance both figuratively and literally.

On their first day of work earlier this week, this motley crew of European adventurers began its two-week odyssey in Philadelphia carrying chairs from the Marionette Theater to the grounds outside. Then, the 14 volunteers scrubbed them clean. Next came some 1,000 puppets, many of which hadn't seen the light of day in some time. The crew's ultimate mission: Spiffing up and rehabbing the bedraggled Fairmount Park theater on Belmont Mansion Drive. The effort is the brainchild of 33-year-old Queen Village resident Todd Kimmel, a puppet lover and fan of the theater who dug into his pocket to help make the clean-up possible.

Maybe Pinocchio was wrong. Maybe the dream of becoming a real boy was misguided. Nancy Brownstone suggests Pinocchio would have been happier if he had just learned to be content in his own wood. She slips on elbow-high black gloves and is now completely covered in black. Into the darkness, behind a bejeweled lavender puppet stage, she disappears. The velvet curtain parts. Pinocchio's Tale begins as jolly tunes flow from a hand-cranked calliope. Pinocchio, looking dapper in his red shorts and suspenders, chatters and tap dances.

Tu B'Shevat, the Jewish Arbor Day, was celebrated with a program yesterday at Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill. Rabbi Shraga Sherman of the Fiel Jewish Children's Resource Center helped Naomi Hachen, 4, and Joshua Levin, 5, with crafts. Events also included seed plantings, environmental games and a puppet theater.

Jewish history and culture were the focus of a multimedia "traveling museum" that came to Philadelphia last week. "The Great Jewish Experience" featured interactive exhibits, a street fair, a puppet theater and a concert. It was co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Center's Klein Branch and the Lubavitch House.

Children have a playdate with the Sprout Network Saturday for the Super WHY Celebration at the Market & Shops at Comcast Center. Activities include storytime, and children can watch the network's favorite Super WHY episodes. There will be a meet and greet with Super WHY and Princess Presto and photo opportunities. Market merchants will have arts and crafts, kid-friendly lunch specials, an interactive gaming station, and more. Playdate is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.   KidsinCenterCity.com playdate with Sprout: The Super WHY Celebration, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Saturday on the lower level of the Market & Shops at Comcast Center, 1701 JFK Blvd.

The Lord of the Rings, the holiday show that arrived at the Annenberg Center yesterday, is puppet theater but puppet theater on a production scale seen today mostly in Broadway musicals - and perhaps in some of the hi-tech illusions at Disneyland. The musical adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy about questing Hobbits is unsparingly spectacular in the production from Montreal's Theatre sans Fil (Theater Without String). Creatures of ghastly forms and shapes materialize - a giant red man-eating spider; an enormous fat hand with four fingers grasping hungrily in all directions like the monster plant, Audrey II, in Little Shop of Horrors; squads of warriors with stoplight eyes doing battle with flashlight-eyed enemies; a tree with eyes and a protective nature.

Twice this season, puppets have taken us by surprise on the local stage. In The King Stag, which the American Repertory Theater brought to the Annenberg Center early this month, they were part of a world of fable and magic, creating a reality beyond the real. In The Puppetmaster of Lodz, the attraction at the Wilma Theater, puppets serve quite a different purpose, taking us into the lives of the ordinary people who perished in the Holocaust and making the horrors of genocide piercingly immediate and personal.

Listen to Paul Zaloom on casting his current show, My Civilization: "I walk down the street, and I see something, I go to the dump; I go shopping at odd-lot places downtown on Canal Street," near his New York apartment. "If there's not something obvious . . . then I go through my bag of repertoire junk. " That's how Sen. Jesse Helms got cast as a mannequin leg. Once Zaloom has gathered all the inanimate objects for his one-man show - the toys, the goods found around the house, the electrical appliances, the junk and all the rest - it's rehearsal time.

For centuries, puppetry has delighted children and adults worldwide. This weekend, parents and their pint-sized charges can watch a Far Eastern interpretation of the art when the Peking Puppet Theatre opens the Annenberg Center's Theatre for Children series. The Peking Puppet Theatre, which is on its first U.S. tour, has staged more than 10,000 shows since 1955 in the People's Republic of China, where puppet theater is a tradition. Working with highly manuverable rod puppets that range from two to five feet high, puppeteers below stage can create subtle moves in their puppets' bodies, legs, arms, fingers and heads, even the eyes.

Children have a playdate with the Sprout Network Saturday for the Super WHY Celebration at the Market & Shops at Comcast Center. Activities include storytime, and children can watch the network's favorite Super WHY episodes. There will be a meet and greet with Super WHY and Princess Presto and photo opportunities. Market merchants will have arts and crafts, kid-friendly lunch specials, an interactive gaming station, and more. Playdate is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.   KidsinCenterCity.com playdate with Sprout: The Super WHY Celebration, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Saturday on the lower level of the Market & Shops at Comcast Center, 1701 JFK Blvd.

MARIONETTES, animated household objects and faces fit for "Fraggle Rock" set the stage for a "manualfesto" of puppetry at the Walking Fish Theatre, in Kensington, on Saturday. Billed as "puppetry not for children," the "Puppet Manualfesto Fall Showcase" will feature two shows of live work and film, plus music from Walking Fish house band, Up Your Cherry, with Matt and Melissa Dunphy. Think of it as a poetry slam or literary reading - with puppets, said Martina Plag, vice president of the Greater Philadelphia Puppetry Guild and founder of Frankford-based puppet theater company Studium-Praxis, which got a grant from the Puppet Slam Network to fund a series of events that includes the "Fall Showcase.

Basil Twist's Petrushka Basil Twist reprises his 2001 Petrushka , the Punch-and-Judy show-cum-Ballets Russes Stravinsky ballet turned back into puppet theater. He adds brilliant choreographies to his dancing dolls, which even pull off the Kozatsky, those deep-knee-bend Cossack kicks. Wednesday to April 16 at the Annenberg. Pulcinella Alive Pennsylvania Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a notable collaboration, with both on the Verizon Hall stage for a world premiere of Stravinsky's Pulcinella by Boston Ballet's resident choreographer, Jorma Elo. Thursday to next Sunday, Kimmel Center.

On an Oberlin College Web site in 1998, Chris Hayes wrote engagingly about the 25 years since he had graduated in 1973. Even the last few years in Vermont, out of the spotlight. "I teach drama to elementary school children . . . am helping to organize a festival in honor of Calvin Coolidge . . . and perform a solo show for children and adults . . . consisting of Native American coyote stories. " Coyotes, children, and President Calvin Coolidge. Cool. On June 6, Mr. Hayes, 58, of North Pomfret, Vt., program director at the Painted Bride Art Center in Old City from 1981 to 1992, died of prostate cancer at an assisted-living facility in Lebanon, N.H. "He was really a foundation of Philadelphia's performance art and experimental theater," said Gerry Givnish, Painted Bride director from 1969 until 1999.

Robert T. Lenton, 80, a classical musician, painter, craft-store owner, and puppeteer, died of rectal cancer last Sunday at his home in Philadelphia. In a 1979 interview with a Philadelphia columnist, Mr. Lenton voiced concern about the fourth career that he had chosen. "The hardest thing about puppetry is getting people in to see it, the Muppets notwithstanding," he said. "People just forget about puppets once they're out of childhood. They seem foreign and strange to adults.

It's a good time to revive Eug?ne Ionesco's forceful Rhinoceros, which he wrote to show how easily an entire community adapts to a faddish and reprehensible standard - in the case of the 1960 play, fascism. Robert Smythe, Mum Puppettheatre's artistic director and the director of Mum's Rhinoceros revival, has a current example in mind: the Patriot Act and the philosophy that drives it. Rhinoceros, about a community at first resisting or ignoring the beasts, and then willing to join them, is easily about rushing to a new standard - while throwing out the bath water, the baby, and then, finally, yourself.

If the thought of Philadelphia's July Fourth week festivities sends you into an agoraphobic panic, fear not. There are plenty of things you and your family can do away from the city. The Philadelphia Zoo's Zoo on Wheels "Zoo-2-U Live Animal Revue" program will roll into the Keswick Theatre for two shows Wednesday. Laura Warner, the zoo's outreach coordinator, will show off some creatures of the wild as she talks about adaptation and survival. Audience members will look at - but can't touch - a large bird of prey, a large snake, and a porcupine as they learn how animals protect themselves and locate food, water and shelter.

When writers, filmmakers and artists address the Holocaust, they struggle with the dilemma posed by mass slaughter carried out on an incomprehensible scale. Lay out the facts and images in all their enormity and barbarity - as in the great documentary film summation Shoah - and you face the danger of numbing the audience so that death becomes faceless. Distill the horror into individual experience - as in the stage and film versions of The Diary of Anne Frank - and you can be accused of trivializing what happened.

Maybe Pinocchio was wrong. Maybe the dream of becoming a real boy was misguided. Nancy Brownstone suggests Pinocchio would have been happier if he had just learned to be content in his own wood. She slips on elbow-high black gloves and is now completely covered in black. Into the darkness, behind a bejeweled lavender puppet stage, she disappears. The velvet curtain parts. Pinocchio's Tale begins as jolly tunes flow from a hand-cranked calliope. Pinocchio, looking dapper in his red shorts and suspenders, chatters and tap dances.

In Friedrich D?rrenmatt's play The Visit, a fabulously wealthy woman returns to her hometown in Germany and offers it $1.8 billion, half for the government and half to be split among the townspeople, on the condition that the lover who betrayed her 40 years earlier is killed. Admittedly, it's a plot of writerly invention rather than plausible actuality, but the initial sense of incredibility it engenders soon vanishes as D?rrenmatt develops the idea into an engrossing fable that explores issues of vengeance, justice, the power of money, the nature of community and redemption.