Bobbindoctrin puppets target adults

Two veiled women in unrelieved black Victorian garb sip tea in their parlor when they receive a prank phone call from an evil mer-man.

What makes the scene even stranger, the ladies -- and one might assume, the mer-man -- are puppets about 18 inches tall, each manipulated in the tiny stage setting by puppet masters who are also veiled and dressed in funereal costume.

"It's about the sea, loss, femininity and women who drink a lot of soup -- and a Mr. Bride, who may have died. Or not," said Jenny Campbell, 24, a Montrose-area resident who co-authored and co-directed the 25-minute piece, Why Do the Children Rust?

Scheduled at 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Jan. 24 at Helios, 411 Westheimer, the play is the latest offering from Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre, which for eight years has been offering adult puppet plays in Houston's more nontraditional venues. These include lawns and parking garages to the Atomic Café, the Axiom, DiverseWorks.

Like other productions that rely on Bobbindoctrin's puppet building, the new show is darkly humorous and even mysterious in its theme, but definite in its audience. This is no fairy tale for children. It has been written and designed for the theater company's regular audience.

"We usually get a younger mix, but we do get a variety of people. Some are in their 60s. We run the gamut," said Bobbindoctrin's founder, Joel Orr, 34, a Heights resident.

The current show features four female puppeteers, the lead puppets manipulated by the play's authors/directors -- Campbell, a 2001 Sarah Lawrence College graduate, and Yelena "Lenni" Zhelezov, a puppet sculptor and University of Houston theater senior who came to the United States from Russia with an early 1990's Soviet-U.S. seamstress exchange program.

The two have collaborated on writing, directing, puppet-building and performing as puppeteers before in The Edge of Space! Living Room & Perils of Ambition.

The current production features special effects including the manipulation of puppet Aqualung, a turn-of-the-century diver, who can be heard breathing heavily through his air tube. A three-tiered cardboard set of waves created by Bobbindoctrin's founding technical director, Dennis Clay, moves in alternate directions, with or without five puppets bobbing amongst or below them at any one time during the play.

While the play might not be what season-ticket holders at Houston's Theater Under the Stars are familiar with -- or what patrons of The Alley or Jones Hall productions normally expect -- it has a way to go before it reaches the experimental levels of some previous offerings.

In the Garage Years, bundles of old and new one-act plays mostly written by Orr.

Included in those plays are Don't Beat Your Children Before They're Born in which a man raises sheep to fund a courtship that will supply him with much-longed-for children. But bad at his job, he starves, then beats to death the livestock, which he sees as his insolent sons, before he dies and graphically decomposes.

R.I.P Van Winkle, based on the story by Washington Irving, is one of Bobbindoctrin's non-scripted improvisations, where Van Winkle asks fellow bar patrons provide varying retorts to his questions about what technological advancements have taken place since he began his long nap.

No Vocab Man, in the play of the same name, is ridiculed by his friends because he can only speak in sound effects and a few conjunctions. When he begins to speak, his friends don't alter their attacks, proving to him that they never listened in the first place.

Orr's favorite, The Black Box, tells the tale of a family that is happy until dad disappears in a plane crash, his last horrific words preserved in the black box recorder. The recorder is given to his son, who plays it as his mom is driven insane.

"I wish I had 20 more like that," Orr said. "When we first started out, we did shows that can be produced everywhere, nightclubs, cafés, garages, on portable sets."

Orr got his bachelor's degree from the University of Houston in English literature after studying under playwright Edward Albee. Orr once asked the great playwright -- author of The Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? -- why his first attempt at creating a play for puppets had been deemed worthy of Albee's critique in the first place.

Albee told him "it was just wrong-headed enough to be interesting," Orr said.

Since then, most of his plays have been comedies involving satire, some "irredeemably bleak," and some seen as mean-spirited, he said.

Puppet theater has advantages and disadvantages over traditional plays featuring human beings in the spotlights, but it is generally less serious or demanding.

"The actors come pre-built," said Orr, who has taken on the role of producer in Bobbindoctrin's latest effort.

Most of Bobbindoctrin's audiences are regulars and know what to expect from the group. For first-timers, though, Orr said, the group's brand of theater can be something like a sucker-punch, Orr said.

For others, like Zhelezov, it's an opening to new, constantly experimental worlds.

"I came to a production of Garage Years and I was so fascinated by it -- by object theater, objects performing -- that at the end, I came up to Joel and asked him what I could do, " said Zhelezov, 25, an Eastwood-area resident who has been studying for a bachelor of arts in theater arts design.

Troy Scheid, 24, another puppeteer dressed in funeral black during the current show, got involved with the group through Zhelezov. The two were in a design class when Zhelezov showed Scheid a drawing of a puppet she wanted to make. Scheid, who had been in the Rice Players at Rice University, where she is completing a bachelor's degree in history, wanted to know more.

"We're a collaborative effort," said Scheid, a resident of the South Hampton area near Rice.

Zhelezov found that she not only liked the work of making puppets, writing and directing shows, she also liked being a part of Houston's experimental theater family, which extends to casts and crews at Infernal Bridegroom Productions and other venues.

"We're all friends," she said.

"We share an approach to the theater that's adventurous and fun," Orr said. "People who are willing to branch out."

Puppetry styles can range from simple hand, shadow or table-top to partially masked puppeteers above a curtain rod, a position from which they manipulate the objects on a stage below.

"We traditionally use a mix of styles," Orr said.

A large part of what Bobbindoctrin does when not producing a show is to educate people about puppets, puppet building and its history, a tutorial done through the group's education department.

A weekly workshop on puppet building and writing plays for puppet theater is scheduled to begin soon at the Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts in the Sixth Ward, Orr said.

With each show attracting more people than the last, he and other puppeteers for Bobbindoctrin are not sorry about their chosen career.

"It's fun," said Zhelezov.

"It's a lot of work," Orr said. "But it's a hoot."

For more information about Bobbindoctrin's current or upcoming events, write Bobbindoctrin, 3201 Allen Parkway, Suite 150, Houston, 77019, or log on to www.bobbindoctrin.org.