“Do-do-do-do-do,” Elmo sings tunelessly, stealing glances off-camera. He wants the attention of someone you can’t see. He cuts a familiar figure on your Instagram feed—an ovoid head and body wrapped in crimson fur, two globular eyes, a tangerine pear-shaped nose, and a half-moon toothless grin. 

As the video plays on, Elmo’s frustration is mounting—he is actually shaking. Will he burst into song? Will he break the tension with his signature peals of laughter? 

Finally, he erupts. 

“Notice me, mo—f—er!” 

We’re obviously not on Sesame Street. 

There’s definitely an appeal in puppetry that’s clearly meant for grown-ups, as over two million views on the rogue Elmo’s Instagram reel attest. Avenue Q, the musical parody of Sesame Street with adult topics and very adult humour, has already had over 6,500 shows since its debut in 2003. Puppet theatre for adults is often funny and cheeky, or at least, surprising and unexpected. 

Many of us, now deep in the throes of adulthood, were brought up on a steady diet of Sesame Street and other puppet-centered edutainment programmes airing on television after school. Puppets were the affable, benign companions who taught us the alphabet and numbers, and they remain firmly rooted in our childhoods. 

Arts writer Kenneth Kwok notes that traditional puppetry forms across Asia, such as Indonesian wayang, hold a more “elevated status” and tend to be “targeted at adults and families rather than children specifically”. 

But for today’s grown-ups who may have been weaned on puppetry in their formative years, this childhood artform may yet again be the perfect vehicle to look at challenging topics in a safe manner, create connections with others, and offer the opportunity to introspect and reflect. 

Exploring death, safely

Famous Puppet Death Scenes does exactly what it says on the tin—it’s a series of vignettes in which puppets meet their ends in a variety of ways. Some deaths are horrific—there are body parts, blood and entrails. There are funny deaths, such as a puppet who tries in vain to escape a monstrous fist but is squished by it into oblivion. And some deaths are poignant—an elderly male puppet simply stares off into the distance, knowing his time has come. 

This fiendishly inventive puppet production is the brainchild of Canadian puppet theatre company The Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Inspiration came from an earlier production of the puppet fable Pinocchio, during which Old Trout elected to have Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio’s wisecracking companion, bludgeoned to death with a hammer. And the audience, though shocked at first, loved it! 

The logical step forward, then, was to create an entire show of puppet deaths. Famous Puppet Death Scenes was devised in 2006 and premiered the following year at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Since then, the show has toured internationally, with reviewers lauding the multifarious and creative ways the puppets are offed. 

But far from being a puppet snuff fest, there is a more noble intention behind Famous Puppet Death Scenes. Peter Balkwill, one of the co-founders of Old Trout, maintains that the puppet theatre show is a safe way to explore death. That’s because a puppet exists simultaneously as an object manipulated by a puppeteer, and as a representation of something more abstract. 

In an interview with dcist, Balkwill says,

In his essay The Co-Presence and Ontological Ambiguity of the Puppet, puppetry scholar Paul Prisis writes that in a puppet performance, “because [the audience’s] imagination never fully takes over perception”, there is a “distancing effect” between what the audiences sees onstage and what the performance is portraying. 

In Famous Puppet Death Scenes, audiences are able to watch puppets die funny, tragic or gruesome deaths over and over again. It’s arguably more palatable than watching human actors playing the same scenes, and definitely much easier than dealing with death in real life. Puppet theatre allows us to confront things from a safe distance that may otherwise be too difficult and challenging to be faced head-on. 

But puppet theatre doesn’t just offer safety in separation; it also builds connections. 

An Exercise in Empathy

“The puppet is an empathy machine.” 

That is what Nick Lehane, a New York-based puppeteer, tells the New City Stage when discussing his emotive puppet performance, Chimpanzee, and the way it helps audiences feel compassion for animals. 

Chimpanzee is about a chimpanzee living in isolation in a biomedical facility. There is no dialogue, just a sole puppet manipulated by two to three puppeteers. Over the course of the show, the puppet chimpanzee visibly experiences a wide gamut of emotions, from sadness and loneliness, to boredom and lethargy, to anger and frustration. It even has hallucinations brought on by drug testing, deluged by memories of better times in the care of humans. 

Lehane was inspired to create Chimpanzee after coming across stories about cross-fostering experiments in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. In these experiments, baby chimpanzees were raised by human families and taught American Sign Language to communicate with their carers. When the experiments ended, the chimpanzees were sent off to labs to become biomedical test subjects. 

Lehane first devised a 15-minute version of Chimpanzee in 2013, and later expanded it into a full-length production that premiered in New York in 2019. 

A review of Chimpanzee for Berkshire Fine Arts speaks of the empathy-inducing quality of puppet theatre: “We subconsciously know that [the puppeteers] are investing the feeling in this creature carved of papier mache and painted in a pleasing gold brown… Somehow the magic of the talented puppeteers Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck and Emma Wiseman moves us as though we were the chimp.” 

Indeed, all puppetry performances have the capacity to encourage empathy in its audiences. In an online lecture delivered at Lesley University in 2021, Lehane explains how puppets are empathy machines with one of the fundamental principles of puppetry—breath. 

Through sheer movement alone, a puppeteer can make a puppet appear to be breathing. Furthermore, the manner in which the puppet breathes is able to communicate a whole host of emotions, such as slow, laboured breaths to indicate grief, or fast, quick breaths to signal excitement. When audiences recognise emotions in a puppet, it is an exercise in empathy. 

Puppet theatre shows like Chimpanzee help adults to strengthen our empathy muscles by giving us the opportunity to understand and connect with others, even when they’re not human. 

But what about understanding and reconnecting with ourselves? 

A hard look at ourselves

When the puppet theatre production Twisted was staged in 2005 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, it was billed as “Singapore’s first puppet performance for adults”. 

Twisted was created and produced by The Finger Players, a Singaporean puppet theatre company, which previously only created children’s puppet shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2004, The Finger Players decided to create puppet theatre shows for adults, with Twisted being one of their earliest efforts. 

Twisted is mainly about a man who falls into a literal hole at five different stages of his life. The story is told without any dialogue with a variety of puppets, including rod puppets and shadow puppetry. From a toddler playing with a ball to an old man at death’s door, the protagonist puppet falls into the hole and somehow finds his way out. 

But one common observation amongst reviews of Twisted is the juvenile quality of the production, which appears at odds with its for-adults billing. Reviewers often used the word “simple” to describe the show’s plain and direct storytelling. Matthew Lyon, reviewing for The Flying Inkpot, even remarks that the show “seemed almost like a children’s fable, a simple bedtime story” and its puppetry work presenting “tiny moments of magic”. 

However, the child-like nature of the production seems to be by design. A clue comes from the Twisted programme booklet, which comes across like a Shel Silverstein children’s book with whimsical line drawings and simple verse. 

Perhaps the association with childhood is advantageous. Children’s puppet theatre and its stories are often allegorical and moralistic—they are intended to teach the young and therefore direct with their intended lessons. Writer Katherine Rundell notes in The Guardian that children’s fiction “necessitates distillation; at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy [and] fear.” 

Rundell writes, “Children’s stories arm adults against those necessary compromises and heartbreaks that life involves: to remind them that there are and always will be great, sustaining truths to which we can return.” 

In this view, Twisted is deceptively profound in its explorations of navigating the pitfalls of adult life. The candid, universal nature of its storytelling and the childish enchantments of its puppetry are almost confronting to its grown-up audiences, who will find the experiences of the male puppet immediately recognisable with their own. The show presents an invitation to look back and reflect on one’s own life. 

Puppet theatre also offers us the promise that one can be both an adult and a child at the same time. It allows us the boundless freedom of imagination, co-existing with the joys and burdens of adulting. It is that safe space where we experience both dreams and nightmares, live lives far removed from our own, and delve deep into our insecurities and vulnerabilities. 

Maybe Elmo was right. We should notice him. Puppets do have a lot left to teach us, long after childhood. 

Catch Chimpanzee by Nick Lehane from 26 – 28 May 2023 and Famous Puppet Death Scenes by The Old Trout Puppet Workshop from 2 – 4 June 2023 at Flipside 2023.