Three years ago, Robert Smythe moved Mum Puppettheatre from West Chester, its home of many years, to Manayunk — a place, he told the Inquirer, “where people can find us.”

Despite support from the suburbs, Mum had a hard time luring audiences from Center City. Last spring, when Smythe performed a segment from his critically acclaimed When The War Is Over at the Painted Bride, “More people saArgottw that excerpt in three performances than in the 15 we gave in Manayunk.” Add the big crowds Mum’s Son of Fantoccini drew during the Fringe, and the message was clear: the company needed to move downtown.

“You go to Manayunk to have dinner,” says Smythe. “People who go to Manayunk are self-selecting to not go to a place where there’s a play.”

So this fall, as Mum actively seeks a Center City home, Smythe is giving Center City audiences plenty of chances to see his work.

His actor-and-puppet production of Larry Gelbart’s timely Washington political satire Mastergate opened last week at InterAct. On Monday, his voice will be all over the Barrymores — for the second year in a row, he’s writing the awards show’s script. From Oct. 28-Nov. 1, he’s performing When The War Is Over at the Wilma Theater, in a co-presentation that’s a first for both the Wilma and for Mum. Add a reprise of Mum’s Velveteen Rabbit opening Nov. 27 at Theater Double’s new space at 1619 Walnut, followed by Smythe’s second guest directing gig of the year, Charlotte’s Web at the Arden, and you get a portrait of the artist as a very busy, and very visible, young man. (He also designed the ticketing software that the Theater Alliance of Philadelphia adapted for their new StageTix ticket-by-mail program — it’s a system he dreamed up while killing time in hotel rooms during Mum tours.)

Wilma Managing Director Teresa Eyring says she was “blown away” when she saw When the War Is Over at the Bride. (She’s not alone: reviews of previous stagings of the piece, in which Smythe pays tribute to his two grandfathers, have called it “lovely” and “heartrending.”) The timing was good; the Wilma, after two years in its Broad Street home, was looking for ways to share its big new theater, and Smythe “was the first person we thought of.” (The Wilma will share in the proceeds but won’t charge rent.)

Smythe, 38, is ruefully accustomed to the double whammy of achievement and oblivion. This spring he won a Guggenheim fellowship — one of only 168 recipients in the country, and the only performing artist. Yet city press coverage was minimal, except for a botched item in the Philadelphia Inquirer that failed to include him in a list of area winners (he was mentioned in a correction the next day). He’s a highly decorated puppeteer, but he’s never been invited to the prestigious Henson Festival in New York. A five-time Barrymore winner, he’s never won a Pew Fellowship (though a less well-known local puppeteer, Joseph Cashore, has). He’s won rave reviews for Mum’s shows for adults, but his company couldn’t survive without workshops and school visits. And he has a long memory for critical slights (during our conversation he mentions a negative City Paper review from 1989).

But, he says, he decided to become a puppeteer when he was 5 years old (“before the Muppets were invented”): “I’m not doing it only if I get a good review.”

In fact, he says, early pans just stiffened his resolve to continue — and he came back with the enthusiastically received From the Ashes.

To some degree, Smythe was just a little ahead of his time. Though the notion of puppetry for adults still confuses some (“We get a lot of phone calls for birthday parties”), puppets now star in Broadway hits (Julie Taymor’s The Lion King) and get their own festivals (like Philadelphia’s Full-On).

Yet Smythe’s puppets, unlike the extravagant creations of Taymor, are often disarmingly simple — a ball on a stick in Fantoccini, a Mastergate senator represented by a head that’s one big jowl.

“I have lots of theories that human beings are so desperately lonely for any kind of life, we’ll anthropomorphize anything,” suggests Smythe. “So the most successful puppets look least real.”

Mastergate posed some new challenges for Smythe — for instance, working with a company of actors who in some cases weren’t experienced in puppetry.

But his biggest hurdle was learning to work with someone else’s words.
Many of his own pieces do away with words altogether (hence the name Mum), so having to stick to a script (as he must also do for Charlotte’s Web) can be a pain. In a word, he says, “it sucks.”

(That said, Mastergate’s best moments marry words with gesture in inspired fashion — just watch Hayden Saunier’s hands during her masterfully meaningless Congressional testimony).

Come spring, Smythe returns to his own turf, theatrically speaking; with the help of the Guggenheim and grants from the NEA and the Pew’s Philadelphia Theatre Initiative, he’s embarking on an investigation of the world of spiritualism in a piece called Seance.

It’s one more step in the continuing growth of Mum. Once it was a founder-driven, virtually one-man operation; now, although it’s still “the smallest theater organization in the Theater Alliance,” Smythe is working with three full-time staffers, a budget of slightly more than $200,000 — and shows that feature more than one actor.

“It’s a big, big year,” acknowledges Smythe. “We’re becoming an overnight success.”