Also this issue:

Learning to Fly
Shelley Spector chats about her life, her art and her upcoming show.
-Robin Rice

Boxed In
In a story of a con man turned boxer, Darin Strauss loses sight of the core of truth.
-Justin Bauer

First Friday Focus
The Galleries at Moore | Temple Gallery | Ashley Gallery
-Lori Hill

Blind Date
Two artists are grouped together for an exhibit at Seraphin Gallery.
-Robin Rice

East Meets Midwest
Wisconsin artist T.L. Solien is featured in two gallery shows this month.
-Susan Hagen

June 6-12, 2002

theater

Sinking Ship

by Toby Zinman

Rocking the BoatThrough June 15, Mum Puppettheatre, 115 Arch St., 215-925-7686

It begins with a tiny fire in the far distance, across the water. A tiny person appears on a raft. Then, closer to us, there’s a farmer who hoes the soil, and crops grow. Two pigs are repeatedly chased away. A woman appears with her daughters, who are conjoined twins. They are happy. The sun is shining. Then they are sick. Then they fly away with a doctor who will separate them. All of these wordless characters are puppets created and wielded by Robert Smythe, who has been influenced by both Vietnamese water puppetry and his own fascination with conjoined twins.

I have seen Vietnamese water puppetry: It is an ancient art in which the puppeteers stand in waist-deep water and manipulate with astonishing speed and dexterity tiny puppets attached to bamboo poles; they fly and they swim, and it is strange and festive.

Rocking the Boat is anything but. It is mournful, slow beyond bearing, stupefyingly repetitious, sentimental, self-important and self-indulgent. And the puppets -- hand puppets in this case -- are clumsily manipulated with neither skill nor subtlety. And since the two girls are represented by many puppets of different sizes, I found it difficult to figure out who was who, and why, for instance, the babies were as big as their father (grandfather?) or why they got larger and smaller at various times.

That the story of these twins who are joined at the heart (get it?) is set in Vietnam (which I gather from the costumes and the bamboo plants framing the tiny stage) seems pointless, although Smythe seems to want to suggest some political commentary. (And what any of this has to do with Cuban boy Elián González, as the director's notes in the program suggest, beats me.) The metaphoric idea suggested by surgically separating conjoined twins, of losing part of yourself, is left undeveloped.

The song "La Vie en Rose" is played over and over again in the hour-and-a-quarter of the show's duration, while puppets move in a crude dance; this was topped only by the melodramatic clue music (including a shameless "Kyrie Eleison") played the rest of the time. There are projections on a side screen of fertilized eggs joining catastrophically. In a lit window, next to the stage, there is a long, crass demo by live hands of the surgeon's plans for separating the twins. Everything is shown to us at least three times -- literally -- making what might have been effective once merely irritating.

There are several moments of poignancy, where the image of grief seems both beautiful and moving, but most of the time, people in the audience were looking at their watches, sighing and fanning themselves in the hot, cramped theater.

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