Other Hand Productions

Made by Mary Robinette Kowal and Fred Riley III

Tales of Japan was the first show I did when I worked at Tears of Joy. It was made up of two stories. The Gift was a short piece, about fifteen years old, done on tabletop. The Teakettle of Good Fortune was just a title when I was hired. Fortunately, when I had been very small my father had brought a book of Japanese fairy tales back from a business trip, and Teakettle was one of my favorites. The other piece of Good Fortune was that my partner at the time, Fred Riley, was a good puppet builder.

Since we didn’t have much time we built the show in the style of puppetry most familiar to us; moving-mouth. The priest in the photo is a live hand puppet, which means that one of my hands is in his mouth and the other is in a glove acting as his hand. His other had was sympathetically strung. That means very simply that it’s stuffed. A string runs from the live hand to a pin at the base of the puppet’s neck and then back down to the stuffed hand. So you get some movement from both hands.

This is Gerta and Moo from Other Hand Productions’ the Snow Queen. This play was originally developed for Tapestry Theater.

Gerta and Moo are made almost entirely out of paper. Their costumes are cloth but other than that…they are paper. For the faces, I used a Paper Sculpture technique invented by Albrecht Roser, a german puppeteer.

The texture on Moo, the reindeer, is caused entirely by the paper, not paint. The paper is a bark paper from Ecuador, which I chose partly because of its mottled brown color and partly because he is a woodland creature so bark paper seemed perfect. Gerta’s hair is made from a marigold paper for similar reasons. The pale yellow color was perfect and flowers are very important to her throughout the show.

These are performed in the Czech Black style.

Between Two Worlds was adapted for the puppet stage by Mark Levenson from the classic Yiddish play The Dybbuk. We based the set designs on the art of Marc Chagall.

Although I did not create the puppets, I was responsible for applying their “makeup.” This too, was based on the paintings of Chagall. Chonnon, the character on the left, is based on a painting called “The Lovers.” He is in love with Leah, my character, but she is betrothed to marry another. When Chonnon learns of this he dies and comes back as a dybbuk (a spirit) to possess Leah.

In order to show this posession Chonnon is first played by a puppet. When he takes Leah we recreated his face as a mask worn by the puppeteer. Leah is based on the woman in the painting of “the Lovers.” The rest of the puppeteers are dressed in period clothes that try to match the neutral brown of the stones. This play was awarded an “UNIMA-USA Citation of Excellence in the Art of Puppetry” Founded by Jim Henson, the highest honor in American puppet theater.

Arlechino stands about three feet tall. His head is made out of papiermache and his body is slotted plywood (visualize a paperdoll.) He weighs about four pounds. To make the head smooth, I first sculpted it in clay then I made a plaster cast of it; I pressed the papiermache into the mold and did eight layers of sanding and gessoing. (gesso is a plaster-like primer used in painting)

In our Pinocchio we use marionettes, found-objects, live actors and a style of theater called Czech Black

Would you like to see the design drawing?

Note: Our puppets were lost by the shipping company on their way back from their last rental. They are no longer available for rental.

Other Hand Productions had a full set of Audrey II plants. I’m also available to perform the show or train puppeteers. If you are interested in pricing please contact us for more details.

I freely have to admit that I am addicted to Little Shop of Horrors I have performed in at least seven different productions of the show in addition to building the set of Audrey II puppets that you see here. The plant on the left is my version of the smallest of the four puppets. The shell is made of papier-mache and covered in terry-cloth. The paint colors were chosen to match the original off-Broadway plants built by Martin P. Robinson. The plant on the right is the original Off-Broadway puppet- Marty very kindly let me use his set in a production recently. (No- don’t even ask how you can use them too.) When I showed Marty pictures of my plants he said, “They look just like mine!” Quite the compliment, and a little bit of an exageration as you can see by looking at the next set of plants.

Sorry- I don’t have good pictures of Pod 2, so we’re jumping straight to Pod 3. Again, Marty’s plant is on the right and has more graceful taper to the snout. Mine does has the advantage of being lighter. The interior is made of unpeeled rattan, which is light and very strong. The form is rounded using a combination of ethafoam for the jawline, and a foam called Wickaway. Wickaway looks like reticulated foam, but is designed to be used in outdoor furniture and so, sheds moisture (sweat) like crazy. It doesn’t glue terribly well, but in this application it’s a godsend. The plants can get really, really hot and air doesn’t flow well. This makes all the difference in the world. Marty’s root booties were made with a flexible foam, which I found I much preferred to the ethafoam I used for mine.

Here our plants have very, very similar shapes which makes sense, because I used the his rib patterns. They are very useful things, and involve no guessing at all. Now- the interesting thing about the Marty’s plant, on the right, is that it is fiberglass. Apparently after a couple of years on Broadway the ethafoam orginal wore out, and wasn’t suitable for touring. So he made this monstrosity. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful, beautiful puppet, and very well balanced. To understand exactly how well balanced it is you have to know two things. It weighs 125 pounds. I weigh 127. So- outweighing the plant by a mere two pounds I was still able to work it with surprising ease. My plant, on the other hand, weighs in at 80 pounds. I went straight from performing in a production using Marty’s plants to one using mine and I just laughed when I got into my Pod 4. After a month a weilding the fiberglass puppet, the ethafoam one felt like it weighed nothing. It was pretty funny.

I hope this little comparison is interesting to you. If you are thinking about building a set I strongly recommend getting the plans, (which are available from the play’s publishers). I’ve been performing in different productions of Little Shop since 1987, and I cannot stress enough the difference a well-balanced set of puppets makes.

Now, for your amusement, here are the scariest Little Shop puppets I ever saw. I trained a puppeteer for this theater, but there was no way I was going to work these. They are made of expanding foam and chicken wire. Scary, scary puppets. Light, but really badly balanced which makes them dangerous.

Other Hand Productions presents a showcase of new pieces featuring puppetry, masks, movement theatre, dance, and music. Individual images, phrases, or situations inspire the pieces; a xylophone missing its eighth note, masks created from tape recorders, a dog that becomes a flowering tree. The performance premiers a collection of fascinating, funny, and sometimes poignant images that cannot be labeled or categorized but merely hinted at as Whatnot.

An excerpt from Whatnot showcased Off-Broadway in New York to critical acclaim. Reviewer Larry Engler wrote:

One of my personal favorites… It is one of those pieces that appeals to every age group. I was totally charmed and captivated by this lyrical and humorous piece.

This show is the result of a very different way of creating for Other Hand Productions. Both Snow Queen and Pinocchio really began with the writing of the script, but Whatnot was created by ensemble. Created in 1997, the ensemble sat down with 3 x 5 cards and jotted down various ideas for the show. Through improvisation just a few of those ideas were developed. Some of them, such as Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom, had been waiting to be produced for years while others such as Xylophone were born in this process. All of them were nurtured with open minds, artistic freedom, and an eye toward an honesty of meaning, which is created each time the show is performed.

This show is appropriate for audiences age 12 and up.
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Pied Piper is one of the designs I’m most proud of. The set is a touring show, it takes twenty minutes to put it up and it all fits into a van. When you add the puppets and the lights, it winds up being an hour load-in. That’s it. And this is not a small show. It spans a twenty by twenty foot stage and is ten feet tall at its highest point. Once again, Lance Woolen made my drawings a reality. Although I did paint everything.

This show is also one of the most challenging to perform. Jodi Eichelberger (the writer) and I knew that we would be performing it so we wrote it to challenge ourselves. Sometimes I wonder what we were thinking. It’s an operetta that’s 45 minutes long with 35 minutes of music. So we sing a lot, in addition to working very large rod puppets. At one point we have five active puppets on stage with two puppeteers.

The piper himself is played by a masked actor (Jodi) who is the other puppeteer. This gave me the challenge of creating a space where he could play. In front of the set is obviously a safe place to put and actor, but behind the green slope are a series of ramps for the actor to walk on. The puppetry is done in the trench next to the ramp. Then at the end of the day, the ramps become packing boxes and we load up to go to the next site. This show is retired now. We did it over 700 times.