Books
In praise of puppets
If puppets and puppeteers strike you as holdovers from the age of butter churns and quill pens, Eileen Blumenthal, a professor in the Mason Gross School of the Arts, has something to teach you.
“People have this parochial notion that puppets are silly things best left to children’s birthday parties and Sesame Street,” Blumenthal says. “But puppets are a major part of adult theater in nearly every culture in the world.”
Blumenthal is an authority on puppets and the author of Puppetry: A World History (Harry N. Abrams, 2005). As the title suggests, the book is massive and includes more than 300 photographs. It is now in its third printing.
Her fascination with puppets grew naturally out of her love of theater. “My interest in puppetry never struck me as eccentric,” Blumenthal said. “I was drawn to theater that used a broad range of texts, sets, and actors. Why should theater be restricted to actors as they occur in nature? Why not use actors that are made to order?”
“And though many people think of puppetry as a marginal form,” she adds, “many landmark productions have used constructed actors. Picasso’s 1917 designs for Parade, Robert Edmund Jones’s 1931 Oedipus Rex, and the Piscator 1929 production of The Good Soldier Schweik are three important ones that come to mind. Puppetry in mainstream Western theater didn’t start with The Lion King and Avenue Q.”
Blumenthal, who has a doctoral degree in history of theater from Yale University, has been teaching theater arts at Rutgers for more than 30 years. She said the non-real aspect of puppets gives her theater students an important alternative perspective.
“The theater program at Mason Gross is focused on contemporary realistic and classical styles,” Blumenthal says. “Besides helping them to understand those forms, I also try to expose them to a broader range of non-realistic theater.”
“Puppets never try to hide the fact that they are made out of wood or plastic,” she says. “They are right in your face about not being real, but they make you believe anyway.”
By studying puppetry, Blumenthal aims to show students that realism is only one of many styles, and that there are other ways to look at material. Students translate material from one style to another in her class.
“"They begin to see what you can express outside of realism,” she says. “They aren’t puppeteers or puppet makers, so their work is often rudimentary, but it’s a refreshing change for many of them because they’re trained to be believable, and puppetry is non-real – and yet it is absolutely true.”
But it is as a critic that Blumenthal feels most at home as a teacher. “I love teaching theater criticism,” she says. “I’ve gotten letters from students five, 10, even 15 years after their graduations, saying, ‘In your class I learned how to write – and how to think.’ I can’t tell you what that means to me.”
A prolific writer and researcher, Blumenthal’s essay on Japanese puppetry appeared in the Los Angeles Times this fall. She also was a Village Voice theater critic for a dozen years, and along with other books on theater, she wrote numerous feature stories on theater for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, among others.
Blumenthal has a very loyal following among former students.
“She waived me into her graduate-level class even though I was only a sophomore at Rutgers College,” says Kerri Allen, a freelance theater critic in New York and a 2001 Rutgers alumna. “In that small seminar with seniors and graduate students, my writing drastically improved, and I learned the art of criticism. By age 26, I was writing theater criticism for The New York Times. Thanks to Eileen’s professional example and dedication to excellence, my criticism career skyrocketed, and my experience at Rutgers was enriched.”
Blumenthal also is deeply involved in writing a history of Cambodian royal dance. She has been traveling to Cambodia for many years, and even studied Khmer, the language of Cambodia. In 1990 she produced a national tour of Cambodian dancers in the United States. The tour drew tremendous media attention – even more when five of the top dancers defected during the tour
“It’s so important to try to save the Cambodian heritage, as so much of it was destroyed by Pol Pot” during the Communist revolution, she says. An estimated 1.5 million Cambodians were killed in the Khmer Rouge killing fields, and the culture was left in splinters.
Whether it’s dance, puppets, or theater criticism, Blumenthal’s work is all about celebrating the artist.
“"I think of puppets as analogous to musical instruments, she said. “The puppeteer – not the puppet – is the actor, the artist. In the same way, a musician makes the music, not the instrument. My work as a teacher and writer is to nurture and document these important works of art.”