Somehow, magic happens.
Somehow cardboard, fabric, and buttons – pieced and molded into puppets for Arden Theatre Company’s production of “The BFG (Big Friendly Giant)” — come alive, and Sebastienne Mundheim, the South Philadelphia artist who created them, can’t quite figure out how.
Is it her puppet-making artistry, she wonders, using her grandmother’s black and gold antique buttons to add flash to puppet eyes?
Is it the actors cast as puppet-headed characters named Childchewer and Gizzardgulper, who provide nuance? Do they make the seven giant puppet heads and one small puppet girl come alive?
“It’s very interesting what the alchemy is that brings the puppets to life,” she said, stirring chicken soup in her South Philadelphia home/studio, where puppets – many life-sized — and other creatures hang from everywhere, turning the space into a quiet party of color and chaos.
“It’s technical and mechanical,” she said, “and it’s also believable. The more we believe it, the more real it is.”
That must be the answer.
The audience believes the magic into life.
Packed into every seat for an early December school trip, the children in the Arden audience were more than eager to believe. Their excitement was palpable and the sound they made was some multiple of hundreds of birds caroling in trees.
Among them was Stephen Wiley, 8, from Philly’s Bella Vista section, sharp in his school uniform with classmates from St. Mary’s Interparochial School. The puppets “added a lot of detail. I think they were very realistic,” he said.
(Of course, what standard of realism applies to a puppet named Bloodbottler?)
Funny how belief works. Puppet Sophie wasn’t even finished, but Mundheim’s mother – enlisted to stitch the legs – was ready for reality. “She put a little tea towel over her butt so she wouldn’t be exposed,” Mundheim said, laughing.
The interplay of play and reality always mattered to Mundheim. As a child she made tiny figures from found objects, hiding them and a flashlight under her bed so she could work on them when her parents thought she was asleep.
Creating puppets for Roald Dahl’s children’s classic, as adapted by David Wood and directed by Whit MacLaughlin, carried its own challenges, particularly for the giants.
Mundheim began by building a complex structure of chicken wire on a construction helmet. “It was too heavy, so I built a simple structure out of paper,” and then upholstered it. Each head is 30 inches tall and 18 inches wide. For comparison, the average head is nine inches tall and six or so inches wide. The actors with their giant heads are four times as tall as the smallest puppet, Sophie, at 30 inches.
“The giants are frightening in the story – they are funny and also scary,” she said. “I didn’t want the giants to look like any kind of person. I didn’t want to vilify any people.
So, she tapped into a vibrant color palate – pinks and purples. “I was worried that they’d look like a bunch of Fruit Loops,” she said. “But then I just let go of my worrying and started to have fun.”
The director wanted the giant heads to hover above the actors so their facial expressions would add nuance. Mundheim designed a backpack-like metal frame, but it was too stiff. Iterating, she built cardboard and gaffers’ tape frames with weight carried on the actors’ hips.
Beyond cardboard and fabric, “the performers also come to believe that the puppets have life and a spirit,” Mundheim said.
Sophie’s spirit exudes bravery and compassion. After getting snatched by the Big Friendly Giant, she overcomes fear and saves England’s children.
In one scene, Matteo Scammell, who plays both the Big Friendly Giant and Sophie’s father, embraces Sophie, the puppet. “What I love is my relationship with Sophie – with the puppet, and with Sophie, the actor. It feels very vulnerable,” Scammell said.
He hugs the puppet tenderly, because it is, after all, only slender paper and fabric, but in doing so, he evokes the tenderness of both giant and father.
Actor Jessica Money, who both plays Sophie and manipulates the puppet, trained at Mundheim’s workshop. “She helped me see what I do with my body and then figure out how to do it with the puppet – how to make her breathe,” Money said.
Coming Jan. 12 is an exhibition of Mundheim’s work at The Delaware Contemporary. Mundheim worries she won’t be able to sleep without her puppet friends once she moves them from her home/studio to the museum.
“I got butterflies, not the good tickling kind, but the frenetic suffocating kind, when I thought about everyone leaving.”
“The BFG (Big Friendly Giant)” through Jan. 21, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. 2nd St., Phila. 215-922-1122
Recraft, an exhibition of Mundheim’s work, Jan. 12-May 26, The Delaware Contemporary, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, 302-656-6466
