Joel Orr’s Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre is wonderfully strange indeed. Billed as “the only group of its kind in Houston” — and lots other places, too — Orr’s trunk of creepy puppets is nothing less than a suitcase filled with nightmares. Open it and be prepared to shiver. Everything from talking devil heads to lost souls appears on the Atomic Cafe stage during Orr’s latest foray into puppet art, Corruption of the Species, an utterly fascinating triptych about the nasty act of staying alive in an unforgiving universe.
The show begins with an enormous cast of carefully crafted palm-size shadow puppets who enact the food chain — known here as the “the waste chain” — behind a large frosty window of light. The puppets, of course, don’t really do the acting, but the whole “cast,” beginning with the beautiful wine-colored amoebas and progressing all the way up to the foolish, ax-toting woodsman, seem downright convincing. Credit Katie Jackson’s artful cutouts and the voices behind the characters for their ability to transform a room full of grown-up theatergoers into a paper-thin world of shadow and light. Troy Schulze and Kelli Cousins create some wonderfully silly characters. The funniest and most disturbing scene is an animal cocktail party in which an antelope, a squirrel and a warthog dish the dirt on the other forest creatures.
Less successful, though more vicious, is the second piece of the triptych, “buried within,” which focuses on an evil couple whose lurid affair leads to murder. The larger-than-life puppet heads are impaled on long poles, and the action takes place within the confines of an old-fashioned puppet stage in which the puppeteers hide below and maneuver their charges with wires. Something in Orr’s horrifying story feels too big and too gruesome for the restrictive playing area in which it’s told, and the grotesque handheld puppets — worms wiggle from their heads, and their hearts are merely black holes — are too outrageous for the tiny space.
It is during the third story, “the possessing,” that Orr allows his imagination to break free from the standard puppeteering accoutrements. As much dance as puppet show, this final tale features tiny muslin beings held aloft on poles by puppeteers shrouded from head to toe in black. The soulless bodies dance, kiss, fornicate, make a baby, dismember the infant and fall in love with nothing more than grunts and sounds. But the story is powerful, disturbing and even funny.
Unlike anything else in Houston, Orr’s Bobbindoctrin is visually arresting, musically lush, odd, fearsome and smart. But isn’t that true with all nightmares?
Corruption of the Species runs through Saturday, July 8, at Atomic Cafe, 1320 Nance, (713)222-2866. $9.99.
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2000.