A Puppet Play with Music

Text by Patrick Keppel

Directed by Bradley Kemp and Patrick Keppel

Triangle is our original puppet play with music which will be produced as part of a citywide commemoration of the centennial of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire fire in which 146 women died, a critical event in US labor history.  We’ve assembled an amazing team of puppeteers, musicians, and vocalists who performed a scene from Triangle at Judson Church last March and again in October 2010 at Dixon Place.  On the strength of these performances, the project has been awarded a seed grant from the Henson Foundation to complete the full work at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn from March 24-26, 2011.  The project has also been awarded workshop space at the Henson Carriage House in March, ending with a performance and talkback from the Carriage House staff.

In the libretto, the forewoman Joan tells three younger workers her story of the Triangle workers’ strike and of her survival of the subsequent fire seven years before.  At the same time, the former owner of the Triangle Factory, Blanck, presents his own version of the strike and fire, teetering among feelings of anger, grief, guilt, and eager complacency.  Together they dramatize the psychological difficulty of maintaining ideals, or even of expressing one's basic humanity, within a framework of social injustice.

What makes Triangle so engaging for audiences is that the play doesn’t simply dramatize the story of the fire, the past event safely contained by the passage of time.  Rather, since the play is set years after the fire, the play is really about the present and thus engages the audience directly.  Somewhere these women are still trapped—just as they were in Bangladeshi in December (see http://www.cleanclothes.org/news/2010-12-14-bangladeshi-factory-fire).  Who will open the doors for them?  In this sense, the play makes a clear and hopeful call for compassion, courage, and community action.

Audiences are also intrigued by our nonrepresentational approach to the material.

Throughout its history, puppet theatre has proven a particularly striking and interactive medium for both artistry and education.  However, from the beginning our concept in creating this work has not simply been to create a musical puppet play that follows the text literally, but rather to create a piece that emphasizes the unique qualities of all three artistic media.  The artists are using an improvisational technique so that the music and puppetry are developed in tandem with the more subtle thematic and metaphorical elements of the text.  As a result, the text (vocalized sprechstimme style) rests on dense, dream-like layers of soundscape and puppetry.