The Phantom Limb’s puppets hunt a wolf in the fold
March 17, 2009 at 1:35 pm by Curt Holman in Events, theater 
The content and tone of Haverty Marionettes’ The Phantom Limb spans the spectrum from “disturbing” to “very, very disturbing.” Writer/director Michael Haverty explores the case of Mr. Albert Fish, an American serial killer, child molester and alleged cannibal known by such nicknames as “The Brooklyn Werewolf.”
If the premise alone sounds unnerving, Haverty Marionettes’ avant-garde approach makes The Phantom Limb even more challenging and uncomfortable. Much of the production contains no dialogue and echoes silent movie-era entertainments, so frequently we can only piece together events by implication. Potential audiences should read the historical notes posted outside 7 Stages Back Stage Theatre, or skim the Wikipedia entry, before venturing in.
Patrick McColery plays Fish as tormented but deceptively mild-mannered, while Reay Schloss and Amy Strickland serve as puppeteers and mostly non-speaking, black-garbed supporting performers. When Fish borrows a life-sized little-girl puppet from her mother and makes her dance, The Phantom Limb offers a skin-crawling image of innocence abused. McColery conveys Fish’s vain attempts to keep his unbalanced psyche under control. At one point he reads a 1934, possibly written by Fish himself, describing the man’s unspeakable actions. Later, in a fit of paranoia, he seeks shelter in Bloomingdale’s department store and burst’s into a frenzied, incongruous rendition of “You’ve Gotta Have Heart.”
The production also features short puppet-based vignettes that riff on “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Peter and the Wolf,” complete with bits of Prokofiev’s famous score. The wolf puppet features an intriguingly half-human design, and overall these sequences turn The Phantom Limb into a free-associating meditation on animalistic human behavior comparable to Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves, which featured similar Jungian symbolism. Silhouette-style black-and-white animation takes further digressions, including an account of a 15th century werewolf.
In 2007 Haverty Marionettes staged its inaugural production, Haverty’s wildly creative adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (which, incidentally, will be remounted June 25-July 12 on the Alliance Hertz Stage). Inspired by William Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness prose, As I Lay Dying took similar liberties with linear narrative as The Phantom Limb, but its humor and greater variety of incident made it easier to take. The Phantom Limb, while showing no actual bloodshed, makes a relentless, claustrophobic examination of abnormal psychology and the human capacity for violence. A bold, disquieting work, The Phantom Limb pushes the playful art of puppetry into the darkest possible directions. My, what big teeth it has.
The Phantom Limb. Through April 5. Haverty Marionettes, 7 Stages Back Stage Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 5 p.m. $18-$20. 404-523-7647. www.havertymarionettes.org
Photo by Haverty Marionettes
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