Twice in one week the BEMA has played the stage. After the in-house rendition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" last Thursday and Friday, the Hopkins Center is currently presenting Water Puppet Theatre from Vietnam.
As a performance space, the BEMA rarely seems particularly useful. Too flat, too few boulders for the cast to hide behind, dilapidated seating. If the BEMA were shaped as a Greek amphitheater, or as a Greek hippodrome, with focal points or at least focal ranges, its shaded and easily-accessed location would be an excellent venue for more-than-weekly student art events. As it is, big and empty and area-ish, the meeting space demands real ingenuity, but mostly compromise, to make it useful for anything more than Freshman Trip icebreakers.
Fortunately, the Water Puppet Theatre brought its own space. The BEMA here serves as hors d'oeuvre, evoking a warm expectation of the summertime picnic, fun and cute and family-friendly. This works especially well - instead of a solemnizing walk into Moore Theater, kids and moms and grandfathers stroll down the little duff-softened trail behind the East Wheelock cluster.
The BEMA also provides, of course, the flat turf on which the theater company set up their tent and pool and orchestra pit. Less than ten feet from the bleachers, a wading-pond of at least two hundred square feet flow from out of a tent, bespangled with bright reds, greens, pinks and blues, tassels and flags trying to wave in a lethargic breeze. Not unlike a sea-world extravaganza, but without the "whale" element, little squirts munching on their sandwiches find themselves, ecstatically, in the splash zone.
The set - with the circus attitude, the band off to the left, a provocation to audience participation at the commencement - obviously small but without the feel of miniatures, works well for the variety-show progression of the performance.
The format of the show, appropriate to the stage and location, is not epic. Instead, perfect for short but curiosity-heavy attention-spans, ten five-minute vignettes follow one after the other, interspersed with some excellent music (by seven players of traditional Vietnamese instruments - note especially the drums, the dan tranh, a type of zither, and the nhi, a two-string violin). When the puppets appear on stage, popping up like Flipper out of the sea, they proceed to dance around according to their species, or speak to unseen interlocutors (the band members did the ventriloquism).
The puppets - phoenixes, ducks, fish, children, fairies - move with remarkable grace and agility, particularly realizing their only locomotion comes from underwater guywires and extension poles. Plastered facial features, historically not uncommon in any dramatic performance, gain animation through music and angle. Two dragons seem to do ballet, with terrible beauty, pyrotechnics then water shooting from their mouths. Two farmers appear to sow rice, listing left and right as if anyone could see the rows, then are joined by several more farmers, only a foot or two tall, tending their water buffalo or pounding iron on an anvil. In the most playful vignette, one somehow eliciting the spectrum of friendship feelings, two lions (which look like tiger fish) jockey for a bouncing ball.
None of the pieces ever reek moralistic or didactic; I do not think Water Puppet Theatre is for education of social graces. Instead, they mock - though hardly satirize - the mannerisms so common, and, really, so important, to social life: the preening peacocks do, the self-effacement of a fisherman with bad luck around fishermen with good luck, the mechanization of teaching fairies to dance, the downfall then success then exit of foxes who steal people's animals.
Few times does an unfamiliar work requiring such great but unknown skill result in such glee; audience-members rejoice instead of "appreciate." But interesting too is that Water Puppet Theatre recognizes fully, probably more so even than do the viewers, that it knows it's a raucous good time, relaxed, but resonating with skill. A supreme entertainment.
