According to the show's director, Erik Sanko, the view that marionettes can only be used to tell upbeat stories kept him a closet puppetmaker for many years.
"It wasn't very punk rock to tell your friends that you made dolls," he explained.
Sanko, along with his theater company, The Phantom Limb, used the rare medium of puppetry to preach against the seven deadly sins while astounding audiences with an exhaustively detailed set in "The Fortune Teller." A demonstration Saturday afternoon gave audience members a chance to peek behind the scenes at the technically impressive production. Sanko noted that while there are many puppeteers in New York City, only a few have mastered the more difficult marionettes.
The puppeteers -- Liam Hurley, Oliver Dalzell, Randall Whittinghill and Sanko himself -- took care to make each of the characters' mannerisms representative of their personalities. An older character walked much more deliberately while the puppeteers broke the fourth wall by pretending to have difficulty lifting the more obese puppets.
The show's dark mood grabbed viewers' attention from the beginning with a screen projection of a dark forest and a raven, which acted as an usher, cawing at spectators to turn off cell phones and refrain from smoking. Throughout the show, the crew of The Phantom Limb skillfully succeeded in highlighting the often unsettling attributes of marionettes.
The plot of "The Fortune Teller" is told from the perspective of Silas Leech, a lawyer resembling an alligator who was hired by deceased millionaire Nathaniel Ax to read his will. The dead eccentric requested that a fortune teller dispose of his possessions to the seven assembled guests, who each represent a different deadly sin. As the play progresses, the masked fortune teller predicts the deaths of each of these characters, each fate fitting the grave sins these characters personify.
The manners in which each character meets his death ranged from the satisfyingly ironic to the half-baked. While a greedy banker logically finds himself trapped in the vault where he was counting his money, it was difficult to make sense of the death of the envious optometrist, who tumbles out of a window after seeing a woman light a cigarette.
Even when the plot weakened, however, the art direction of "The Fortune Teller" remained magnificent. Jessica Grindstaff, Sanko's wife and The Phantom Limb's visual artist, used her background in fine arts and dioramas to create sets of painstaking detail. The story takes place in a Gregorian mansion reminiscent of the giant dollhouse every young girl wants. The action of the play alternates between two platforms on either side of the house, which slide out towards the audience to draw attention to the scene.
Seventeen volunteers spent three months acquiring creating all the necessary props. Items that were not made originally for the play were bought on eBay. According to Sanko, materials were "cannibalized" to form multiple props used in various points throughout the play -- an old boxing glove provided leather for clothing, and the remaining stuffing was dyed to become hair.
The props demonstrate the entire production's extraordinary attention to detail. The pots and pans in the gluttonous kitchen of the chef character looked surprisingly used, and he wore a costume carefully stained with food bits.
Sanko's past in grunge music is reflected in the score he composed with Danny Elfman, whose previous credits include several of Tim Burton's grim movies, such as "Corpse Bride" (2005), "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) and "Beetlejuice" (1988). In the production, Elfman employs light percussion to resemble the blacksmith's tinkering tools, heavy brass to emphasize the rich banker and strong violin melodies to underscore the actor's self-importance.
The score not only sharpens the macabre flavor of the performance, but also stands alone as a great piece of music. The piece even attracted the attention of the Kronos Quartet, a string quartet known for commissioning and playing non-classical music, with whom Sanko plans to work in the future.
The sound of "The Fortune Teller" also owes a great deal to Gavin Friday, an Irish singer, who lends his voice to the narration. Friday has one of those orgasmic voices, both melodic and enunciative.
The one-hour show hurtles towards its disappointing and ambiguous conclusion, the production's only flaw. When the audience learns why the fortune teller condemns these men to their deaths, his mask bursts open; yet the audience never quite discerns the fortune teller's true identity.
The ambiguity is only heightened by the lawyer's skepticism of whether the events of the past hour truly transpired. The play concludes with Sanko coming out, appearing eight feet tall because audiences were accustomed to watching the two-foot tall puppets. This plot device remained confusing until Saturday's behind-the-scenes discussion, when Sanko revealed that the fortune teller is actually death incarnate and represents the devil for whom Death worked.
The Hop must be praised for its chutzpah in scheduling "The Fortune Teller," which was shown at a loss as a result of the play's unconventional seating style. The audience sat on stage where the action took place, allowing room for only 75 people at each sold out showing.
Erik Sanko is currently working on a puppet play for Lemony Snicket, the pen name of the "A Series of Unfortunate Events" writer, and a puppet biography on Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. Hopefully Sanko will produce two more works as excellent as this one, and the Hop's budget will be preserved so that this visionary artist and his company can return in 2011.
