Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Puppets are enough to make you giddy. They tempt you to escape from everydayness and go someplace altogether elsewhere.

Photographs of puppets are very different than pictures of actors, and frequently they’re twice as interesting.

Watching a puppeteer casually handle one of his or her creations off stage can be as affecting an experience as a great puppet performance.

A puppet can be as big as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float or as tiny as a matchstick. The profession of puppetry is similarly multifarious, encompassing genres from the children’s marionette birthday-party circuit to the cultish found-object experiments of Stuart Sherman and Basil Twist.

Much as they mock the laws of nature, puppets defy taboos. They can deal with transgressive issues like religion, death, depression, sex and violence with relative impunity.

Some people say puppetry is a theological metaphor: Yes, it tells us, there really is Somebody Up There pulling the strings.

A puppet is the ultimate theatrical object, defined by its essential intent of transformation. No matter how benign or cuddly, a puppet is always a little scary.

Puppets can make a headline writer woozy, so he imagines that obscure phrases like “Waiter, There’s a Puppet in My Soup” are meaningful and funny. Whereas theatrical masks have been featured on dozens of American Theatre covers over the years, puppets have rated cover images only seven times (Feb. ’88, April ’90, March ’91, Dec. ’94, July/Aug. 2000, Sept. 2000 and this issue). 

There’s a lot about puppets crammed into the pages of this issue—how they’re conceived and developed, why contemporary playwrights are increasingly enamored of them, how a handful of master puppeteers view their own unique contributions to the art form. But this is not Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Puppetry. The subject’s way too big—and way too tiny—for that. —Jim O’Quinn

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