Encore! A New Puppet Show; More Funny Disasters

During last summer’s Camp Grandma, the grandkids were tasked with making puppets out of recycle trash to stretch their imaginations and creativity. Each puppet evolved with a name and its own distinct personality.

Next we made a puppet theater from a cardboard box. And finally, we wrote a script about our trash puppets escaping from the recycle bin and their subsequent adventures.

The puppets decide to use their combined strength to tip the bin over so they can escape, (we use a yardstick to knock the bin towards the audience), revealing the puppets on stage, surrounded by other trash.

Our First Puppet Show

As it turned out, the highlight of our first puppet show last year was when Miss T fell off a little red chair. It made a resounding crash in the middle of the play. All three of us–Miss T, N, and I–were convulsed with laughter. It was literally, a show-stopping moment.

But that was just one of our trials.

We found we couldn’t close the curtains between acts from backstage because the opening was too narrow–a theater design flaw. So N, stepped out into the audience to close the curtains and, on his own initiative, decided to fill the gap between acts by telling jokes and riddles. A seven-year-old stand-up comedian was born.

Then the one copy of the script we were sharing fell apart and we had a mad scramble to pick up and collate the pages.

Despite the glitches, it was riotous good fun for the puppeteers, and the family applauded enthusiastically at curtain call.

How We Enhanced the Puppet Show

Here are some of the ways to enhance a puppet show:

• Group chairs theater style for the performance. We did our show after our weekly Friday night family dinner and used our dinner chairs.
• Make tickets. We used my Cricut, but another way to make tear-off tickets is to stitch a small stack of paper together on your sewing machine.
• Serve popcorn. Again, I used my Cricut to make these popcorn boxes, but you can roll up paper cones from cardstock and line with kitchen parchment.
• Put a string of lights on your puppet theater for some glamour. I used a string left over from the fairy lantern I made for Miss T.
• While the puppet theater has cardboard wings that can open and close, I made curtains from a new tea towel that I had bought for Miss T to embroider. I strung the curtains on a thin bamboo pole that had been a plant stake, and bore two holes on each side of the puppet theater to suspend the curtains on the “rods.”

Our Second Puppet Show

With the children’s other grandma visiting from overseas, we had a chance to redeem ourselves with an encore performance a few weeks ago. The kids were unavailable for rehearsal so we just did one quick reading beforehand.

A recipe for more disasters.

In retrospect, a lot of our problems stemmed from the puppet theater design itself. But another problem was the mutiny by one of our puppeteers.

Problems with our Theater

First, our puppet theater, great in concept and looking quite nice, was flawed in actual use, as we had found with our first performance.

In the original puppet theater that I had built with my own children many years ago, we had used a mover’s cardboard wardrobe box. So, all I did was cut a hole on one side for the puppet stage, and tape the scenery on the opposite side. My sons and I got inside the wardrobe box and, ducking down so our heads couldn’t be seen, we were able to maneuver the puppets easily.

In our current puppet theater, we had just a tiny, 5 1/2-inch slit to hold our puppets in place, and we were doing this “blind,” with our heads against the back wall of the stage. So we were groping our way.

Problems with the Cast

Another problem was the cast. After our first performance, we realized we had too many puppets and too few hands.

Each puppeteer could only comfortably hold one puppet in each hand. So, every time the whole cast was needed, we did double and triple duty.

In one scene, I was responsible for one trash puppet, the car, the queen, and the kidnapper (two real puppets where you have to wiggle your fingers into their arms and neck, so not easy to interchange).

So, we eliminated some of the puppets from the play for this second performance, but we still had too many. We also hadn’t properly reassigned all the lines of the puppets we had cashiered, so there was some confusion.

Miss T, the consummate ten-year-old professional, took charge and started to stage manage the performance, making sure we got the puppets on and off, per the script, through loud whispering and cuing. I was laughing too hard to help.

The Mutiny

But, the ultimate disaster came when, with the play already in progress, N decided he would take the roles of princess and kidnapper, abandoning his own puppets. More whispering and hissing behind the curtains ensued, as Miss T tried to hold him to his assigned roles. Grandma was trying, too, but weakly because she was too consumed with laughter.

In the end, N prevailed. But of course, the dialogue was now jumbled. N did not always notice which were his lines in his new roles, and Miss T and I had to carry forth with his puppets as well as our own. In the end, Miss T, the only composed puppeteer, began speaking most of the dialogue for all the puppets herself to save the day. By this time, grandma was in tears, on the floor laughing.

The finale made up for the bedlam, as all the puppets came on stage snappily to sing our rousing closing song and take their bows.

A Puppet Review

Okay, it wasn’t the most polished of puppet shows. And I should have insisted on time to rehearse before we gave the performance.

But oh, we had so much fun, with gut-wrenching laughter and giggles through tears.

Sometimes, being a grandma means letting go. We didn’t need a perfect performance. We just needed to stretch our creativity through puppet making, set design, and script writing. And we did all that.

The rest was just gravy.

Get the Script

If you would like to do your own performance of this play, drop me a request in the comments section and I will email it to you, along with notes and tips for staging. I’m sure yours will be a much more polished performance than ours!

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