Self-billed as “Seattle’s most creative, most courageous, and most
disturbing puppeteers,” Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab has made a name for
itself with sick-and-twisted hits
like Frankenocchio and the ongoing Drunk Puppet Nite. With
its latest production—UFO: The Puppet Show—the
Monkey Wrench gang aims for a full-length sci-fi puppet epic (there’s
an intermission and everything). But expectations of, say, a fact-based
Roswell exposé are quickly smashed by the
pulled-from-their-drunken-asses fantasia on display, in which meddling
aliens are revealed as the secret force behind such previously
disparate phenomena as the Third Reich, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and
Michael Jackson.
Monkey Wrench’s puppetry (hand, shadow, other) is played out on a
series of small platforms and screens too far from the audience,
rendering some of the smaller bits inscrutable and occasionally leading
to the puppets’ upstaging by their full-sized, black-body-stockinged
manipulators. But with the “sound effects and affectation” provided by
onstage synth-master Chadwick Dahlquist and the ramshackle scrappiness
that is Monkey Wrench’s stock-in-trade, UFO occasionally takes
flight as a proudly ludicrous monstrosity.
However, just as often, things land with a splat. Most of these
splats can be attributed to Monkey Wrench’s vaunted
sick-and-twistedness, which is occasionally inspired: the deathbed
delivery of Hitler’s love child was impressive, and an early Jackson
scene—in which young Michael’s pedophilia is presented as the
reason his father beat him, rather than a fucked-up by-product of the
abuse—was breathtakingly wrong.
But often the in-your-face wrongness went nowhere, or at least
nowhere I wanted to go—most notably in the few unfortunate
instances when the puppeteers tried race-based shock. Good racist
comedy incriminates the teller. Without the grit of self-incrimination,
Monkey Wrench’s offerings were just dumb racist bullshit. May the
cricket sounds that greeted the two most glaring examples—one
crack about blacks and menthol cigarettes, another about a new Civil
War where “the darkies lose”—prove instructive. 
1. Enough with the goddamned Shakespeare already.
Check.
2. Tell us something we don’t know. Every play in your season should be a premiere—a world premiere.
Check
3. Produce dirty, fast, and often.
Check
4. Get them young.
Check
5.Offer child care.
No, but this is stupid anyway.
6. Fight for real estate.
Can we just have fringe theater without changing the economic system?
7. Build bars.
It wasn’t free, but you clearly didn’t drink enough.
8. Boors’ night out. encourage people to boo, heckle, and shout out their favorite lines.
So why didn’t you boo? Racist? Really? What a cheap shot with no basis in reality.
9. Expect poverty.
Check. No one getting rich here.
10. Drop out of graduate school.
This is just a dumb point.
Here’s your fact-based expose of the Roswell incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
Meanwhile, UFO is telling a STORY. A funny one. In a theater, with artful paper-mache props. I can agree that it is something of a drunken-ass fantasia — but that’s the point, you tit.
Critiquing the lighting and seating situation is fair, but I’m sorry that you don’t posses the imagination (despite being at a puppet show) to suspend the presence of the cloaked, skilled puppeteers. It’s called Bunraku — an impressive and traditional form of Japanese puppetry. It’s worked for hundreds of years. You should at least offer your readers that information.
About the … sigh … “racist” thing: What is more ridiculous than a 2 ft Arnold Schwarzenegger puppet using the word “darkies”?! How could that possibly be interpreted as genuinely racist? Shame on you for going there and taking the dumb way out.
I saw the show and found it really fun — a refreshing departure from the lame Seattle theatre scene that’s been recently called-out.
For those of you that can get past this bullshit, boilerplate review, and who can appreciate seeing something new and different, I highly recommend checking out the show. Just be sure not to make the same mistake that Mr. Schmader did, and get yourself and your friends a few drinks beforehand. Imagination and a frivolous sense of humor may be required.
Hm. Re: claims of racism: Haven’t seen the show, but you guys seem pretty touchy for Seattle’s “most courageous, most disturbing” puppet troupe. What’s the point of pointing out your disturbingness if you’re gonna throw baby-fits anytime someone’s actually disturbed?
And for what it’s worth, I thought it was a GOOD review—like, mostly positive about the show on offer. Are puppet fans the touchiest theater-folk this this side of burlesque dancers?
Schmader’s review is fair. The puppets are pretty neat, and there are a few funny bits, but basically this show tries too hard to be shocking and winds up looking like a grade-school comedy sketch. At the very least an hour could have been shaved from this show and no one would have been worse off.
I gotta say, in Monkey Wrench’s defense, that I loved both “Dracula” and “Frankenocchio.” Hell, they can’t all be gems, and you gotta give ’em points for trying. There’s plenty of us out here who appreciate the labor-intensive enterprise of puppetry, and despite the disappointment of this show, I’ll be there when the troupe tries again.
I hated this show, I’m not going to lie to you. I think it read like what 5th grade boys would improv having taken over little sister’s toys at her slumber party.
Having said that, I’m surprised that a review of a puppet show doesn’t include more appraisal of, you know, puppets.
Cleverly constructed and incorporating different styles and techniques, the puppets and the way they were manipulated kept us from leaving the theater. For instance, I loved the use of shadow puppets and the way the screen was used for transitions.
The puppeteers did amazing work… work as subtle and thoughtful as I wish the writing had been. I would have watched a full two hours of the Michael Jackson puppet dancing.
Was it enough? No. But it was a puppet show, and the puppets need to be examined too.