Resuscitating Mediums
Puppets and radio plays: Two genres that would seem to have breathed their final gasp last century, somewhere between the adaptation of radio to the Internet and Avenue Q turning child-friendly puppetry on its head. And yet, in the final weeks of 2010, Baby Universe and The Time Machine are offering audiences a peek at what makes even an unlikely project succeedor fail.
Baby Universe: A Puppet Odyssey, a science fiction tale told through puppets, is the success. In theater group [Wakka Wakka]s scathingly funny, post-apocalyptic story, humans are forced to hunker down in bunkers, while women raise baby universes with the hope that they will expand and thrive enough to offer a new Earth to live on. The puppets (and puppeteers) turn the story into a visually stunning look at courage and the bonds between mothers and children, as the possible salvation of the planet must fight the solar system for a chance to live.
Beautifully and hauntingly staged by writers Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock, Baby Universe is filled with the kinds of details that reward repeat viewings. Earth is a woozy floozy of a bar fly; the moon is a grasshopper-limbed flunky of the towering, tottering sun; and a radio station plays memory files of things like crashing waves and rainstorms for its dying listeners.
Using puppets to tell a story this bold and depressing was a brilliant, effective choice; the flat, expressionless faces and stilted movements add another dimension of unreality to the story that only enhances it, and yet the puppets are surprisingly moving. The end-of-days may not be what one thinks of when pondering puppetry, but Baby Universe proves that off-the-wall ideas, when executed well, can seem obvious in retrospect. Where The Time Machine fails is in not tweaking the conventions of its genesis enough.
A staged radio play from [RadioTheatre], this adaptation of H.G. Wells The Time Machine is a snooze. Dispensing with live sound effects in favor of pre-recorded ones (many of which are unintentionally laughable), the two-person performance teeters dangerously on the edge of satire. With his plumy, overripe tones, Frank Zilinyi seems as if hes spoofing Shakespearean actors as he recounts his travels into a future populated by underground cannibals and aboveground albinos. And with her soccer mom haircut and tilted-head smiling, Kate Siepert might as well be a Kristin Wiig character in one of Saturday Night Lives mock commercials.
The biggest problem with this radio theater, though, is the lack of live sound effects. Creating and taping noises isnt nearly as impressive as having one man create them live, which would also give audiences a reason to keep their eyes open despite the strobe lighting and excessive use of a smoke machine. By the time Siepert has wrapped up the tale of her husbands time traveling, were eager to leave the theater and actively engage all of our senses.
[Baby Universe]
Through Jan. 9, 2011, Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Ave. (at E. 25th St.), 212-352-3101; $30.
[The Time Machine]
Through Jan. 11, 2011, The Red Room, 85 E. 4th St. (betw. 2nd Ave. & Bowery), 212-868-4444; $15–$20.