Zombie fungi – the same parasites that wipe out civilization in the sci-fi thriller “The Last of Us” — are real; fruit flies grieve; a group of five towns in 17th century Italy filed a lawsuit against local caterpillars for pilfering from the townsfolks’ gardens.
These are among the scientific and historical facts that, mixed with stories from Ancient Greek mythology and scenes from Classic Greek tragedy, are turned into a visually splendid song-and-dance puppet extravaganza. “The Four Lives” is the thirtieth inventive production by Theodora Skipitares, one of the leading puppet artists of New York, whose skills at sculpture and design merge with a penchant for wide-ranging if sometimes abstruse erudition and a playful approach to the avant-garde.
The title and structure of her latest work, we’re told, is derived from Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived more than 2,500 years ago and is better known (if not necessarily beloved) among high school geometry students for the Pythagorean Theorem. Pythagoras is said to have believed that each of us lives four lives: as a mineral, a vegetable, an animal and a human.
Both the categories and their order are somewhat altered in “The Four Lives,” which is divided into four Acts, each of which gets 20 minutes and a separate stage, to which we are ushered one after the other in different corners of La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater.
In the first, the Insect World, a narrator informs us in some detail, illustrated with a small shadow theater, how fungi take over the bodies of ants. Later, we learn of experiments with fruit flies that demonstrated that, if they are exposed to fruit fly carcasses, they apparently get depressed and in any case die much sooner than they would otherwise.
Interspersed with this information, we see large-scale insects playing out the story of “Antigone” in song, which we’re forced to consider as relevant.
We move on to the Human World, which focuses on two tales from mythology about the birth of the sexes (there were originally three.) It features a gorgeous puppet of a ship with two passengers (one of whom may actually be human) in a roiling sea of (brightly layered) waves. Then there’s a scene with an elaborate series of rock-people, and tiny people on balls that roll across the stage.
It’s on to Plant World featuring Charles Darwin
and then the Mineral World featuring Marie Curie, who discovered radium and polonium (which are extracted from minerals, the latter of which she named after her native Poland. This segues into a Cranky-illuminated story of the effect of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on animal life.
I harbor no bias against humans or minerals (a little against insects) but the twenty minutes I spent in Plant World was by far my favorite. It had the most tuneful of the original songs composed by Sxip Shirey, and the most elaborate and imaginative of the puppets.
It also included the caterpillar trial. It wasn’t clear to me why the trial was in Plant World rather than Insect World, but if you hadn’t looked at the program, you might not have noticed which world was which.
The Four Live
La MaMa through April 21
Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $30. Students/seniors: $25
Created, directed and designed by Theodora Skipitares. Music composed by Sxip Shirey.
Scenic co-design by Donald Eastman; lighting by Frederico Restrepo; costume design by Jan Leslie Harding; puppetry co-direction by Jane Catherine Shaw. The score is performed live by Nathan Respasz, Brittany Harris (cello) and Alexandria Smalls (vocals).
Brittany Harris – Musician/Narrator
Anthime Miller – Musician/Narrator
Nathan Repasz – Musician/Narrator
Jane Catherine Shaw – Lead Puppeteer/Chorus
Jan Leslie Harding – Narrator/Antigone/Puppeteer
Tulein Hamdan – Puppeteer/Chorus
Alondra Soto Ruiz – Puppeteer/Chorus
Alexandria Joesica Smalls – Narrator/Ismene
Sasa Yung – Puppeteer/Chorus
Kimori Zinnerman – Puppeteer/Chorus
Photographs by Richard Termine
