“The Harlem Doll Palace,” an unusual musical that launches the fourth annual Puppetopia Festival at HERE, is not just the true story of Lenon Holder Hoyt, a public school art teacher for 40 years who on her own created a museum in her Harlem brownstone. It’s also the true story of her dolls.
A few of the 6,000 or so that were exhibited at Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum have been turned into puppets, and deliver their own songs and scenes. Many of their stories carry a lesson about race or gender. Some are as grim as Grimm.
Alva Rogers, who wrote the show and portrays Aunt Len, introduces her collection in a jaunty musical number (with music and lyrics by Bruce Monroe):
I have dolls that sell at Macy’s
Like Barbie or Muhammad Ali
I have Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman
Working to make us free.
I have dolls that walk, and sing, and dance
A technologic revolution
And dolls I’ve rescued from the past
That are older than the Constitution
Over the course of the 80-minute show, we get to meet nine of them. There is an Army Talking doll designed by Thomas Edison in 1890, which somebody (not Edison) had painted brown (perhaps, as Len speculates, to instill in their daughter some racial pride.) There is a Grace Kelly celebrity doll from 1960. The Izannah Walker doll tells us in song that she was passed down to Aunt Len from her grandmother, and is named after the woman who had manufactured it (a true story.) Izannah Walker was a 19th century “jill of all trades” who “designed a new kind of doll,” made out of fabric rather than the standard porcelain, so less likely to break. Despite the naysayers (“Women make doilies and trinkets. They have no heads for business at all”) she became a successful entrepreneur. She defied conventions in another way as well. Walker, “queer and proud,” the puppet sings, lived with a Miss Emeline Whipple.
Most of the dolls’ stories are neither jaunty nor inspiring, but downright downbeat. We see Brown Nurse doll screaming in pain with a broken-off leg after thieves have broken into Aunt Len’s museum. We hear an over-the-top tale of woe from Ninon, the French fashion doll, complete with an evil stepmother who throws her out the window to spite her stepdaughters, and a cruel American opera star who dumps her at a flea market in the Bowery, no less. At least that song ends happily (“…the trials of Ninon came, at last to an end/
Ninon was found by chère Mamma Len, her now and forever friend.”) Even the Grace Kelly doll tells of being “buried in a trunk” – which she means literally (this is apparently where Aunt Len discovered her) but also, once she has become a Princess, her husband the Prince won’t let her do any more films, so must keep “my Philadelphia blue blood, Beverly Hills, Alfred Hitchcock past in a trunk.”
A devastating story plays out in a series of scenes throughout musical that focus on three cloth dolls with blank faces from the antebellum South — Sarah, a blonde girl who has a miniature blonde doll of her own to play with; Early, Sarah’s slave and playmate, and Hannah, Early’s mother – and the Missus, an ominous shadow puppet.
Even the frame for “The Harlem Doll Palace” is something of a downer: It begins with Len’s death, and the dolls vowing to keep her alive through their reminiscences, which is presumably what follows.
It’s true that the story of Lenon Holder Hoyt is not an altogether upbeat one. She reportedly retired from teaching after she was attacked; her museum was indeed burglarized; and, age and infirmity forced her to give it up completely. But Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum did last from 1970 to 1994, and a half century later, the dolls in this puppet show do succeed in keeping it alive.
The Harlem Doll Palace
Written and performed by Alva Rogers
Directed by Ash Winkfield
Music by Bruce Monroe
Puppeteers: Winkfield, Mecca Akbar, Thalya David, Charlotte Lily Gaspard, and Marcella Murray
In “Rhynoceron“, a life-sized rhinoceros comes alive in a whoa moment that’s the climax to another true story, a captivating one (literally for the rhino), involving a king and a pope, a shipwreck and an obsession, told with endlessly inventive puppetry – masks, paper cutouts, elaborate sculptures and hard-to-describe contraptions, from which spring sentences written on unfolded pieces of paper — a newfangled, low-tech form of open captioning.
“Rhynoceron” begins with the three puppeteers (KT Shivak, Chih-Jou Cheng, Jacky Kelsey) standing over a wooden sculpture of stags facing in opposite directions. Shivak, who is also the show’s director and designer, uses a violin bow to play a saw, emitting an eerie sound that supplements Ben Zucker’s score, which he plays nearby on a xylophone. Shivak then saws off the horn of one of the stags; it feels shocking, as is surely intended.
In the time of the Renaissance, we’re told, the horns of such beasts were more valuable than gold, diamonds, or cocaine – and we see an old-fashioned scale, weighing a horn against each of the three less valuable items, the last of which Shivak snorts. This is the context for the introduction of the first rhinoceros in Europe.
Such cheeky invention is threaded throughout the hour. At one point, we see a rhino and an elephant battle one another – but only as a Punch and Judy show inside the body of the life-sized rhino. (We had been told that the Europeans had been greatly disappointed that the rhino and the elephant just ignored each other, when they were put together with the explicit hope that they would fight to the death.)
For all of the cleverness of “Rhynoceron,” its most remarkable achievement is to make you pity the rhinoceros – its sad eyes as it’s brought to its knees almost made me cry – driving home (in the words of the creative team) “the parallel between a past when an animal thought to be myth suddenly appeared, and a future where an animal known to be real suddenly vanishes.”
Rhynoceron
Directed and designed by KT Shivak
Puppeteers: Shivak, Chih-Jou Cheng, Jacky Kelsey,
Music by Ben Zucker
Through May 25
Puppetopia
HERE Arts Center through June 1
(First 10 tickets for
$10; $35-$100)
