Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, wants you to know he had humble beginnings. “My father was an Africana farmer, but he suffered great prejudice, bias, and hatred, and had to sell all his slaves on the cheap. Life was hard. The family had nothing, just a plantation.”
“Elon Musk Is Cool AF” was one of the four plays that were part of this weekend’s “MicroTheater” at the Clemente Cultural Center, varying widely in subject and tone, but having two things in common: None were longer than about twenty minutes, and all of them were officially puppet shows — part of the busy fourth International Puppet Fringe Festival, which concluded today.
Microtheater is a tradition that began in Spain, spread to Mexico. and has been adopted by various theaters in New York. Intar had a wonderful site-specific MicroTeatro festival in 2021; Teatro Sea has produced more than a dozen of them over the years. This is the second one involving puppets.
Elon himself is more a masked character than a puppet, but in the midst of his increasingly outlandish and incoherent ramblings, he encountered several animated inanimate objects, including a tiny puppet cancer research doctor whose funding had been cut off; the most puppet-thing about him was his ability to open up a beer bottle on his own, without his puppetteer giving him a hand. “Elon Musk is Cool AF” was a project of the Haskell Brothers, Timothy (who wrote the script) and Aaron (who built the puppets.)
Pablo Jesús Gatto pops out of a trunk at the start of “Trenzas, Sapos y Mariposas,” which translates as “Braids, Toads and Butterflies,” which sums up some of the most vivid memories that the character recounts (in Spanish) from a queer childhood in La Pampa, Argentina, in the 1990s.
In “The Falcon King,” the puppet company Drama of Works told a story of human folly, from the point of view of the birds that were being poisoned by insecticides in the 1950s. Each of the puppets were ingeniously constructed from found, natural, and recycled materials, most impressively the title character:
In “Archipiélago,” the Puerto Rican troupe Vueltabajo Teatro manipulates two lifelike haunted Puerto Rican characters, while the screen behind them projects documentary footage of invasion and explosion – surely scenes from the aerial bombing of the Puerto Rican town of Jajuya during the 1950 Nationalist Uprisings and the U.S. Navy’s decades-long bombing and military exercises on the island of Vieques. The characters do not speak, but the signs are clear that the show views the archipelago of Puerto Rico as occupied land.
