The Prague Post
October 10th, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre
Prague Real Estate

Home » Archives » Tempo

Marionettes over Manhattan

A Czech émigré discovers new dimensions in puppet theater in New York City

November 21st, 2007 issue

By Gwen Orel

Photos by Jonathan Slaff
The actors are all "double-cast" in this unorthodox production of Hamlet, playing live roles and pulling the strings of their puppet characters. Nat Cassidy, is the Danish prince.
Photos by Jonathan Slaff
The actors are all "double-cast" in this unorthodox production of Hamlet, playing live roles and pulling the strings of their puppet characters. Nat Cassidy is the Danish prince.
Photo by Jonathan Slaff
CAMT founder and Czech expat Vít Hořejš.
For the Post
NEW YORK CITY
Bite into the Big Apple this month and you might taste Czech spice. Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ’n’ Roll opened on Broadway Nov. 5 to glowing reviews. Before the stagehands strike darkened most theaters the following weekend, the house was packed not with curious tourists but native New Yorkers, for whom discussions of political systems and ideology still have powerful resonance, six years after 9/11.
And it’s a fair bet that two readings by Radok-award winning playwrights Petr Kolečko and Radmila Adamová, coming up in December at the Bohemian National Hall, will attract more than the normal buzz for staged readings by international writers.
At the moment, one of hottest tickets in town is the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s (CAMT) production of Hamlet, being performed at Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn. That’s an actual, full-size restored carousel, built in 1922, which the troupe is using as a stage.
The CAMT has one of the strongest reputations of any downtown company in the city, quietly producing startling avant-garde work for the past 17 years. Using unorthodox performance spaces, a blend of live actors and marionettes and “puppets” that can include found objects like vacuum cleaners and soda cans, Czech émigré Vít Hořejš and his troupe stage productions that, in their mix of energy, inventiveness and experiment, go down like a hot New York pretzel smothered in Czech mustard.
Hořejš, who moved here in 1979, admits that he still sometimes feels overwhelmed by the city’s frenetic energy. “But I can’t imagine leaving,” he says.
Hamlet is an expansion of a production that CAMT first did in 1997, then again in 2002, on a much smaller revolving gazebo. But the pleasure of seeing it performed on a grand carousel with 48 horses and two elaborate carriages is just an enticing hook, not the show’s real substance. Though children come to each performance, and the 80-minute script is drawn from a Czech family version of the story for puppets, this is not a children’s theater production. In the opening scene, puppet Claudius humps puppet Gertrude (both manipulated by Hořejš).
One of the show’s most poignant moments occurs not on the carousel, but when Hamlet, played by Nat Cassidy, who also manipulates the Hamlet puppet (all five actors are similarly “double-cast”), sits on the floor, picks up a guitar and begins strumming. He breaks into a campfire song with a lovely melody — the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy.
And then there are the marionettes, including a literal army (Fortinbras’ army) whose clumping marching adds a disquieting beat to the turning wheel of fortune. Hamlet features a combination of 3-foot rod marionettes (designed by Jakub Krejčí) for the major roles, toy marionettes (designed by Miloš Kasal) and shadow puppets. All this amid elaborate, carved wooden horses and ornate carriages.
Why the carousel setting? “I thought, there’s some familiarity between the puppets and the horses, we should do something together,” Hořejš says.
A richness of possibilities
Unable to live under the communist system but with no stomach for becoming a dissident, Hořejš left Czechoslovakia in 1978. Through a friend, he accepted an offer to act as a translator/consultant for a translation of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Tables from Italian into Czech. When he got to Turin, he warned Levi that, due to his defector status, the translation probably would not be published. In the end it was, three years later, under another translator’s name.
Hořejš hoped to move on to England, but was unable to get a tourist visa. Eventually he came to the United States on a refugee visa. “I had to force myself by knowing that with a foreign accent it would be easier in the U.S.,” he says. “But I was afraid I would be assaulted by gangsters when I got off the plane.”  
Instead, he was “assaulted by garbage,” but pleasantly surprised at how European New York seemed.
Unlike many Czech émigrés, Hořejš always considered his move permanent. “I was never homesick, really,” he admits. When he visits the Czech Republic now, he has a slight American accent. But when he began doing storytelling here, he found himself drawing more and more on Czech fairytales, both because they were the ones he knew, and because New Yorkers didn’t know them.  
When he found three antique marionettes “sleeping in a chest in the attic” of the Jan Hus church on East 74th Street in 1984, he decided to do something with them. A self-taught puppeteer, he’d been inspired by the mix of live actors and puppetry he saw at Divadlo Drak before he emigrated.
“That was a great revelation for me, that indeed puppet theater was not dead,” he says. “And it was not dead because live performers came in.”  
After Hořejš founded his company, he took that concept and ran with it. “I discovered the richness of possibilities of interacting between the puppeteer and the puppet, and having different sizes of puppets,” he says.” It feels like close-ups and long-shots. A monologue becomes a dialogue.”   
And he doubts he would have founded a company had he not come to New York. “People are go-getters; they are faster here than anywhere else,” Hořejš says. “I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted — starve, if I wanted to.”
The transition came slowly. “At first, I was not able to ask for money if I was doing a job,” he admits, a holdover from being brought up under communism. “But it doesn’t work that way here. I evolved.”
CAMT has a core group of about eight performers, though roles come and go, and no actor is on a permanent salary, “like my lucky Czech brethren.” Many of the productions are developed through improvisation.
In 2006, Hořejš took his production of Rusalka to the Skupa Festival in Plzeň, west Bohemia. He thought of it as “very Czech,” but the Czech reaction was to describe it as “postmodern.”
That’s when Hořejš realized he had absorbed that special New York energy that thrives on the blending of cultures and styles. “I speak to the audience that is here,” he says.
Gwen Orel can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (21/11/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.