Spiking the Punch in the Puppet World

Pablo Cueto will tell you that the world of puppetry is a lot wider--and wilder--than Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, Soupy Sales and White Fang or Kermit the Frog and his friends from Sesame Street.

The director of Mexico City’s Teatro Tinglado, which brings its “The Repugnant Story of Clotario Demoniax” in English and Spanish to UCLA’s Freud Theater on Friday and Saturday, Cueto is part of an international puppetry movement. One of the 22 companies seen at the Jim Henson Foundation International Festival of Puppet Theater last month in New York City, Cueto and Teatro Tinglado are creating edgy, provocative puppet shows for an adult audience. It’s not just for morning TV anymore.

Cueto--42, with black hair, dark, soulful eyes and a thin mustache and the look of a ‘40s movie star--says he finds performing for adults more interesting than performing for children. “Children are very curious, and they want to be told the truth of what’s behind the puppet stage,” he says over tea at a Santa Monica cafe. “For adults, the truth is their everyday experience. Instead, they want to be transported to another world. Adults want to be lied to, and we’re willing to lie to them.”

Cueto formed Teatro Tinglado with his mother, artist and puppeteer Mireya Cueto, in 1979. (His grandparents were also puppet makers and experimental artists.) He says the word “Tinglado” means “an improvised structure, something you build and break down easily, like a puppet stage; it’s also synonymous with creating confusion or a mess.” The senior Cueto has since gone off to form her own company, Espiral, but consults and designs puppets with her son.

Puppetry, as defined by Cueto, unites other art forms into something unique and new. “It’s the borderline between visual arts and performing arts,” he explains. “Modern puppetry is really expanding. Staging can be a very contemporary mix of what theater and movies can do. Like my mother says, ‘It’s when the metaphor comes alive,’ when you say I wish that the Earth would swallow me and it happens.”

Indeed, heads literally roll in “Clotario Demoniax,” which is chock-full of sex, violence and satire. Cueto was inspired to create the show after a trip to European puppet festivals in 1990. He went home wanting to create a Mexican version of the famous Punch figure, the devious antagonist of many puppet traditions--in Italy, he’s called Pulcinella; in Germany, Kasperle; in Russia, he’s Petroushka. Cueto enlisted playwright and author Hugo Hiniart to create a sufficiently nasty character. To Cueto, who as both puppeteer and actor portrays Punch in the show, he represents a hidden element of all of us.

“He’s a cynical, hypocritical, underhanded, cunning monster, and he has no guilt feelings about being evil. When the audience sees him they have permission to identify with the character. Traditionally, Punch hangs the hangman, imprisons the policeman, beats up the judge. It’s what we all want to do deep down. Here, you can do it.”

In a story Bert and Ernie wouldn’t be caught dead in, Cueto’s Punch figure, Clotario, violates the sacred code of friendship by killing his best friend and marrying his best friend’s girl. To get her to disrobe on their wedding night, he has to tell her stories while she discards one item of clothing per tale. It gets weirder from there with a genie, a radio talk show and a showdown with the Queen of the Tabloids.

The show’s look is very colorful and low-budget, a crazy quilt of images--photocopied, hand-drawn or cut out from magazines. A collage of postcards of Mexico City forms the backdrop for one scene. Cueto uses table puppets made out of household items, like a glue bottle combined with an upside-down miniature liquor bottle for a drunk character, or a syrup bottle with a painted Styrofoam ball head for the drunk’s wife. Some scenes feature “humanettes,” actors’ heads combined with puppet bodies. Actors in full costume appear throughout the show, speaking the dialogue and manipulating the puppets from the side of the stage.

As for the other three actors in the troupe, Cueto says what unites them is performance, not puppetry. “Puppets can be very elaborate, but what can never be substituted is the eyes of a human. We combine puppets with actors; you’ve just got to know when to use one and when to use the other.”

“The Repugnant Story of Clotario Demoniax” opened last month’s third biannual Henson Foundation festival to much press acclaim.

“Pablo Cueto is a third-generation puppeteer,” says festival executive producer Cheryl Henson, Jim Henson’s daughter. “His skill and technique is so solid that puppeteering is second nature. He’s then able to explode it and do a lot of different things with it.”

Henson says she wants to send more festival groups on tour; the Teatro Tinglado appearance marks the first such show in Los Angeles. “Puppet theater is dynamic and exciting right now,” she says. “You have artists coming to puppetry from all disciplines--theater, film, sculpture, graphic arts. There are a lot more young people getting into it who come from a film and animation background. The amount of visual information in our culture helps.”

For Cueto, it’s fun to be part of the surge. After a few years of suffering because of the elimination of Mexican government support for the arts, his company has found its feet again, working around the world and collaborating with artists in other media.

“It’s not a common thing, not a mainstream thing to work puppets for adults, but it makes it interesting,” he says. “I think the hardest thing about puppetry for adults is bringing the audience to the show. Once we have the audience in front of us, we’ve got it made.”

* Teatro Tinglado presents “The Repugnant Tale of Clotario Demoniax,” in English Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; and in Spanish, Saturday, 2 p.m., Freud Playhouse, MacGowan Hall, UCLA. $9 (students), $25. (310) 825-2101.