Teatro Tinglado Puppets Dwarfed in a Large Hall

Mexico City’s Teatro Tinglado brought its little puppet theater to the oversized Freud Playhouse at UCLA Friday and Saturday. It was a mismatch.

Most of the company’s puppets are only 2 or 3 feet tall. They would have been better appreciated in one of L.A’s many sub-100-seat theaters instead of the Freud, which seats approximately 500, with more capacity in the rear than in the front.

This was in stark contrast to the appearance of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in the same building in 1990. Most of that company’s puppets are larger-than-lifesize, yet it performed in the smaller theater next door to the Freud.

Of course, more Teatro Tinglado performances would have been necessary in order to accommodate as many people in a smaller hall, which probably would have increased production costs. Still, the experience of being so far from the puppets, even from a seat in the center of the theater, was so unsatisfying that the cause of adult puppet theater was probably hurt as much as it was helped.

The Teatro Tinglado show was definitely for adults, as some parents of small children learned to their chagrin. After a brief introduction, Hugo Hiriart’s “The Repugnant Story of Clotario Demoniax” begins with a murder on a mountain slope. After the title character kills his companion, the body bounces down the peaks, as represented by a miniature mountain range extending out to the side of the boxy frame structure that serves as the puppet theater, in the center of the wide Freud stage.

Back home after the “accident,” Punch-like Clotario tells Marcelina, the grieving fiancee of the dead man, that his dying wish was for her to marry Clotario. It looked as if the dead man briefly popped out of his coffin when he heard this, but this was one of those small moments that was almost lost in the Freud.

Marcelina reluctantly agrees to wed Clotario, but not to bed him--unless he tells her stories while she removes her clothing, one piece per story. The stories proceed until the only greater-than-lifesize puppet, a genie, suddenly takes Marcelina to the home of the evil Lola. After Lola appears on a radio show (hosted by a dancing puppet who looks like Oliver Hardy), Clotario tracks Lola down and engages in a fierce, funny punching match.

The dimensions of the show are sometimes enlarged when the costumed puppeteers take over some of the narrative, by themselves or in conjunction with puppets. During the final bout, two actors and their corresponding puppets are participating in the onstage action. Because a bearded man (Ramon Barragan) plays the fierce Lola, the Lola puppet also has a beard.

Barragan served as the narrator, with emphatic gestures but only sporadically comprehensible English (the Saturday matinee was in Spanish, while Friday and Saturday evening shows were in English). Company director Pablo Cueto played Clotario with flawless English, and Haydee Boetto and Alejandro Benitez also spoke well. Much of the recorded music was from Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella,” with appropriately sour kazoo sounds punctuating the action.