Entertainment, strings attached

Poking through a garbage can, an old man searches for something valuable. Finding nothing, he collapses on a nearby bench and meditates sadly on his life.

It’s a scene maybe too familiar in our city. But what makes it strangely more poignant than usual is that we’re not seeing a man at all. We’re looking at a marionette.

“The audience believes a marionette in a way that they don’t believe a human actor,” puppeteer Joseph Cashore says. “People understand it and go with it emotionally. It’s like visual poetry.”

For more than 30 years, Cashore has been making marionettes, eliciting such strong reactions because his puppets are so beautifully constructed and move with such realism.

There’s a violinist who looks as if he’s really playing the violin. There’s an elephant whose trunk moves delicately and searchingly. You can see the homeless man’s toes wiggling through a hole in his shoe.

Behind such lifelike movements are Cashore and his wife and assistant, Wilma, working intricately constructed control mechanisms. The Pennsylvania-based team -- they’ve been married 22 years -- spend about 10 months a year giving performances across the country. They stop this weekend at the Cerritos Center.

“My control mechanisms are unlike any that you may have seen,” Joseph Cashore says. “Each one of mine is designed to allow that puppet just to do that character. They’re actually systems of mechanisms. I have a lot of levers, things I can raise, which move something else.”

The minimum number of strings he manipulates is about 17. The most is 42.

“That’s for the elephant,” Cashore says. “It does a lot. The trunk is fully articulated and it moves in many different ways. The ears work in a couple of different ways.”

The elephant, incidentally, took him three years to construct, including field trips to the natural history museum and zoo in his native Philadelphia.

“Although there is a lot of this that would appear as tricks in the show, none of these things is engineered for its own sake. It’s all in support of the theme.”

In fact, each of the short vignettes in the shows has a kind of moral.

The theme point of the homeless man, he says, is compassion. “There’s a comedy piece -- a young girl avoiding doing her homework; the theme is discipline. There’s a mother and baby; that expresses the tenderness between them. There’s an old woman at a gravesite; that expresses, I hope, both mortality and hope.”

Most of the pieces are enacted to classical music. Haydn, Vivaldi, Copland and Strauss are some of the composers.

“I listen to a lot of music, trying to find the right music that will express the theme of the piece,” Cashore says.

Another, if more well-known, puppet troupe that uses classical music is the Salzburg Marionettes, which have been reenacting the operas of Mozart and other composers since 1913.

“Salzburg does something quite different than what I’m doing,” Cashore says. “I’m presenting marionettes in a pure form, not interpreting works created for live actors. An actor has a day job, another life. A marionette has a life only when you see it.”

Cashore, now 54, was 11 when he discovered marionettes. He saw his first in a gift shop in New Jersey and asked if he could play with it. But the clerk said no. So he went home and built his own out of a wooden box, clothespins and a tin can.

He didn’t make another until he graduated from the University of Notre Dame. And after doing it as a sideline, he eventually turned it into an award-winning career. Overall, he’s made more than 100 marionettes.

“It’s like inventing a musical instrument, then rehearsing with it enough to know how to play it,” Cashore says. “A big part of the performance is becoming intimately familiar with the mechanism and the character.

“I first work in front of a mirror. Then, when I’m farther along, I videotape it so that I’m seeing if I’m communicating what I think I’m communicating.”

Even so, every now and then the marionette takes over.

“Very often in the development of a piece, you find that the puppet wants to do something else -- to go somewhere you hadn’t expected -- and you work that into the piece. It’s an organic process.”

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The Cashore Marionettes

Where: Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday; 1, 4 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday

Price: $10 to $15

Contact: (800) 300-4345