The puppets’ ends affirm life’s meaning

“Old Trout” may not be the most auspicious name for a seafood restaurant, a lipstick shade or a men’s cologne -- but for Canada’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop, the odd appellation seems to fit.

The name, says Judd Palmer, one of the founding members, comes from an actual aged fish that lives in the bottom of the swimming hole on his family’s ranch in southern Alberta -- where the members lived, hippie-style, while they built their Calgary-based puppet theater company. That was in 1999.

“It was a bout of pre-millennial apocalyptic terror that sent us down there,” Palmer says of the group’s decision to set up shop on the ranch. “There were lots of cows if we needed to eat, and in the Y2K total collapse we’d have the guns to defend ourselves against the ruminants.”

Of course. But back to the trout: “He has been alive for 10,000 years for sure, a prehistoric thing -- knows all the innermost truths of our being,” said Palmer, 35, with possible overstatement, in a recent conversation. “If you swam down, it could tell you the truth.”

Palmer adds a charming fact perhaps less well-known in the States: Old trout, he says, “is a term of endearment in this part of the land, as well as in Nova Scotia and points east.”

He uses a similar off-kilter logic to explain why the three-member troupe -- Palmer, Peter Balkwill and Pityu Kenderes, with additional performer Mitchell Craib -- has decided to explore mortality by killing off more than 20 puppet characters in their touring show “Famous Puppet Death Scenes,” opening Thursday at the Orange County Performing Artscenter’s Samueli Theater.

In a show that CBC News called “a veritable feast of puppet annihilation,” elderly puppet narrator Nathaniel Tweak presides over a collection of puppet death scenes purportedly culled from a long and celebrated tradition.

Included on this list is “The Feverish Heart,” a recurring segment in which Fate in the form of a giant fist repeatedly bashes in the bald head of the egg-shaped Nordo Frot; a German children’s show featuring two excitable blobs named Bipsy and Mumu, caught in “Let’s Make a Deal”-style hell when forced to choose between two doors labeled Ja and Nein; and a cosmic trip where a cryogenically frozen man wakes to a future populated by space-suited people who strangely resemble Johnny Depp.

“I don’t know if it’s a Canadian characteristic, but we have a sort of Gothic sensibility -- at least, I do,” says Palmer, who is also writer and illustrator of the book series “Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children.” “We live through these winters; we live in a certain perpetual state of fear of the cosmos that it is larger and more terrifying and more brutal than we could ever hope to be, so maybe this spawns in me kind of an essential angst.”

It follows that “Famous Puppet Death Scenes” is not a kid’s show. “We rarely end up in front of children, although that Pinocchio thing we did was for a family audience,” Palmer says, referring to the troupe’s anti-Disney take on the fairy tale. In the Trout version, the cute little cricket gets crushed with a hammer. “Ultimately, whether we want children at the show has more to do with the way adults feel about children than the actual children. It makes an adult audience nervous.

“The music director of one of our shows put it well. He said, ‘Children are already afraid, like all of us -- they just need a name to put on it.’ While the show itself is scary, it’s part of the basic human desire to understand the world of the unknown.”

Though the Trouts call their work puppetry for adults, Palmer says, they don’t mean “adult” in the sense of R-rated. “There’s a kind of stream of things that were intended for children but are now subverted for adult purposes,” Palmer observes. “The work of Edward Gorey would be a wonderful example of that.”

That’s why, he says, the Trout’s take on death is essentially life-affirming. “Our intention is to actually overthrow the audience into a kind of childlike state of wonder -- not to be cynical, but instead to assume that the adult is as capable as the child of that kind of essential, magical thinking that leads to wonder,” he says.

“I think that’s one of the beauties of the puppet: It has a way of sneaking in the back door on an audience,” Palmer adds. “They don’t quite expect to find themselves suddenly caring about a block of wood, but they do.

“And then we kill them.”

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diane.haithman@latimes.com

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Old Trout Puppet Workshop: ‘Famous Puppet Death Scenes’

Where: Samueli Theater, Orange County Performing Artscenter, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday

Ends: Saturday

Price: $25

Contact: (714) 556-2787