PUPPETRY and PEARL

Two River Theater Associate Producer, Dennis Chambers, sat down with Playwright Kate Hamill, Director Shelley Butler, and Puppet Designer James Ortiz to discuss how the puppet of Pearl came to be!

Dennis Chambers [DC]

How did the decision come about to have the character of Pearl be a puppet?

Shelley Butler [SB]

Pearl’s such a fascinating character. How do you theatrically represent a child that has been excluded from society? In a reading we had once done of the play, we had a wonderful 13-year-old, but no matter what she did, we never got that otherworldly element—we simply saw a precocious child.

Kate built this world full of heightened theatricality that begged for something as conceptually big as Pearl. It’s a small cast representing a much larger community. We are telling a huge story through an intentional, economized lens. We all kept digging into who Pearl really is – what are her relationships, and how does that manifest as this creature that the audience is going to experience? Those explorations led us to the puppet idea.

Kate Hamill [KH]

In some ways, a real child is too real. The magical thing about puppets is that they accomplish the real and the otherworldly.

James Ortiz [JO]

Puppetry is supernatural and hyper-real. There’s a Dan Hurlin quote, that I’ll butcher, that goes, “An actor may die, but we know he’ll get up when the curtain comes down. With puppets, there’s no pretending.” So, our brains say, “I see. And I accept.” There is this contract that happens with an audience that’s magical and strange and bizarre. Pearl as a puppet made total sense to me.

DC

How did you decide that you wanted to bring on James Ortiz to design and create the puppet?

SB

Puppets can mean so many things, so they need to be designed by someone who really understands both the motivations of that character and how to theatricalize that within the context of the whole play. I’ve been a fan of James’ work since The Woodsman Off-Broadway and knew he was the person we needed.

DC

James, were there any challenges you faced while designing and building Pearl?

JO

I’ve created a few child puppets, but what I liked about attacking this is that the puppet will inherently spook us, because Pearl is this feral monster.

Puppet characters are usually simpler – cleaner lines with a face fixed in one expression, but Pearl has to express a huge range of emotions. Trying to do that and still make her a human child was a magical exercise. Pearl is this outward explosion of what repression culture does.

DC

What has the process been like incorporating the puppet into the larger design of the play?

JO

We definitely spent a lot of time unifying the vision of Pearl. With puppetry, I love that there’s no version of it where I’m not in constant conference with every department in a theater, from costumes to company management. It’s an “all hands on deck” thing. A puppet is the mascot of the play.

Other people on stage believing in Pearl is where the magic trick comes in. As creatives and craftspeople, we’re all part of that illusion.

KH

What I love about theater is that there’s lots of stuff I don’t know. But you just get a bunch of smart, interesting, creative people in a room, and you find a common language of discovery. When James sent over the sketches for the first ideas for Pearl, I was like, “That’s so much better than what I was thinking.” That’s the beauty of good collaboration and that’s what you’ll see reflected on stage.

The Scarlet Letter runs from February 3—25 / 2024.

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