Dead puppets society

Ronnie Burkett's Happy is a masterpiece-no strings attached
PAUL MATWYCHUK

There's a bit in Ronnie Burkett's astonishing marionette play Happy where the hound dog that belongs to one of the characters walks across the stage. Occasionally it stops, sniffs the air and pricks up its ears. At one point, it wheels around suddenly and checks to see if its ass is still there. Burkett remains in plain view through the entire episode, walking alongside the puppet and manipulating the strings. But the dog's movements are so uncannily lifelike that the audience can't help but applaud with delight at the end of the routine.

The skill that goes into a minute-long scene like that alone exists on a level higher than what most performers ever achieve, even fleetingly-but in Happy, it's practically a throwaway little side moment, one more small touch out of dozens. (Burkett accomplishes so many difficult effects as a performer, a playwright and a marionettist in this play that I suspect part of him thinks that cute little floppy-eared dog puppet is almost too easy an applause-getter.)

Indeed, there is so much artistry on display in Happy that it's just about overwhelming. Far from being a mere technical exercise in virtuoso puppetry, Happy is, quite simply, the richest, most emotional experience I've had at the theatre all year. It contains so much humour and yet so much pain, so much theatrical inventiveness and yet is governed by such a sense of humanity that, even though it's a play about death and loss, it's executed so beautifully that it becomes an affirmation of the glory of being alive. (All that, plus a cute dog!)

Aged in wood

The story unfolds in a rooming house populated mostly by senior citizens. There's Happy, a war veteran whose always-cheerful disposition stands in marked contrast to the building's other residents, including Lou, a grouchy but lively old broad with an unhealthy craving for cigarettes; Raymond, a sweet, gentlemanly fellow whose shyness has always prevented him from making very many friends or finding many people to love him; and Ricky, a young gay Chinese man from Moose Jaw who has moved to the big city and reinvented himself as a flamboyant Puerto Rican hairdresser. The main plot line, however, deals with Carla, an introverted young woman struggling to find a way to cope with the grief of watching her lover Drew die, completely without warning, from a brain aneurysm. (Plus, every so often, the action of the play is interrupted by performances from Antoine Marionette's "Cabaret of Greyness" whose performers deliver musical numbers inspired by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of death and dying-most memorably a Pierrette cellist with an exquisitely mournful face named Jacqueline du Pressed.)

In writing a play about grief, Burkett may have found marionette theatre's perfect theme: what better, more poignant image could there be for the mysteriousness of life and the finality of death than seeing a puppet go slack and perfectly still after dancing so charmingly around the stage only seconds earlier? (In Happy, when a character dies, Burkett gently places the marionette in a large sack which he then stores inside a large sliding drawer-and there's something terribly moving about that gesture. Anyone who's had a loved one die can only hope their spirits were treated with a similar degree of care.)

Happy to be alive

People often marvel at the way Burkett makes you care so much about dead blocks of wood-but Burkett's puppet's are alive, not just because he animates them so convincingly, whether it's Lou's coughing fits or the way Carla sorrowfully hugs Raymond's dog, but because Burkett invests every single one of them with such a distinctive, recognizably human personality.

(Even characters who never say a word, like fellow tenants Skinny and Seamus or Happy's wife and son, have been given such memorable faces that you feel like you know everything about them instantly.)

As the play proceeds and Burkett reveals more and more about the backstories of people like Ricky and Raymond, those puppets seem increasingly human; yet at the same time, perhaps because of their stylized appearance, they begin to embody qualities larger than themselves (unrequited love, the pull of memory) with a purity that live actors could never convey.

I should add that Happy takes itself a lot less seriously than I have. (A play that names a Chinese character Mrs. Maytagwasha obviously has a personality with a strongly developed silly side.)

But it's hard not to get all lyrical when you're confronted with a play as moving as this one. Beautifully conceived and designed on every level, from Bill Williams' ingenious lighting to Cathy Nosaty's gorgeous, wrenching score to Burkett's wondrous toy box of a set to the witty, detailed costumes he's created for the marionettes to wear, Happy is a goddamned masterpiece.

Pardon my French.

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