Eric Bass, the co-founder and artistic director of Sandglass Theater, recently wrote to U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., inviting him to Vermont for the ninth Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival.
Held in and around Putney and Brattleboro from Sept. 11 to 20, this festival of puppetry and unusual theater brings international artists and local community together through a variety of performances, workshops, dialogues, and other special events.
“Dear Senator McCain,” Bass writes, “On behalf of Sandglass Theater, let me extend an official invitation to you to be our guest at the Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival.
“[A]ll of the performances address, in some way, issues of 'otherness' or exclusion, whether the specific subject is immigration, race, gender, or ethnic marginalization. ... Many of the artists will be interviewed in a 'talk show' forum, along with colleagues working in the areas that their shows address. We would do our best...to give you every opportunity to talk firsthand with these artists from the international field of Puppet Theater.”
The invitation from Bass is a response to Sandglass receiving national attention when it made McCain's “America's Most Wasted List.”
Claiming that his priority is “to eliminate wasteful project and special-interest-driven pork-barrel spending,” McCain is upset about a $30,000 grant that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded to Sandglass to support a series of puppet shows, as part of its Art Works grant program, which awards organizations that create art programs meeting what the NEA calls “the highest standards of excellence.”
“Sandglass plans to use a portion of this grant to partially fund a 10-day international Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival,” McCain wrote. “One of the many 'adult' themed puppet shows on the festival calendar is Paul Zaloom's White Like Me: A Honky Dory Puppet Show. According to the Sandglass Center, the show will 'tackl[e] the gnarly subject of the upcoming de-honky-ization of the United States when white people in America will be...just another other.'”
Shoshana Bass, press coordinator for Sandglass, says that the company was astonished that Sandglass made the list.
“We didn't think McCain would notice a such small puppet theater in a little town in Vermont,” she explains. “And the amount of money we received from the NEA is relatively small.”
Bass said she admits she finds it exciting that Sandglass is getting such national publicity, and she said she hopes it will help publicize the puppet festival in September.
Puppets in the Green Mountains is the signature event of Sandglass, and the 2015 festival will have an encompassing theme for the first time: Walking to the Borders.
According to the theater's website, “The performances, while vastly diverse in artistry and content, all focus on the experiences of displacement, otherness, togetherness, play, and commitment to a more livable world.”
The performer that McCain singled out in his diatribe against the festival, American found-object puppeteer Paul Zaloom, will be opening the festival. He will perform the show which McCain found so ridiculous, White Like Me, a one-man satire depicting a society where whites are rapidly becoming the minority. Zaloom will also be present for a weeklong residency during the festival.
Zaloom is an award-winning puppeteer, political satirist, filmmaker, and performance artist who tours his work all over the world. Although he lives in Los Angeles, Zaloom has long ties with Vermont. As a child, he went to summer camp at Farm & Wilderness in Plymouth. For a short while, he was an exchange student at the Putney School, and he attended Goddard College in Plainfield.
At age 19, while still in college, Zaloom joined the Bread and Puppet Theater, the renowned, Vermont-based, avant-garde puppet company. He has continued to work with this seminal group every summer since 1972. Like Bread & Puppet, Zaloom often has a political component to his work.
“Issues get stuck in my craw,” he explained to The Commons. “Artists can make serious subjects approachable through jolly puppets, which becomes cathartic for me and my audience. Here, things that may seem depressing, we can laugh at, as we see their absurdity. Our problems seem easier to face when we see them as funny.”
And one thing Zaloom insists is that his work must be funny.
“I have been a comic performer all my life,” he says. “ My number one mission is to make people laugh.”
Zaloom has had a long relationship with Sandglass's Eric Bass.
“We've known each other since day one,” he says. “Both of us began our careers about the same time, and we traveled in the same circles. I think I first met Eric as long ago as 1982 in Dresden, East Germany. We were both part of the small cadre of folks developing this stuff.”
Since Zaloom's first solo puppet piece, The World of Plastic, created in 1978, he has utilized various found objects - toys, tools, appliances, packaging materials, and other assorted junk - in a hyperactive, surreal comedy about American culture.
This genre of puppetry has since been named “object theater” by puppetry academics, and Zaloom is widely recognized as one of the pioneers.
“I see what I do with my found puppets as a direct descendant of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades art pieces,” he explains.
In the past 36 years of solo work, Zaloom has also exploited other forms of puppetry: toy theater, rod puppets, marionettes, shadow puppets, overhead projections, Bunraku-style puppets, cantastoria (storytelling with pictures), hand puppets, and ventriloquism.
Zaloom has written, designed and performed 14 full length solo spectacles, including Fruit of Zaloom, Zaloominations, Sick But True, Velvetville, The Mother of All Enemies, and the current spectacle, White Like Me: A Honky Dory Puppet Show which he will be performing during Puppets in the Green Mountains.
White Like Me is a puppet show in two parts. In the first section, Zaloom appears with a ventriloquist dummy, Mr. Butch Manly, who forces Zaloom to confront his own prejudices and biases, “as his wickedly persistent and sarcastic wooden doll hammers the hapless puppeteer with attacks on his self-righteousness, liberal guilt, and hypocrisy,” Zaloom writes.
The second half of the show is drawn from Zaloom's collection of toy cars, action figures, dolls, wind-up toys, tchotchkes, weird junk, and more. This toy theater extravaganza tells the satiric story of how White-Man leaves his home planet of Caucazoid, arrives on Earth, “civilizes” it, becomes the philanthropist Santa Claus, kicks “aliens” out of Arizona, and to his horror finally realizes that white folks will become a minority in the U.S. in 2040.
Although McCain may be the senator from Arizona, a state which has definite issues about immigration and white cultural dominance, Zaloom is perplexed that McCain would focus on his show.
“It's a bit like shooting fish in a pond,” he says. “McCain wants to rattle the saber with Iraq and the Middle East, and have the U.S. build half-a-billion dollar planes.”
With Sandglass, Zaloom says McCain is just attacking what he considers the weakest and most insignificant target.
“What could be sillier than puppetry?” he asked. “McCain clearly sees it as frivolous, idiotic, worthless, insignificant, and trivial. The fact is that the National Endowment for the Arts, dollar for dollar, is the best investment America has ever made. The arts stimulates billions and billions of dollars throughout communities in this country.”
Although Zaloom may seem a small-scale celebrity here in the United States, he is a cultural phenomenon in Latin America.
In 1992, Zaloom starred in the cable TV children's science program, “Beakman's World.” The show moved to CBS in 1993 and aired for four seasons. The show was moderately successful in the states, but became a sensation south of our border.
“In Latin America, I have to be surrounded by bodyguards because of the excited fans,” he says. “When I recently performed in Mexico, I faced 18,000 ecstatic fans, and was attended by the mayor of Mexico City and the U.S. ambassador. As I was leaving a concert, I felt something pulling my leg, and discovered a female fan wrapping herself around me.
“I must say that it is an odd feeling then coming back to the United States and find no one knows me.”
It may seem small comfort that at least Sen. McCain now knows who he is. But perhaps the senator will take up Eric Bass's invitation and go to see Paul Zaloom perform during Puppets in the Green Mountains and become one of his biggest fans.