Hand-Held Device

Aaron Cromie shares the limelight with his creations.

by Juliet Fletcher

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Published: Dec 13, 2006

"Where's Sophie?"

Aaron Cromie has broken off a thought about his papier-mache recipe to bound across the deserted Arden stage in search of his female lead. A foot tall, blond and dressed in only a smock, the puppet that embodies the child protagonist in the theater's production of Roald Dahl's The BFG has gone walkabout from her station amid the toy-strewn set. (Not that anyone finds it comic to note, at this point, that she has no feet.)

It's an anxious three minutes, as Cromie quietly combs the wings. Sophie, made of rosin paper and paint-rollers, with a wide-eyed sculpted face that resembles both her puppeteer Maggie Lakis and the classic Sophie illustration for Dahl's book by Quentin Blake, is painstakingly designed to help her puppeteers weave hand-held magic. When she appears, back from unscheduled "rehearsal" with the actors in a dressing room, Cromie rakes his fingers through his spiky hair in relief. "All I was thinking," he confesses, "was, 'How can I make another one by 7 o'clock?'"

Being on call for puppet design is not, Cromie admits, what he used to think his theater life would entail — although that papier-mache recipe has come in handy. An acting fellowship at Walnut Street Theatre in 1995 was followed by his stint at the Dell'Arte school, where he learned how to perform with masks, and for a while his work divided neatly between mask and puppet performance and more conventional acting roles. But this fall, he says, the balance shifted. Designing puppets has taken precedence.

"I came to the conclusion that, while I still hope to act, this design stuff is where I have to focus right now," he explains. National and notable regional productions have come a-calling: On the back of his work designing puppets for Measure for Measure at the Folger Theatre in D.C., another company in that city, The Studio Theater, approached him to build a fleet of 12 bunraku-style puppets for their current production of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home.

"The upside to that was the acceptance — away from the circle of friends here, the work stands on its own," he notes. He has been a familiar Philadelphia presence at Mum Puppettheatre and with the company he co-founded, Hotel Obligado, but working outside this region he found it refreshing to be judged on merit alone. "The directors said, your work is of this quality, we want you to do this show."

Other accolades have pointed him in this direction: In 2004, he and Tony Lawton received a grant from the Jim Henson Foundation to undertake Foocy Djanni, a puppet work about a vengeful Russian witch. "I am proud to have grown up with The Muppets, and Jim Henson," says the 34-year-old. Those mainstream puppet influences informed a childhood already steeped in hands-on theater, guided by his father, who taught music and theater at Pequannock Township High School in New Jersey. Every spring break, he would be preparing the school play, and the young Cromie would go with him. "In the morning it'd be rehearsal, and in the afternoon, set-building," he recalls. "For me, the sound of sawing, the smell of fresh coats of acrylic and latex paint, all were my early memories of vacation. And the fact that I went there with my dad, which allowed me to feel very permitted in doing this."

He returned from D.C. with a mountain to climb: The BFG, or The Big Friendly Giant, written by Dahl in 1982 and adapted for the stage by David Wood, calls for Dahl's giants — mostly grotesque, one gregarious — to meet, carry and even attempt to eat tiny Sophie and her fellow "human beans." To achieve the right scale as their worlds collide, the foot-high Sophie puppet mostly scampers around the 6-foot-high BFG (Pete Pryor) and the other, more murderous giants. But when the BFG returns to the human world — to warn the Queen of England of an impending giant-led massacre — his entrance dwarfs the life-size people.

For an artist who claims he can't draw, and makes mock-ups of his creations out of crumpled paper and tape, Cromie admits "this play required new skills of me." He sculpted masks for the giants around hard-hats. The face of the Sophie puppet was based on a photo of Lakis, but with tiny features sharp enough to imply changing emotions. And in each case, the iconic story illustrations by Quentin Blake could be hewn to or disregarded. "When I began, I spent a lot of time reading the book, and thinking about how the BFG existed in my imagination," he explained. "And Blake's illustrations — they belong in the book. We didn't set out to copy them in three dimensions." Nevertheless, the BFG's ears flap familiarly, and the giants' masks display the flared nostrils and beady eyes characteristic of Blake's rendering. "Of course, you can't undo his influence," Cromie smiles. "You can't unring a bell."

Wood's script called for the 14-foot-tall BFG who arrives in Act 2 to be animatronic, but director Whit MacLaughlin and Cromie both agreed to do the scene differently, "organically." Pryor is poised on stilts, wearing a mask, shoulder pads and snow-gloves, making his frame larger while remaining light to wear. "I fell five or six times," Pryor says, "but I'm getting used to the movements." Jeb Kreager, who plays the vicious giant Fleshlumpeater, demonstrates how putting on the giant mask transforms his movements into huge walloping strides. Taking it off again, he says, "Kids will always beg to see what's inside here, what it's made of."

And that's the kind of honesty about theater life that Cromie likes to unleash on his young crowds.

"There's nothing I hate more," he says, "than after a puppet performance, when the adults tell the kids, 'Oh, the puppets are sleeping now.'"

(j_fletcher@citypaper.net)

The BFG runs through Jan. 28, Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122, www.ardentheatre.org.

 

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