Skip to main content

LOVELACE MARIONETTE THEATRE

I have been fortunate. 

In the mid-seventies, I moved to Pittsburgh, PA.  There, I did a variety of things:  working as a carpenter´s helper; repairing toilets and operating a telephone switchboard in a roadside hotel; studying early childhood education at a Penn State branch campus; working as a direct care worker in a center for Severely and Profoundly Retarded Adults who had spent their lives warehoused in large state-run facilities; studying Sociology and Political Science at a Community College; being a VISTA volunteer promoting an Adult Literacy Program; catering rock concerts at the Pittsburgh Civic Center; growing and marketing bean sprouts out of an abandoned brewery; working as a volunteer on the “Mill Hunk Herald” – a grassroots worker writer magazine.  And I met Margot Lovelace.




 Margot was an icon of the Pittsburgh art and theatre scene, founder of the first professional puppet theatre in the United States.  In her early 50s in 1975, she had built a solid reputation as a puppeteer, playwright, producer, director, promoter, teacher and comedian.  She started in1964 in an old warehouse in the East Liberty neighborhood  of Pittsburgh.  I stumbled onto the newer theatre that was housed since 1978 in a garage on Ellsworth Avenue in Shady Side, when I was searching for a place to live.  I moved into a second story apartment next to the theatre, with Margot as my landlady.  The attraction of the Marionette Theatre soon drew me in, and I began spending all of my spare time there helping out with productions – even getting to perform in a couple of shows as a full body puppet – a sort of Jim Henson Muppet.  I was even inspired to build my own rod puppet that I often used to hitchhike around the country (you'd be surprised how effective it was having a two-foot puppet sticking his thumb out for you)..


The 100-seat Ellsworth Avenue theatre put on marionette and hand-puppet shows for children, and experimented with other types of puppetry focusing on tragedy and comedy geared to adults.  I remember providing support for a travelling troupe who worked with BunRaku puppets from traditional Japanese theatre – large colorful half-size figures operated by a three person team dressed totally in black, blending into a black background.


I eventually moved away from Pittsburgh and lost track of Margot and the Lovelace Marionette Theatre.  For years, I travelled with a set of three marionettes gifted to me by her - the three Billy Goats Gruff.  With wool covered jointed wood bodies and heavy lead hooves suspended by nylon strings attached to two crossbards, they would “clack clack clack” across the bridge under which lived the evil troll.  Margot retired in 1984, donating all of her puppets to the Carnegie Museum of Art.  The Lovelace theatre was the longest running puppet theatre in the United States.

Yes, I have been very fortunate.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marbles are for... Somewhere between unsuccessfully trying to suppress a few sobs at the poignancy of flawed humanity and experiencing a deeply satisfying grin as Bill Murray over-sings Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” during the credits of my second watching of the movie “St, Vincent” on Netflix, I was hit with a memory from long ago Junior High School as Murray’s Vince, recovering from a stroke, was made to pick up marbles with his toes and deposit them into a nearby bowl.  A strange thing to associate, is it not? But that is what well-done fiction is all about: connecting us with both universal and very personal things. Along about 1964, shortly after the assassination of JFK and still under the influence of his school- based physical education initiative, our local school officials had every student evaluated in terms of stature and other physical qualities.  I remember standing sideways in front of a graphed board set up in what doubled as the Junior High gym...
1 comment
Read more
MUD BY ANY OTHER NAME… Before leaving the remote village where we had arrived after a half-hour motor-boat ride across a placid coastal lake and a pleasant, spirit-inspiring, forty-five minute journey in a dugout canoe through acres of mangrove trees, my hosts asked me if I wanted to borrow a pair of rubber boots as we continued on our way to visit a farmer who was planting nitrogen fixing trees on his small plot on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras.  “There will be mud along the way”, they said.
1 comment
Read more
THE HATFIELDS AND THE MCCOYS I was getting ready for a trip to a project region in the south central Department of Olancho in Honduras, but there was some doubt whether conditions in the zone would allow for a safe journey back along the country roads leading to the isolated communities that were participating in the project.  There was talk of increased violence in the region; not that violence was something unheard of in these rural, frontier environments, but over the last year the level of reported deaths in the department (not by automobile accidents or natural causes) had risen to a point where additional safety considerations and analysis were needed.  The news coming out of the area consisted of a too-often vague and mixed up tale of gang rivalries, drug trafficking wars and/or family feuds.  It all seemed just too jumbled up to make sense.  But, by talking to staff of our local partner organization, I was finally able to piece together at least part of ...
1 comment
Read more