Review: Trouble Puppet's The Jungle at Salvage Vanguard Theater
Trouble Puppet's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle begs an important question: Would it be possible to produce an adaptation of The Jungle that didn’t use puppets?
It’s the rare work that accomplishes a feat like The Jungle’s—taking a story and finding the exact right medium to tell it, so that things that might otherwise need to be explained to an audience are instead grasped intuitively, and emotional connections that might require a bogged-down script to build can be forged quickly, as a matter of course. Think along the lines of how the place Dorothy wakes up in is established as a magical land via the switch to technicolor in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. It’s smart and it makes allows the piece to make its point clear without words, through the unique qualities of the chosen medium.
This is what Trouble Puppet and director Connor Hopkins accomplish by using puppets to tell the story of The Jungle. So many choices made here allow The Jungle to function at an awesomely high level of sophistication, in terms of its storytelling: Dressing the puppeteers almost identically to the puppets they control, allowing them to interact freely, having the puppets react to the interactions between their puppeteers… It’s some serious shit, succeeding—without ever even looking like it’s trying—on levels most Austin productions don’t even attempt to reach.
The Jungle is, at its core, a story about the way the more vulnerable among us—the poor, the recently emigrated, the old—are left without agency and forced to live by the rules dictated by those with unearned authority. It’s a theme that runs throughout the work of Upton Sinclair, who wrote the book upon which the performance is based, and while it uses the downright unspeakable conditions found in the meatpacking industry around the turn of the last century as its background, those themes are what Hopkins and his company seem most interested in exploring. The nuts and bolts of the meatpacking plants of a century ago are explored—often to the work’s detriment—but when The Jungle shines, it’s because it’s exploring powerlessness.
And what tool can more effectively explore the lack of power and the subsequent turning over of control to authority than a puppet?
When The Jungle plays with this aspect of the performance, the results are downright breathtaking. The performance, which uses tiered levels as part of the stage design, features characters who occupy roles similarly tiered. There’s Zeb West, who speaks and moves freely about the stage as the plant’s Foreman, unencumbered by the responsibilities of puppeteering. Then there are the puppeteers, who, as full-sized humans, are able to move without help as they do double-duty as both the puppeteers and actors portraying factory workers. And finally, there are the puppets themselves, who, at maybe twenty inches tall, are effectively cast as the occupants of the lowest tier.
It’s this use of puppets that makes The Jungle seem like a story that would be downright hollow without them. When a dead worker’s body is casually discarded and replaced with another, West is able to literally pick it up and toss it aside. When two characters are married, meanwhile, the surrounding puppeteers (similarly dressed) who stand over them create the effect of being a sort of protective family. Furthermore, just the nature of puppets, and the way we’ve been conditioned to respond to them (think Jim Henson, whose Foundation provided a grant to fund this production) means that the workers have our sympathy from moment one—they’re expressive little creatures with big eyes and precious movements, and it feels natural to root for them. We intuitively grasp their situation, and the power dynamic that’s at the core of the piece.
When The Jungle falters a bit, then, is when it tries to invert this dynamic. A repeated interlude in which a puppet attempts to organize his fellows to form a union and strike comes off as both a touch dated and unlikely to succeed (it doesn’t)—what reason does West’s Foreman have to fear them? A later scene in which a fired worker attempts to physically threaten West with a knife is even less effective, and even unintentionally comical. The piece is so good at conveying how weak the workers are that it’s hard to take seriously the suggestion that they might be able to stand up for themselves. And—as anyone who knows either the rocky history of unionization in the United States or who’s read Sinclair’s book is aware—they’re going to fail anyway.
As the unionization subplot becomes a larger focus, as well as the incarceration of the worker who attacks West, The Jungle continues to stumble, and it never really returns to the heights that the performance reaches in its first two-thirds. But who cares about that, really? There are a handful of things to find fault with, like the fact that it’s hard to distinguish one puppet from another even watching from the front rows, or the way that West’s character is written more like a Snidely Whiplash-style villain than an actual human, which is unfortunate given that he’s the only non-puppet/teer on stage, but those are things that can, and should, be overlooked, given how much The Jungle gets right—especially in areas that few other local productions ever even attempt at all.
The Jungle runs through October 4 at Salvage Vanguard Theater.
