Prop: Large cabinet with multiple doors.
Appearing in: “The Cabinet,” Redmoon Theater.
As a child, Frank Maugeri loved being scared stiff by TV horror films. So it was only natural for the Redmoon Theater’s associate artistic director to create a puppet version of the 1919 German Expressionist silent film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”
He wanted the thriller, about an evil doctor who commands a somnambulist to commit murder, to retain some film-like qualities. “We wanted the ability to do cinematic effects like close-ups, long shots and dissolves and have several different perspectives of the same action at the same time,” explains Margaret Goddard, one of the artistic team members who worked on the production.
The collaborators drew inspiration from various sources: the boxes that artist Joseph Cornell filled with found objects and mementos, toy theaters popular in Victorian parlors, Advent calendars, the actors whose heads popped out from small doors on TV’s “Laugh-In,” and especially the 17th Century cabinets that displayed man-made and natural curiosities. The result was a 14-foot tall antique cabinet with off-kilter doors and drawers that open at different times to reveal puppets, puppet masters and smaller props.
“The piece of furniture operates on a number of symbolic and metaphorical levels,” says Maugeri. “In the horror genre, something scary may be hiding under a mundane bed or behind a closet door, and the cabinet symbolizes the coffin where the somnambulist [a sleepwalker] is kept in the film and it creates a sense of claustrophobia.”
A steel structure, designed by Goddard, hides behind the cabinet, where the five puppeteers do all sorts of acrobatics in order to manipulate the puppets. She recalls: “When I finally saw the show I was flabbergasted because it almost looks like little movies are happening inside the openings.”
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“The Cabinet,” through April 24, Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western Ave. April 27-June 5 at Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard St. $20-$25, 312-850-8440, ext. 111.