Ronnie Burkett had been mulling the end of the world for a couple of years before he wrote Penny Plain, an apocalyptic gothic comedy that plays at The Cultch until Dec. 17.
The world renowned puppeteer was struck by environmentalist David Suzuki saying after a planetary meltdown, the earth would survive, though people may not, and by the ideas and images presented in the History channel TV show Life After People.
Penny Plain focuses on what's happening with the world via the drawing room of a blind, elderly woman of the same name.
Burkett could have depicted the environmental disasters occurring outside of Plain's walls with "Broadway hydraulics," but he thought it would be more chilling to deliver the news to the players and audience with a barrage of news reports. Once the dire reports dim and the lights come up, the audience watches as an array of characters race into the drawing room with news of the outside world, and then leave again.
Plain is deserted by her companion dog Geoffrey, who leaves to live as a man, only to have her end of days vigil interrupted by Geoffrey-replacement wannabes, including a down-and-out poodle.
She encounters a cross-dressing banker, American survivalists and fundamentalists Mel and Barb Titty-think a 50-year-old Barbie with blue eye shadow, Botox and bigger boobs for the wife-and a delusional serial killer who stalks young women who use their cellphones on public transit to off them.
"I love to daydream or read a book on the streetcar or the subway. Those days are pretty much gone now," said Burkett, who rides public transit in Toronto. "But it's not my natural makeup or my urge to follow people home and stab them in the neck with a pencil."
While Penny Plain flows with an air of a screwball comedy from the 1930s, the story also explores relationships between parents and children.
Burkett designed 33 marionettes and two hand-held puppets for the show, sculpting faces and chests with papier maché. He manipulates his characters from a platform above the set with 100inch-long strings, 14 to 16 strings per puppet. "That's a lot of potential for tangle."
Each character is outfitted in meticulously detailed costumes designed by Kim Crossley, who's worked with the 25-year-old Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes for two decades.
Vancouver is the third stop for the production that was commissioned by the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton and the National Arts Centre.
Burkett, who was born in Lethbridge, Alta. and grew up in Medicine Hat, became interested in puppetry at age 7 when he read an article about Bil Baird in the World Book Encyclopedia and saw his puppetry in The Sound of Music.
The day Burkett turned 19, Baird hired him to work for his company in New York. Puppetry encompassed everything Burkett enjoyed in his youth. "I can make stuff and I can make funny voices and I can be on stage and I can invent stories," Burkett said. "Had I not found puppetry, I would have been one of those people in the arts who looked undisciplined."
In Penny Plain, the names of the title character and a 14-year-old girl named Tuppence are "a wink and a nod" to the miniature Victorian cardboard theatres that hosted operas and Shakespeare plays.
"The sheets to assemble these things were sold for a penny uncoloured, and two cents printed in colour. So the term was penny plain, tuppence coloured," Burkett said. "And so, in this play when this mysterious girl Tuppence appears and passes herself as Penny's new dog, the world starts growing again."
Speaking of growing, when Burkett performs Penny Plain he'll be sporting an emerging Movember 'stache.
"So the audience, every night, will be berated into going to my page on the Movember site and donating," he said.
Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
