Look at those elephants.
Seriously, look at them. Towering over the street like a dream made manifest, like something that crawled out of the collective unconscious and decided to take a walk. You think you understand puppets? You think they’re for children? You don’t know shit.
Most of us don’t want to admit that we’re all terrified of authenticity. Terrified. I’m scared shitless of standing there, naked and human, saying what I actually mean or feel, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that. Pretty sure none of us are. So we build these elaborate constructs, these papier mâché gods, these cloth and bamboo avatars, and we make them tell our truths. Because if the puppet says it, if the elephant dances and sways and speaks in my voice but not with my face, maybe I can get away with saying what’s actually in my heart without getting destroyed for it. Maybe. Maybe the puppet takes the hit. Maybe the puppet eats the consequential shit. Maybe the puppet is the lawyer I’ve hired to deliver the bad news, the bagman, the body double, the one who walks into the room first to see if it’s safe for the rest of me to follow.
The puppet is the ultimate fuck you to realism. The whole project. The whole gorgeous obscene project. It says: “You want truth? I’ll give you truth. But I’m gonna make it twelve inches tall and paint it in colors that don’t exist in nature, and you’re gonna believe it more than if I just stood here and talked to you like a regular human being. You’re gonna believe me harder because I’m made of wood and string and a lie everybody can see, and the lie you can see is the only lie worth trusting.”
It’s the oldest magic trick in the book. One of the oldest one. The shaman knew it. The Greeks knew it. Every street performer from Myanmar to Fisherman’s Wharf knows it, every kid making sock puppets in a basement knows it, every Bunraku master who spent fifty years learning to operate one figure with three people in black robes knows it (and listen, fifty years to learn to move one figure — that should tell you something about the seriousness of the proposition). You want to tell someone their world is ending? Their god is disappointed? Their heart is breaking? Don’t just say it. You sound like a fool when you just say it. You sound like everyone else who ever opened their mouth and reached for the big words and came back holding nothing. Build something impossible instead. Move it with your hands while hiding in shadows, and let it speak. Let the elephant stumble and cry. Let the demon rage. Let the lover sing. Let the dog die. Let the figure made of nothing carry the weight that the body made of something refuses to.
I learned this from Lee Breuer. Lee. I started as his teaching assistant at Stanford in 1997 (wait, maybe it was 1996, the years smear together at this distance and I’m not gonna pretend they don’t), sitting in on classrooms where he was working through whatever he was thinking about that quarter, watching him push student actors into territories they didn’t know existed, watching him refuse to let anybody settle for the easy version. He liked what he saw enough to hire me when the quarter ended, and I spent the next four years inside Mabou Mines. Mabou Mines. Production Manager on the domestic and then international tours of Gospel at Colonus. Technical Director on the revival of Hajj. Then Peter and Wendy, the Bunraku Peter Pan that toured the world and broke audiences in cities that didn’t speak the language and didn’t need to, because puppets don’t need language, puppets are language, the older language, the one we knew before we knew the other one. Next was Lulu, Lee’s adaptation of Wedekind with the trumpeter Jon Faddis on board (and yes, that Jon Faddis, the Dizzy Gillespie heir, blowing high C’s into a Weimar Republic nightmare, and if that combination doesn’t tell you something about how Lee’s brain worked, nothing will), the show that was in development the whole time I was there, the show that taught me what it means to nurture a thing that doesn’t yet exist. And lastly Assistant Directing on Lee’s revival of Prelude to a Death in Venice, watching the master reconsider his own foundational text in real time, watching him rewrite himself while I sat in a corner taking notes I wouldn’t fully understand until years later.
Four years inside. Four amazing years of Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech. Four years of being in rooms where the most influential American puppet director of the past fifty years was working through, in everything he did, the same goddamn question I’m circling here: why does the puppet break your heart more than the human? Why does the audience cry at the figure of Rose the dog in The Shaggy Dog Animation, operated with rods and strings by a guy in black behind a screen, when they wouldn’t cry at a human actor playing the dog? Why does the Bunraku Wendy carry more sadness than any child actor ever could? Why does the puppet of John Greed in Prelude land the existential dread in a way the human actor speaking the same lines couldn’t quite reach? Lee Breuer knew. Lee built his life around the answer. Built his whole fucking life around the answer. And the answer, the answer he kept arriving at and arriving at, was that the puppet announces its construction and earns the audience’s trust by refusing to lie about being a puppet, and that trust is what makes the puppet’s emotional truth land harder than the human actor’s emotional pretense ever could. The puppet doesn’t ask you to suspend disbelief. The puppet says: I am made. I am operated. I am artifice. And now watch me do the impossible thing anyway.
That’s the whole game. That’s it. That’s what Lee taught me and what Lee Breuer was still teaching when he died in 2021 and what Lee is still teaching now through everybody he taught who’s still working.
I thought about Lee constantly when I saw the elephants at Inle Lake. Shan State, eastern Myanmar, the floating market on the lake itself with the stalls on bamboo platforms creaking under the weight of vegetables and silver and whatever else people were selling that morning, and the leg-rowing fishermen working the water between them, one foot wrapped around the oar in that impossible Intha technique that exists nowhere else on earth, like they’ve been doing for centuries because they have been doing it for centuries, and then again in Nyaungshwe, the town where you go to catch the boats out. The whole place smelled like diesel and lake water and frying onions and the slight rot you can never quite get away from in tropical wet places, and the light came through the bamboo at angles that would have made Caravaggio quit and become a real estate agent. The elephants were operated by old men with hands that had been doing this for fifty years, hands that knew things their owners couldn’t have articulated if you asked them, hands that had inherited the knowing from somebody else’s hands and would pass it on to somebody else’s hands, if the kids were paying attention, which mostly the kids weren’t. The figures themselves were articulated with strings and rods, painted in the impossible Burmese palette of red and gold and white and the kind of black that isn’t really a color so much as the absence of all the others. The men weren’t performing for me, exactly. They were performing for whoever happened to stop, and most people didn’t stop. Most people kept walking, kept shopping, kept doing what tourists do at floating markets, which is mostly nothing of consequence. But every now and then somebody would stop. And the elephant would notice. And the elephant would do the thing… the slight tilt of the head, the lift of the trunk, the impossible suggestion that this collection of wood and string and paint was paying attention to me specifically. And the person who stopped would do the thing back. They’d look at the elephant the way you’d look at a person. They’d forget for a second that they were looking at something that wasn’t alive. That second. That second is what Lee Breuer built his career on. That second is what every puppet tradition on earth is built on. The Burmese old men at Inle Lake knew what Lee knew. The shamans knew it. The Greeks knew it. Bunraku knows it. Punch and Judy knows it. The kid with the sock puppet knows it. The elephant tilted its head and the principle showed up again, on a different continent, in different colors, with different cultural meanings, doing the same essential work.
Gentlemen,” returned Mr. Micawber, “do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants— I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.
David Copperfield
Because here’s what Dickens understood, What Niki Ulehla understands, what everyone who’s ever pulled strings or worn a mask or held a figure up between themselves and the audience understands: we’re all just “tossed in all directions.” All of us. Life throws us around like we’re nothing, like we’re the puppets, like the strings are being pulled by something we can’t see and can’t argue with and sure as hell can’t fire. But when you make the elephant dance, when you take dead materials and breathe your own desperate humanity into them, you’re taking control. You’re flipping the script. You’re saying, okay, chaos, you want to toss me around? Watch me make art out of it. Watch me make meaning. Watch me turn the figure of being puppeted into the figure that does the puppeting. Watch me hand the strings to somebody else.
The puppet doesn’t pretend to be real. That’s its power. That’s the whole thing. It announces itself as artifice, as construction, as made, and then it goes ahead and breaks your heart anyway. Maybe especially because of that honesty. It’s more real than real because it admits it’s fake.
These elephants in Myanmar aren’t trying to fool anyone. They’re obvious and utterly impossible. And that’s exactly why they work. That’s exactly why, when they move through the street, people stop and stare and remember something true about themselves they’d forgotten, something the human face couldn’t have reminded them of because the human face is too busy being a face to be a truth.
We need our puppets. We need our puppets. We need our monsters and gods and elephants. We need our shamans and our Greeks and our Burmese old men and our Lee Breuer. We need something bigger than us to carry the weight of everything we can’t say out loud.
Something bigger. Something made. Something honest enough to lie to us about being alive.