Share:
  • Twitter
  • MySpace
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • digg
  • Fark
  • Furl
  • NewsVine
  • TailRank
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Stumble It
Jul 23, 2009

Toy theater: 'What the Fireman Said'

Robert: 'What the Fireman Said'

Related to the article Toy Stories.



Robert. Photo by Dan Froot."Robert has this unbelievable life story," Froot said. "He was a porn star and an effects worker in San Francisco in the '80s. Then he became a successful businessman in Europe. Then he became addicted to crystal meth and had a fast slide down to the streets of West Hollywood.

"Now he's been about two-and-a-half years clean and sober, he's employed and he's housed in Section 8 housing. He's also been HIV-positive for about 25 years. His life is just so epic and operatic, that the play isn't just about his homelessness. It's mostly about the changing winds of fortune for him."

Robert narrated portions of his play during the live performances. The toy-theater stage was a set of revolving rooms.

"Every time the curtain opened, there would be a different room," Froot said. "We used a marionette for some scenes, and a doll for another, but some scenes didn't have a person in them at all. There was one room that was a very fancy European sitting room, with gold lamé curtains and opulent chandaliers, and the room slowly filled over the course of the narration with pills and alcohol bottles and syringes and other paraphernalia until the room was full."

Return to the main article or watch excerpts from Froot's other plays:

Sandy's story: 'Eight Days Without a Dog'
Froot's puppeteers use only items from the 99-cent Store, where Sandy does all her shopping, to communicate without words how losing her dog affects her ability to maintain contact with the network of services that support her.

Leo's story: 'Dawn'
In the most classic example of traditional toy theater, this story is told through two-dimensional cutouts representing Leo on a bench in downtown Santa Monica, and his observations of the people and things that pass by him.