[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]
STEPHEN: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the Theatre For Young Audiences industry. Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional to hear their stories about the audition, rehearsal, and development process of theatre for young audiences. Each of them have bridged the path from youth to adulthood while working in the theatre for young audiences industry. My guests have mounted shows small enough to fit in a minivan to productions so big they travel by caravan. You can join the conversation by emailing PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or messaging @PipeAndDrapeStories Instagram.
This is episode 20 of Pipe and Drape. This pipe and drape story is about one of the most challenging art forms in the field: marionette performance. My guest had just a few training sessions before putting his skills to the test in front of an audience of children, and he has been performing with marionettes ever since. Thank you for listening with me today.
STEPHEN: Hi everybody. Today I'm sitting down with New York puppeteer puppet builder and writer. Tyler, be Quick. Tyler has performed all over New York City at St. Ann's Warehouse, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre, Caveat, the subway entrance at the corner of 14th and 8th during the Art and Odd Places Festival and at Parks and Schools in all five boroughs via the city Parks, puppet, mobile and safe. Through the arts, Tyler's puppet and costume builds have appeared on Saturday Night Live, in the street with Theater for the New City, with Randy Carfagno Productions, and most recently Disney's Winnie the Pooh with Rockefeller Productions. Tyler recently completed a residency with Object Movement Festival where he wrote and developed the biographical piece, The Story of Baba Vanga. This iteration of his show included shadow puppetry, marionette months of research, Bulgarian folklore and millions of schemes of yarn. Right now we're going to hear the pipe and drape story of Tyler B Quick, which leads us around his homeland of South Carolina and over to the Columbia Marionette Theatre. Tyler, welcome.
TYLER: Thank you, Stephen. You also didn't say that you played a wonderful part in my show and the Object Movement Festival. So I just had to say that you did a great job.
STEPHEN: I don't try to be like, aNd My WoRk Is, but yes, so this is not the first time Tyler and I have been on stage together and by that I mean on a stage together. We worked backstage together at Barter Theatre, we were stage left together. We met my very first day of my apprenticeship. I was thrown into tech for Wizard of Oz and Tyler told me what to do and it was such a relief.
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| Stephen Fala, Tyler B. Quick, and William Cate at the top of Act II of The Wizard of Oz at Barter Theatre, 2014 |
TYLER: Yeah, that was an interesting time. We were stage left though and we held stage left down.
STEPHEN: Um, yes we did.
TYLER: Especially the Wizard of Oz. You know, fly systems were stage left, so...
STEPHEN: I had never flown anything before. And on that first day they were like, 'And here are these people that you will be flying.' And I said, okay good luck to those people. And so I'm grateful to have had your guidance throughout all of that. And you literally cued me. There was a cow that had to fly across stage during the tornado sequence, which I will still have nightmares about, and Tyler's cue was "Moo" because I wasn't on headset . So I would just fly the cow across the stage and then they would lower it and they would, that was such a whole thing. The cow.
STEPHEN: Um, yes we did.
TYLER: Especially the Wizard of Oz. You know, fly systems were stage left, so...
STEPHEN: I had never flown anything before. And on that first day they were like, 'And here are these people that you will be flying.' And I said, okay good luck to those people. And so I'm grateful to have had your guidance throughout all of that. And you literally cued me. There was a cow that had to fly across stage during the tornado sequence, which I will still have nightmares about, and Tyler's cue was "Moo" because I wasn't on headset . So I would just fly the cow across the stage and then they would lower it and they would, that was such a whole thing. The cow.
TYLER: That's right it wasn't. Instead of a cue, it was a moo.
STEPHEN:I think every cue should be a moo
TYLER: Moo number one, standby Moo number one, go.
STEPHEN: But a lot has happened since we worked behind the scenes together folding snow cloth and mopping the stage and flying people. A lot's happened between then and now. And a lot happened before then. You know, the Big Bang, but also you did a lot of things with your life. So you grew up in South Carolina. Tell me, what was it like being a kid in the south? I'm from the land of Gritty and the Philly Phanatic and so that's like a whole thing. But you grew up outside of Columbia?
TYLER: Yeah, I mean we moved a lot when I was growing up. So we also lived in North Carolina for a big chunk of my life, including that's where I graduated from high school. So when I tell people like where I'm from, they ask whatever. I say I'm a Carolina boy rather than specifically north or south. And there's always this feud between North and South Carolinians about which one's better. And I'm like, I don't know. I lived in both, I love both. When I was thirteen I was living in Durham, North Carolina. I was at a school and we did a production of the Sound of Music and I played Friedrich von Trapp, the older son. It was a very fun slash awkward time 'cause I was going through puberty. I was thirteen so it was very much like, you know, Sound of Music, they do do re mi fa the whole thing. And it was all like soprano singing, including my little brother whose voice hadn't changed yet. And then when it got to la, it was la and that was me! All that aside. I fell in love with it and I kept doing it. And I guess here I am.
STEPHEN: Sound of Music the film notoriously has the "Lonely Goatherd" scene where they're doing marionettes, but like, are they? And you ended up doing a lot of marionettes with your life. Is there any correlation between you doing that musical, like that first exposure to theatre and marionette later in life?
TYLER: I have never made that connection, but that is such a lovely connection and I'm gonna keep going forward with that--that my first show was Sound of Music, which had marionettes in it. It's very fitting. I didn't, but no, I have no connection to Julie Andrews whatsoever other than I think she's very talented.
STEPHEN: She is. And so you continued to do theatre from that point on and you ended up studying theatre in college?
TYLER: Yeah, I was. I went to college and I became a theatre major and I decided, actually I didn't really make a decision, I kind of was just like, I don't know what I want to do in theatre. So I would perform occasionally, not that often. I stage managed, I did some like props design, so I kind of just like ran around the board and like sound design and kind of just like, I was like, I don't know what I want to do in theatre, but I know that this is where I want to be. College goes on and I do, I did do a children's theatre performance. I was part of, it was called AYPT, the Appalachian Young People's Theatre, which was a program at app that was really great. We basically would devise an entire show, like thirty-minute show and make the costumes. And for that one we did have puppets and we ended up touring it around western North Carolina.
STEPHEN: Was that your first time using puppetry in theatre?
TYLER: Yeah. Yeah, that was the first time. There was one like "typical," I'm using air quotes here, kind of puppet, whereas like a hand puppet basically. But we all were performing with masks as well. We played various animals, so we did AYPT and when I graduated I moved to Barter, got a job at Barter as a production assistant/part of the stage management team, met you.
STEPHEN: Hey.
TYLER: After Barter I moved to Columbia, South Carolina. I hadn't lived there since I was like ten years old. I basically applied to every theatre in the area and the first one to get back to me that paid was the Columbia Marionette Theatre. And I was like, oh, interesting. I could play with puppets. I like puppets. Who doesn't love puppets? I go to visit the theatre and I drive up and as I'm like rounding the corner there's a few trees blocking the building. So like on the main road you can't really see it. There is a little sign that says Columbia Marionette Theatre with an arrow pointing down the road, but when you turn on the road, you all of a sudden see a medieval castle and you're like, what is this? And there's a big dragon on it and you're like, wow, okay. So you drive around and then it says Columbia Marionette Theatre on the sign. When I got there, I looked around, there were marionettes all over the walls from previous shows and then inside the theatre there's like a seating section and then off to the side are like what they call party areas for birthday parties, which all have different themes. There was like a dinosaur theme and a castle theme and whatever. And then you walk to the front of the house and there's a stage there. You walk back and you see there are two bridges back there, which is actually different than the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre, there's just one bridge there. At ours we had two, which became pretty useful for having several marionette puppeteers. You could, if a puppet needed to walk downstage, you could hand off your puppet to the front bridge puppeteer. There was a gap in the middle of the bridge, um, that you would walk the puppets through so they could go all the way downstage. I went in to meet the artistic director, Lyon Hill, an amazing person. He's a mentor of mine and a close friend. He asked me about my experience, I said I had little to no puppetry experience and he said, are you willing to learn? And I said, yes. He had a little practice marionette and let me play with it. And then we went up on the bridge, and he was like, I'm just gonna give you some basic techniques right now. And he gave me a job. Yeah, he continued to teach me the whole time I was there. I was there for two years.
STEPHEN: In addition to your duties as a puppeteer, did you have to do anything with the, the parties and events that happened at the theatre/castle as well?
TYLER: Yeah, people show up for birthday parties about thirty minutes before the show and then they have their pizza or whatever. And then if you booked a birthday party, you get one of the first couple rows. So like there were four birthday sections, and the house was divided in the middle, so the first two rows split into four sections were for the birthday parties. So they all got to sit there and be crazy kids or whatever. I was mostly hands-off unless they like needed to be pointed to the restroom or we also sold concessions before the show that I would help out with. It was very like a mom and pop type vibe in the theatre, and it was family owned, or it's is family owned by the Scollon family and I worked with John Scollon and his daughter Sam, both at that theatre and it was founded by John's mother.
STEPHEN: Marionette shows tend to be full of spectacle and tricks and all sorts of things. So what was your rehearsal process like, getting each of these pieces together before playing for these birthday parties?
TYLER: Yeah, we had a decently strenuous rehearsal process, honestly just because while the shows are only like thirty minutes long, twenty to thirty, it can be very physical, especially when some of the puppets are on the heavier side. They, we did have a spectacle or tried to in every show so a lot of puppets were pretty big. There would be moments where we did Aladdin and there was a genie that came down and I'm six two to give the listeners an image. It was probably from like my head to below my waist in size, and widthwise bigger than my shoulders. I would have to lift this puppet, kind of spin it around during the moment when Aladdin rubs the lamp and smoke would come up from the stage and then the genie kind of twists his way down from the above the proscenium. So it was a little physically strenuous at times. The rehearsal process, however, you know, they knew when we would need breaks and things like that. And the artistic director Lyon, he always had very good feedback. So the rehearsal process overall was like very like cohesive. I think we just worked well together.
STEPHEN: How many of you were up on the puppet bridges during the show?
TYLER: We had three puppeteers per show, sometimes we would have four, but the only time there was four was when the fourth person was on the floor like doing shadow puppets or something like that.
STEPHEN: And did you have to learn multiple tracks?
TYLER: So in our rehearsal process we tried to make the tracks specific to the characters. So as often as possible we would try to keep the same puppeteer on the same character. We would learn different tracks, but we also tried as best as we could to keep each puppeteer on their own main track. Sometimes you'd have to switch around, but I always enjoyed that 'cause you get a different perspective in the show as a performer
STEPHEN: On top of learning a show, you were also learning how marionette work, which they are the hardest puppets. Like that's no denying it. How long did it take you to get the hang of it and feel comfortable before performing?
TYLER: My boss showed me a meme recently that said the types of puppeteering and it listed one through then listed by difficulty, number one being the most difficult, number ten being the least. So then through two were all other types of puppetry. Each one said that and then number one was marionettes because it's seen as a very difficult thing once you're learning it, performing. It is part of the learning process. You have to make that jump into performance in order to further the craft. I would say I'm still learning it definitely. I mean I guess they say it takes a thousand hours to master something. I would argue with marts it takes much longer, but I don't know, each puppet is different so there's a learning curve to each one, especially with marionettes because they're all made so differently and they all move in their own way and have their own character and you kind of just have to feel that out with the puppet in your hand and over time you get used to that puppet and then you kind of get like a muscle memory in your hands when you're performing,
STEPHEN: Can you take us through a day in the life of a Columbia Marionette Theatre puppeteer?
TYLER: Sure. So I believe the shows were at I want to say 11:00 and 1:00, I would arrive at 10:00 and make sure the house and the lobby are set up and clean. I would start the popcorn, and usually people would arrive around 10:30 if a field trip happened. Sometimes we would perform earlier than 11:00. So there's the field trips and then there are the weekend performances that are open to the public. So if we did a field trip, we would bring the kids in, they would all go sit in their little rows and wait for the show to start. We would often have like an opening, like an intro kind of thing where one of us would come out and we had several different types of puppets that we'd bring out. So we would show them what a marionette is, we would show them what a shadow puppet is, hand puppet...We would give them examples of what some of the different types of puppets are and then we would start the show, curtains would rise, we do our whole thing. And then after the show the kids would usually...we would line them up and they would each get to play with their own, not permanently, not permanent, but their own little marionette that was like either retired from an old show or we had just made it for like to be used by the kids and they would go off to the little party sections and they would practice walking a marionette around and we would walk around and kind of like give them instructions and stuff like that. And I liked it because the kids actually got their hands on a marionette puppet, which not many people can say that they've done. Like we were actually giving people an opportunity to play with these puppets, which like people don't get to do. I mean I'm sure people have a little marionette at home that someone got or something like that. But these are like theatrical style marionettes short-strung to the height of like a five year old or a seven year old so they can play with it. We would do one field trip in the morning usually and then they would go home and that was the day, very short day, very like part-time kind of experience working there just because, you know, small local theatres don't really have funding for like full-time employees other than like the artistic director, the executive director, and the managing director. That's about it. I was usually done for the day by like noon on a field trip day and then you have the show the weekend days I would probably be done around 2:00PM. So on the weekend shows I would get there around 10:00, start the popcorn, make sure everything's good to go get the candy out, get the soda. One time this kid came up to me while I was working the concession stand and his dad said, would you like juice or water? And he said, 'Doritos!' And that stuck with me for some reason and I just really relate. House would open at 10:30 families come in. It was lots and lots of families mostly and the occasional adult 'cause like puppets are cool, it's a thing to see in Columbia, South Carolina. What else are you gonna do? We would start the show between shows have lunch and we were done around two. There were not normally like hands-on experiences after the show unless a birthday party requested it. Then we would do that and sometimes we would give tours backstage and stuff like that.
STEPHEN: There's a lot of stuff that we don't get to see there.
TYLER: Yeah, especially in like if you're in a marionette theatre, all you see is the tiny box for the stage and it also can be a little hard to like know the scale of the puppet you're seeing on stage when you don't have like something to compare it to. So when you go backstage you're like, wow, okay, I see now like the puppets are this size, a lot of kids like make that connection when they go backstage. And sometimes what we would do backstage, when we would have a tour, is one of the puppeteers would be up on the bridge moving a marionette so they could see on the strings how you move the marionette and which strings you pull to move the head and the arm and that kind of thing.
STEPHEN: And of course with marionette puppetry there's...you have tangles to deal with and like other all things that could go wildly awry.
TYLER: And they will.
STEPHEN: What is the wildest mishap you had when you were down in South Carolina?
TYLER: Oh my gosh how do I pick one? Just to continue that genie moment from earlier: Aladdin was one of my earlier shows, so I was still learning a lot of things and this, and like I said I still am learning things, so this genie, because he had to be lowered onto the stage and twisted up, there's a very specific way to first of all pull a puppet up to where it's above the proscenium. You kind of have to like throw it over your arm and make sure you have all of the strings there. However, since this was also supposed to spin, I would twist it before I would pull it up. So if you miss one string when you're twisting it, that can cause some trouble. And so the genie came down and he kind of, one leg string went over his head and he had, he basically looked like he was smelling his feet or one of his feet and I was trying and he landed and he was like, 'Hey, I'm the genie just hopping on one leg.' And I did the whole scene like that because I had no choice. I tried to get the leg string off of the head, but it just wasn't working. We had to take him off stage after the scene and fix it.
STEPHEN: How did you take care of your body to make sure that you could keep doing these shows where you're bent over working these heavy puppets on a high stage?
TYLER: It's very physical sometimes, and so I think it's very important to stretch before and after performances. Also as a marionette performer, a lot of the tension you hold is in your shoulders and in your neck and you know, you're not meant to hold that much weight up there because your arms are lifted up above your shoulders while you're performing. Sometimes during that time I actually did go to a chiropractor back before I realized how much I should be stretching before and after performances. Once I figured out, okay, if I stretch specifically like the upper torso area before and after a show, then I am much better off. It also does take a bit of like upper body strength with the heavier puppets. So I think just over time you get used to them.
STEPHEN: Between the puppetry skills that you've gained and the way you learn to take care of your body to keep performing. What are some things that you have taken from this experience on to your jobs that followed?
TYLER: Well, my experience as a marionette puppeteer got me the job at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre in New York. Right now I'm doing a, a program that tours or is starting to tour some schools and I think my experience with what we did at the marionette theatre definitely has helped me to get to those positions. There was also, I was able to, while I was there, I was able to like help a little bit with some building and things like that. Also like props and set building too, so you become familiar with like a band saw and things like that. Right before I left they let me, they asked, they were looking for a new show and so they commissioned a show from me and a friend of mine and we wrote a musical for young audiences. Yeah, so that was really cool. It was, nice to see my own work produced. I wrote it. My friend Tinsley Long, who you know from Barter wrote the music. We had a, we had a gay time, it was called Peter Pan's Space Adventure. And it was about Wendy's great great granddaughter. Peter finally came back to visit and her name was Penny and he took her on a space adventure.
STEPHEN: In addition to performing shows in the theatre/castle, you also took pieces out on the road to your audiences.
TYLER: The main show that we did on our tour was a show that we as a theatre got a grant to do every year, which was a show about recycling that we would take around to all the schools and perform for them. It was a lot of fun. Occasionally we would have other shows that would either be like requested by schools or things like that, but that was our main focus because we were given this grant to take this show around the state. It was very much like if we were going to a school it would be two of us and it's very much like, okay, these two men dressed all in black just showed up in a, in a white van and they're trying to come into the school and do puppets, so I mean were definitely times where I was like, what are the optics here? Um, but uh, you know, it was always a fun time by the end of it and we always went like straight to the office just to make sure, just to be like, we're the puppeteers, hello. But we would get to the school usually set up in like a gym or something like that. We had our own like sound system. We had a little set that we would build. We didn't really typically have a stage, they usually would let us perform on whatever kind of platformed area they had, but if not, we would just do it set up on the ground. And there were not only marionettes, there were hand puppets, rod puppets, things like that. Which, one thing that I loved about this theatre was that they didn't need to focus on just marionettes. So they would focus on puppetry in general. So any show that we, that you would see at the Columbia Marionette Theatre would include probably shadow puppets, maybe a hand and rod puppet here or there, maybe a random other style of puppet that you can't even identify. Marionette theaters are a very like long-standing traditional kind of place and I liked that this place was like, yes, marionettes are this beautiful art form that's been around for so long, but we also want to include the other forms of puppetry because we want to keep our shows fresh and entertaining for the audiences and like we want the kids to have questions after the show so they can learn something.
STEPHEN: You had this experience doing children's theatre a little bit in college and then after school working in South Carolina and then you moved to New York and get to continue doing marionette puppetry in Central Park and you're working on another show that is touring out to schools. So why children's theatre?
TYLER: The first reason that I realized a while back is that you are never going to have a more honest audience than a group of children. If they don't think something's funny they're not gonna laugh. If they think it's funny, they're gonna laugh and you're going to, I don't know, if you want to test something out, test it in front of a group of kids because you're going to get a completely honest answer. No one's gonna be nice and just sit there quietly or whatever. Kids will tell you how they feel and what they think without asking. I would say another reason is personal, because I found theatre as a child and it became a passion of mine and I wanted to learn everything I could about it, so I think that teaching kids about theatre or about performing or any sort of art form I think is very important because I would've never found it if I didn't have somebody teaching me to start.
STEPHEN: It's so funny that you bring up kids being an honest audience. I'm not saying adults are liars, but like they are. But I feel like in mainstream theater or theatre for adults, we tend to get away with doing things that are not good or are not funny, but we're conditioned to to laugh at certain behaviors or clap at certain things just 'cause that's what we're told to do. And then it perpetuates...continuing doing this entertainment that might not necessarily be good or fulfilling to an audience, but it will still solicit a reaction from adults. Whereas kids like, if it's not good, it's not good.
TYLER: You're gonna get unsolicited reactions from kids regardless.
STEPHEN: Tyler, thank you for speaking with me today. How can our listeners find out what you are up to, what all sorts of music and puppet and writing happenings are going on in your life?
TYLER: Oh, well I guess you can go to my website tylerbquick.com. Yes, that's my name. It's not made up. I'm also on Instagram @TylerBQuick and on TikTok, even though I don't actually have anything on TikTok at Tyler b Quick and on Twitter, which I don't use at Tyler B. Quick and I guess I'm on Facebook . No, but, um, my website I think would be the best place to go. If you wanna see my work or if you want a puppet built, you can place an order on there. You can just send me a nice message that says hi if you want. I don't care.
STEPHEN: Make sure you check out Tyler's work online. Order a puppet. And if you are in New York City this fall, you can see his work in person. Tyler will be performing a hot hotdog piece at the Windjammer the evening of October 4th, and he'll be performing with the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre through the end of the year.
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You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. The Pipe and Drape logo was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today. Do you like Cannolis?
TYLER: I love Cannolis.
Check out Tyler's puppetry in this Super Bowl commercial for Crunch!
Check Out Tyler's Puppet Stuff:
See Tyler in New York City October 4th at The Windjammer!
Tyler also performs with the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre in Central Park!
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Host: Stephen Fala
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