There ought to be a way of talking about somnabulism without putting the audience to sleep; but the usually excellent Redmoon Theater hasn't found it in "The Cabinet", the company's version of the 1919 German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. While the company's approach, featuring stick puppets manipulated by on-stage actors supplemented by cleverly animated props and shadow puppets, seems perfect for the surreal and spooky material, the only mystery engaging us is how such capable people could have gone so completely astray.
In The Cabinet and its source material, a man who never awakens from sleep (or, more accurately, whose experience of life is the soundless vagueness characteristic of dreams) falls under the control of a mad scientist who compels him to kill people of the scientist's choosing. Director Frank Maugeri does a brilliant job of setting the scene, as a puppeteer sets a papier-mache Victrola in motion and the scratchy voice of the somnabulist fills the air. But once Maugeri and playwright Mickle Maher have set their Edgar Allan Poe scene, they fail to do what Poe does so brilliantly: create a sense of inevitability whose gathering momentum forces the protagonist, and the audience, directly into horrors from which they shrink and from which they would escape if they had a moment to marshal their wits or their will. Instead, the authors seem to have fallen in love with their own ability to evoke the padded unreality of walking sleep: they sloooooooow everything dooooooown, including the movement of puppets whose interest as actors derives solely from their ability to imitate human behavior rapidly and fluidly. Here instead we're invited to stare at the puppeteers, dressed all in black but for Expressionistic white faces, as they move the puppets with such deliberation that it appears they've just learned how. Despite suitably creepy music (composer Mark Messing capably pays homage to every silent-film score), multiple murders and a 65-minute run time, I found it a literal struggle to stay awake through the piece.
About fifteen years ago a friend said to me, "I saw the most amazing thing at the theater last night. You have to go see the puppet Moby Dick." And I thought: Right, the puppet Moby Dick. The world was waiting. But then I went to see it, and the world had been waiting for this astonishing adaptation of Melville's novel, with every word taken directly from the text ("The whale's whiteness made the palsied world seem like a leper") and a human Ishmael brilliantly matched by puppets of every size and description: marionettes, shadow puppets, finger puppets, stick puppets worked by people behind or inside them. Everything about the production worked, whether displaying a mammoth whale assaulting a minute Pequod or abruptly shifting proportions to show full-sized whaling boats breasting the stage surface. The puppeteers were often visible but rarely noticeable, so gracefully were they subsumed into their remarkable work of animating the inanimate. They literally and figuratively stood aside to let the puppets speak for themselves, and the result was astonishingly powerful. It's this self-effacement that distinguishes Redmoon's work, and when it's missing the result is as flat and stale as The Cabinet. When manipulators call attention to themselves, the point of puppet theater disappears and we're left wondering why we're being compelled to watch such wooden actors.
The stagecraft remains strong: the eponymous cabinet (designed by Neil Verplank, part of a dozen-member team led by set designer Margaret Goddard) opens out in intriguing ways to reveal rooms in the asylum run by the mad scientist, rooms where the sleepwalker commits his murders and scarily empty streets in between. The two-story piece, occupying the entire stage, accommodates movement by the puppeteers, not just in and out of doors but also above and below the puppets' performance space, with the human actors suspended from harnesses. The gramophone (designed by Christopher Furman), with its working needle and turntable, is a truly remarkable piece of work. But no evening in the theater can be satisfying if it consists only of special effects, and The Cabinet lacks any other source of interest.