Puppets are back for the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

Lying next to a large Frankenstein monster’s head one night in 1996, under the stage at Steppenwolf Theatre, I used to be told by a person named Blair Thomas, “We’re aware that we’re making things that individuals have never seen before. In that sense we’re alchemists. We wish to startle and awaken, to permit people to find the honesty in the way in which a puppet or object is used.”

He was then the manufacturing director of Redmoon Theater, within the midst of staging a remarkable production of “Frankenstein,” “starring” puppets of every type and sizes.

Redmoon isn’t any more but Thomas is alive and well, if wildly busy in the meanwhile because the founder and artistic director of the fifth Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, which begins Wednesday and continues through Jan. 29.

It’s the most important such event of its kind in North America, presenting 100-some shows at such venues as Studebaker Theater within the Fantastic Arts Constructing, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chopin Theatre, DuSable Black History Museum, Harold Washington Library and the Chicago Children’s Theater.

You have got heard, and can again, the entire mayoral contenders talking about Chicago as a “world class city.” That is nearly as good an example as there’s.

Puppets have at all times been a part of our city’s theatrical landscape and we will claim the person who created that wildly popular TV puppet gang, Chicago-born Burr Tillstrom and his “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” Fran not being a puppet but an actual (and charming) woman. (Kukla, Ollie and a few of their other TV show friends “live” on the Chicago History Museum and the way comfortable they need to be to have so many recent puppet pals on the town).

You will have fond memories of those folks but know that puppets have develop into an increasingly artistic and inventive realm far faraway from the photographs of your childhood that come to mind if you hear the word “puppet”: Punch and Judy; Garfield Goose; and even the Muppets.

Puppets are invading town now, here to thrill and astonish. This international festival arrives from places all over the world — Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Norway, Japan, South Africa, Spain and elsewhere — and from across the country.

Thomas lives on a working farm in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He has been a positive force on the local theater scene for a long time and got here to puppetry as a toddler growing up within the town of Jacksonville in Alabama. It was a small town, only 12,000 people or so, and, says Thomas, “There was movie show and so I needed to fantasize concerning the world and confront the boredom. I started making marionettes and putting on shows for friends and neighbors.”

He got here to Chicago after attending Oberlin College and commenced working in theater. He created at Redmoon and elsewhere some vivid and memorable shows. In 2015, he founded the puppet festival and last week told me, “We live in such a media saturated world that it is necessary to give you the chance to present something that’s authentic. It is true in front of you, not sure by gravity. You’ll be able to see the magic but still be enthralled, mesmerized.”

There’s a lot to experience over the approaching days — along with shows, there can be exhibits, seminars, workshops and, intriguingly, a Wrigley Constructing pop-up storefront, by which puppets “live” in an imitation food market where the whole lot is made from plastic.

I’m particularly interested by seeing an adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” by the French/Norwegian company Plexus Polaire. It features seven actors, 50 puppets, video projections, a whale-sized whale, music, light and video. Says the corporate’s artistic director Yngvild Aspeli, “Puppetry is a form that always is reinventing itself … it isn’t only a form, it’s a way of seeing the world, a language, a frame of mind.”

For old time’s sake I also need to see a recent “Frankenstein,” this one by Chicago’s Manual Cinema, which uses puppetry, people, music and sound effects in its version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel. This Chicago-based performance collective has been around since 2010, offering a series of wildly imaginative productions. Of this one, co-artistic director Drew Dir told the Recent York Times, “It’s a story concerning the animation of dead matter. And as puppeteers, that’s kind of what we do.”

Having seen a number of Thomas’ work over the a long time and a few from that local treasure Hystopolis Puppet Theater, I actually have come to consider that it’s easy to discover with puppets. They aren’t tied by the physical or emotional bonds that inhibit even the best actors. Irrespective of how they’re manipulated — with rods, strings, hands, shadows or bodies — puppets can manage more theatrical pyrotechnics than any actors. They are sometimes in a position to “say” greater than most playwrights can with a whole lot of words.

Tillstrom put it like this: “We try to keep up a basic honesty and consistency with the characters. They’re all individuals. They’ve personalities they usually all work together. I believe that has something to do with the show’s appeal. It’s pure and it represents love.”

Thomas puts it this manner: “A puppet when it appears on the stage, it’s quite simple what it’s doing. It enchants us in its believability and the skill of the puppeteers to breathe life into the puppet. You understand it’s not real, nevertheless it represents it so well that you may enter into the experience of the puppet. It’s live and in front of you. We wish people to look at something since it’s amazing.”

fifth Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival runs Jan. 18-29 on the Fantastic Arts Constructing and various venues; tickets and more information at chicagopuppetfest.org

rkogan@chicagotribune.com