Puppeteer awakens quirky 'Sleeping Beauty'
By JONATHAN WILLIAMS For accessAtlanta Published on: 07/31/2008

Puppeteer plays to his audience in the kitchen
By MARY G. PEPITONE The Kansas City Star

Paul Mesner Puppets - Hansel and Gretel The Opera April 2008

Posted on January 10, 2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Wolf's version of the 'Three Little Pigs' is a howl By DOREE ARMSTRONG SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Silly me, I always thought I knew the story of the "Three Little Pigs" when Big Bad Wolf huffs and puffs on their houses because he's a bad guy; gets his comeuppance at the end.

Apparently the wolf's version is different. So if you want to know the real story of what happened, check out the Paul Mesner Puppets production of "The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf" at the Northwest Puppet Center.

Based on Jon Scieszka's popular children's book, Mesner's adaptation tells the story from the wolf's point of view, as he's sitting in jail -- unjustly, in his mind.

According to Alexander T. Wolf, he simply wanted to borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbors because he was baking a cake for his granny's birthday. But he had a terrible cold, and just as he knocked on the first door, he sneezed so hard he blew the straw house down, accidentally turning the first Little Pig into dinner.

"Why waste a good ham dinner?" Mr. Wolf says of the unfortunate turn of events.

"It's a very subversive version," puppeteer Paul Mesner said. "It's a really fun character to play because he's so subversive and naughty."

Mesner says teachers love Scieszka's book, which was published in the 1980s, because it teaches students about perspective. If you hear only one side of any story, are you really getting the whole truth?

Mesner has been performing the show for about seven years. He's tried to stay faithful to most aspects of the book.

"I had read the book and I have a couple of friends who advise me on children's books, so I'm always looking for what's funny and new and edgy and what's interesting and what's popular," he says. "It's a very popular show, especially with school groups because they've read it."

This is Mesner's eighth or ninth time performing for his friends at the Northwest Puppet Center. Based in Kansas City, Mo., he performs locally and takes his show on the road.

Mesner's favorite part of the show was just a minor part of the book, so he has expanded it. The book has a picture of a sandwich on one page, so Mesner has constructed the sandwich fixings out of cloth and builds the sandwich in front of the audience.

"It has a mole in it and frog legs and a little dead gray animal on it," Mesner said. " 'Mole tastes better if you put dill on it!' Mr. Wolf likes to say. So it was a fun way to use something exactly from the book but it lets you in on Mr. Wolf's character and his way of thinking."

Mesner dresses himself as the wolf for part of the show, wearing a mask and furry gloves and feet, even striped purple pants, like Mr. Wolf in the book.

There's even some music, as Mr. Wolf sings, "When you're sneezing, it's displeasing" to the tune of "When You're Smiling."

It's a one-man, 50-minute show with rod puppets and one shadow puppet. It's up to parents to decide if their little ones are old enough to sit through the show. (Lots of kids squirm through puppet shows and it's perfectly acceptable).

"I've had 14-month-old kids who sat all through my shows and 5-year-olds who couldn't sit still," Mesner said.

Doree Armstrong is a Seattle-based freelance writer. She can be reached at doreearmstrong@yahoo.com.

Review of The Mikado: OperaOnline.us

Posted on Sat, Jan. 05, 2008 The Kansas City Star
For 20 years, Paul Mesner has ruled KC audiences by ROBERT TRUSSELL

He was young. He was a gypsy. He was fearless.

He was one man in a Datsun pickup with a box of puppets and a portable stage, driving icy Minnesota highways. His name was Paul Mesner, and he prided himself on never missing a performance.

“My winter driving skills got really good,” Kansas City’s best-known puppeteer said recently.

Mesner did the Minnesota tour every year in the late 1970s. Now the man who never went to college considers it his education.

“This fellow saw me perform at a regional puppet festival, and he had done this school assembly circuit tour for many years,” Mesner said. “And he offered me this 14-week job of doing 12 to 14 shows a week in 10 to 12 different schools a week from January through May in Minnesota. So I did that for four years, and I think of that as my school-of-hard-knocks college.”

It was just Mesner and the puppets as he made his way from town to town, school to school. Often he would meet school custodians at 7 a.m. to unlock the building so he could set up his stage.

One year the thermometer was stuck at 22 below for three weeks. But Mesner, who had been doing puppet theater in Omaha, was living an adventure.

“This was $350 a week, and I had to pay for all my meals and lodging and gas, but I thought it was great money.”

He found hotels for $6 or $8 a night. They were “like out of some movie — flower-print wallpaper they put up in the ’40s, creaky bed, bath down the hall. … I scrimped and saved and I came away from there saving money.”

Each year the pay went up by $100. The first three years, he performed “Tom Sawyer” and other shows written by his employer using marionettes. By the fourth year he persuaded his boss to let him do his own material, and he headed out with the hand-and-rod puppets he prefers to this day.

“I never missed a date. I was there for every single date and every single show.”

That changed in the spring of 1980, midway through the tour in his fourth year. He was called home to Lincoln, Neb., because one of his cousins, believed to be drunk and high on peyote, murdered another of his cousins, a caretaker at a Quaker meeting house. Mesner had been close to the victim, Janet Mesner. The killer, Randoph Reeves, was sentenced to death, but the family rallied to have the sentence commuted, in part to honor the memory of Janet, who vehemently opposed the death penalty.

“That was before grief counselors,” Mesner said. “I went back on the road and was just miserable. I was having nightmares every night. At 3 o’clock I’d think I heard someone outside the hotel door. I was a mess. So I just canceled the tour.

“I really came out of that with a sense that life is so fragile and that you’ve got to work your hardest and do your very best,” he said. “It sounds corny, but you’ve got to follow your dream. I worked very hard from that moment on, and I just kept thinking of Janet and what would she think.”

Higher profile

Things have changed a lot since then. Mesner turned 50 last year, and December marked his 20th anniversary as a puppeteer in Kansas City. His first show was “The Twelve Days of Christmas” at Quality Hill Playhouse.

In an era when we’ve seen puppetry mainstreamed in two Broadway shows, “The Lion King” and “Avenue Q,” Mesner keeps his performances relatively simple. He has built Paul Mesner Puppets into a nonprofit arts organization with a budget of $416,000 and four full-time staffers, including Mesner and his executive director, Diane Barker. This season includes four shows at Unity Temple on the Plaza, “Hansel and Gretel” at the Folly and the annual “Page to Stage” production at his studio based on writings by students.

Paul Mesner Puppets received an $18,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to cover part of the $100,000 budget for Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” which his company will perform with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra in April. In recent years he has also collaborated with the Civic Opera on “The Mikado” and the Kansas City Chorale on “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

“Most people think puppets are dumbing things down,” Mesner said. “It’s an unfortunate prejudice. It’s been a struggle to educate people on how sophisticated it can be.”

Mesner operates out of a studio at Linwood and Harrison, which houses, among other things, about 1,200 puppets of all shapes and sizes. He recently walked a visitor through the labyrinth, which once was an auto-supply store and later a business that sold artificial limbs.

The main studio was set up to shoot a DVD of one of his shows. Puppets were mounted on the walls. Vast storage areas held scenery, puppets and equipment. In a small backyard Mesner had planted a garden thick with vegetables.

A fulltime resident of the building is Doris, a happy-go-lucky dog who showed up at the door one day looking battered. According to Mesner, neighborhood drug dealers had been using her as a tackling dummy to train pit bulls.

Mesner was born in Indiana, moved with his family to Washington, D.C., then back to Indiana and finally to Lincoln, where his father is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Nebraska. It was in Lincoln that Mesner discovered puppetry.

“When I was 11 or 12 I was driving my parents nuts,” he said. “And there was, at the local community playhouse, a woman who taught puppets. … She was a bit of a tyrant and enjoyed being a tyrant. She was an incredibly talented fabric artist. And she had a flair for dramatics.”

Mesner took classes for a year and then auditioned to become an apprentice. He learned different kinds of puppetry, including life-sized body puppets.

“I loved it because I could finally get outside of myself,” he said. “I didn’t have to be the nerd. I think for a lot of kids who find a creative outlet, you can get out of yourself or explore some other part of yourself. Puppetry lets you do the same thing. You can shed who you are and become the other characters.”

Mesner intended to go to college. It just never happened.

“First I was going to work one year and then go to college,” he said. “So I went out to Denver and got a job in a ski-jacket factory because I could sew. I learned how to sew when I was in that very first puppet class. I was only there for nine months, but I got a couple of raises because I could lift heavy things, but I could sew, too.”

Mesner was “a hippie” in those days. He’d go hiking on the weekends and sometimes he’d stay at a cabin his friends owned in the woods. But he also took modern dance lessons from a French woman who taught in her basement.

Back in Omaha, Mesner banded together with three friends and started a puppet theater. Success was elusive.

“We incorporated as a not-for-profit, but we didn’t know how to ask for grants,” he said. “It was a very Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland approach, and we promptly started starving to death. I perfected the art of cooking refried beans.”

French connections

In 1982 Mesner took the advice of arts career counselors and applied to the L’Institut International de la Marionnette (International Institute of Puppetry) in Charleville-Mézières, France. He was accepted into a program to study shadow puppetry and considered himself lucky.“I was with 15 other students from around the world, and all the classes were taught in French. I’d been taking (French) classes at the community college … so it was like total immersion.”

Charleville-Mezieres is a place Mesner sometimes describes as “Sioux City, France.”

“Charleville-Mezieres is in the Ardennes, where the Battle of the Bulge was fought. It sounds very bucolic, but it was a working-class town. Rimbaud was from there.”

For the first month Mesner and his fellow students lived in a workers’ dormitory.

“It was miserable,” he said. “A stinky, smelly dormitory. And the food was just factory-gray.”

After a month they were able to move to a Catholic workers’ social house around the corner.

“We had a common kitchen we could share, and we all had our own bedrooms. … It led to a lot more socializing at night. And there were at least two or three picnics a week.”

The faculty, like the students, came from across the globe.

“We had a teacher from India, and she taught in English,” he said. “So everybody who was speaking French complained because this was, after all, in France. And then she’d switch back to French, but her French was broken and my comprehension was no great shakes.”

Mesner stayed in France a few weeks after he finished the course. He even performed in French at a Paris nightclub. He was told he could find regular work if he decided to stay in France. But it was time to go home.

“I came back all charged up,” he said. “And it’s been a steady progression since then.”

Despite his success, Mesner remains unsatisfied in some ways. If he could wave a magic wand, he would give his company a permanent theater or at least a residency in an existing theater. Then he could have better sets, more elaborate puppets, sophisticated productions that are beyond his reach.

As it is, he has to do things pretty much like he did them on the road in Minnesota 30 years ago. The sites are temporary. Equipment is hauled in, set up, dismantled.

“We’re still a gypsy company, basically.”

"So funny it would melt the Ice Age... Mesner is truly hilarious... a complete entertainer." -Paul De Barros, Seattle Time

"I may never want to go back to a traditional production of Gilbert and Sullivan's classic operetta. If you have any interest in theater of any form [the Paul Mesner Puppets' Mikado] is a must-see." -Paul Horsley, The Kansas City Star

"Quality, educational value and entertainment for the whole family make the Paul Mesner Puppets a 'most-requested' show. Everything the company produces is a hit with our patrons." -Kathleen Cuny Miller, Children's Fine Arts Series, San Antonio, Texas

"As a professional educator, I have always been impressed by Paul's knowledge of developmental levels and is ability to reach children of many different ages." -Ann Brubaker, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

"The Paul Mesner Puppets productions are always unique fun for families and have been a great fit with our outdoor festival and summer student work. Paul's work is always creative, in tune especially with younger audiences, and cost efficient." -Gary Gaydos, Manager Florissant (Missouri) Civic Center Theatre

"The Paul Mesner Puppets incorporate educational values into every show and do an outstanding job of promoting the value of reading. The shows are silly enough to elicit much laughter from younger children and subtle enough to have adults in the audience chuckling as well." -Helma Hawkins, Director of Youth Services and Collection Development,Kansas City Public Library

"When scheduling performing arts programs each year, the Paul Mesner Puppets are always considered a 'must.' Paul has a unique ability to make the characters come to life, offering humor and entertainment for both students and adults." -Doug Harris, Leawood Elementary, Leawood, Kansas

"The students were engaged and attentive throughout the show. They responded with genuine enthusiasm. ...I would highly recommend the Paul Mesner Puppets as an exciting adventure in the art of puppetry." -Jennifer Reph, Tremont Elementary, Medford, New York