“Heated Rivalry,” “Romeo and Juliet” and tongue-eating louses. What do all three of these things have in common? Their roles at the Colleges of the Fenway’s (COF) Puppet Production Lab’s “Puppet Slam,” held on April 13 at the Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline.
Shoba Thirukkovalur and Vida Alcamo, juniors at Simmons University, played comical roles in the first act. In “The Library Catastrophe,” a large bird and a snake played enemies-to-lovers librarians who fought over keyboard typing styles. The bird puppet was an impressive full-body effort. It featured Muppet-style puppetry for the mouth and neck, and a cardboard box worn for the body with leggings and feet to match.
“The Puppet Slam” also used a projector to display films made with the puppets by Wentworth Institute of Technology first-year Seth Payne. Payne’s work included a “get ready with me” montage with Marvin, a James Bond-esque puppet and one of the hosts of the night. Marvin starred alongside human co-host Pyper Flaig, a Simmons sophomore, who regaled audiences with her quips.
Payne’s second video project was a lengthy monologue from a tongue-eating louse, talking to (or rather, at) the human about comically existential human predicaments that made the audience crack up. The louse was named “Little Tony” after the larger fish puppet it was inside of “Big Tony.” The film was edited and voiced by Simmons sophomore Mattea Ortiz.
Ortiz also wrote her own tongue-in-cheek skit with Simmons sophomore Ena Edmonds, where two cannibals have a heated evening after meeting through a dating app. The puppets were built with Velcro-ed arms which they tore off to “eat,” which Ortiz and Edmonds walked the audience through design-wise after during the Q&A.
Second-year Simmons student Milo Clary loved being able to adapt Romeo and Juliet, which also featured Flaig. For him, working with puppets gave him freedom to be a character he was never given the opportunity to play. In his own words, choosing a media outside of traditional theater can, “…give you that power back. You can be whoever you want.”
Jenn Leishman, a junior Computer Science major at Simmons, enjoyed building the puppets. “A lot of the materials we got from the Maker Space… but a lot of them we just outsourced ourselves,” they said. “Like the clothes, for example, are baby clothes that we bought.”
Leishman played Ilya Rozanov in “Heated Puppetry,” a parody of hit TV show “Heated Rivalry.” Deafening cheers showed that this segment was the audience’s favorite, and the show – and books – are also Leishman’s. “Getting into a puppet form and bringing it to an audience in a humorous way was fun for me too,” they said.
The Puppet Club was also featured in the COF Theater’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors” this semester with a life-size puppet to form the body of Audrey, a sentient plant. A medley from the performance was put on at the “Puppet Slam.”
Students from the COF Center for Performing Arts worked for months not only writing and directing these skits, but also designing the puppets and learning how to move them.
Creative Advisor and Director Brenda Huggins described the workshops that she led students in, starting with “naked puppets” or hands and working on how their characters would breathe and look at objects, then moving to movement and interacting with others. She described the process as “very collaborative for each group.”
Huggins said she looks forward to next year’s “Puppet Slam,” in spring 2027. After this year’s Slam, it is clear that COF students and their puppets will be just as enthusiastic as she is to get right back to work.
