The Puppet Masters' Demons

Erik Sanko first became enamored of marionettes at the age of five. "When I was a little boy my mom would take us to a theater in the West Village that was run by a guy named Bil Baird who did the marionette sequence in The Sound of Music," says Sanko, who subsequently made his own puppets. For nearly three decades this childhood passion laid dormant. Sanko turned himself into a self-described "go-to guy for avant-garde bass playing," working with Yoko Ono, John Cale, and his own Grammy-nominated band Skeleton Key. "Then for some reason in my early 30s I started making puppets again for no particular reason, other than they scratched some itch I couldn't reach in any other way, and I took them on tour," he says. "That's how it began."




















PHOTO BY RICHARD TERMINE


Shortly after his future wife, visual artist Jessica Grindstaff, made a college documentary about the doll-making musician in 2002, the two combined their talents as a theater duo, who've since drawn raves for their work on the Here Art Center's 2006 production of "The Fortune Teller" and at BAM's 25th Anniversary Next Wave Festival, for which the couple designed a 15-foot-tall marionette with a stage inside its chest. Now the couple is breathing new life into Ping Chong's "The Devil You Know" for the Public Theatre's Under The Radar Festival. Three years in the making this Faustian drama (based on Stephen Vincent Benét's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster") opens tomorrow with a uniquely fabricated cast of characters.

"I stumbled upon this material called Celluclay, which is basically paper pulp and glue that kids use," says Sanko of the untraditional method he uses to craft his puppets' faces and feet, which imbues his string and rod pieces with a haunting hue and oddly humanistic weight. "We don't care for artificial finishes either, so anything that looks old is actually old or recycled." Sanko repurposes his collection of vintage clothes and cloths for costumes (the raggedy button-up on farmer protagonist Jabez Stone, before he sells his soul to the devil for a better plot in life, was hewn from an old linen sheet). For Grindstaff's painstakingly pieced sets she sourced Victorian wallpaper, detailed ornaments on a Christmas tree with little devils, and created two haunting trees, which hold a screen used to project shadow puppet images of her husband's design. "A lot of the time we end up doing things for our own satisfaction, and if they're seen by somebody that's great, but it's more for our own benefit," says Sanko. With that in mind, Grindstaff even lined the inside of the puppeteer hallway with black sparkle carpeting because she says, "it keeps people happy." (LEFT: PHOTO BY RICHARD TERMINE)

Next up is a trip to California, where they're premiering a paper theater version of Lemony Snicket's The Composer Is Dead at the Berkeley Repertory Theater this fall. Their play "69 Degrees South," a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet about Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition, will debut at the 2011 Next Wave Festival. "We're doing like 100,000 things right now," jokes Grindstaff. "In fact, we're actually leaving in three weeks to go to Antarctica to do visual and aural research for about a month."


"The Devil You Know" plays through January 24. La Mama's Ellen Stewart Theatre is located at 74 East 4 Street, New York.