Now that I am in my 40s, I see that I was essentially trained from an early age to be involved in the arts. I was always brought to museums, music and theater performances; or perhaps it was merely support and my family knew something about me that I hadn’t yet realized. My grandparents lived down the street from Bates College and we’d take walks to see the new exhibitions at their Olin Arts Center. We would go to the Theater at Monmouth to see plays for children, where, especially being under 10, the theater was a grand and magical place where the amazing costumes and painted sets could take you away to another land. As I got older, I got to play in an orchestra that accompanied puppet shows in the Maine Festival. When I started having friends who could drive, I started going to alternative local music shows; I would get to see the Bread and Puppet group when they would land at Bates. These led me to discover the Odd Fellows Theater in 1999, the performing arts center that used to be an old Independent Order of Odd Fellows building. But the space definitely wasn’t the grand theater in Monmouth; it was smaller, with floorboards that creaked and were uneven. I remember having to pass through a makeshift curtain to enter the stage area. Before I understood what performance art was through a Fine Art lens, this had certainly grabbed my attention. It was somewhere between circus, comedy, and physical theater. I don't remember every performance I saw there but what I do remember is the feeling that theater didn't have to look one way.
Now that I have a child in high school, these memories of an experimental, grimey, risk-taking space have come back to me. And I often find myself wondering where the kids go to see things like this; where they go to just be weird. And it clicked for me this past weekend that a nostalgic place like that is right here in New Haven, at Witch Bitch Thrift, with performances like the Puppet Cabaret put on by Anatar Gagne of Pinned and Sewtured.
On November 7th, just before 8pm, there was a puppeteer outside the thrift store playing a harmonica while a small, chubby clown marionette danced in front of him. The clown wore a shirt but no pants, with puffy yellow feathers arranged as a balding hairline and a big red nose, maybe one foot tall. But it looked less like the beginning of a theatrical performance than a strange little person who had wandered onto the sidewalk to busk.
Inside the store on the way to the small black-box theater, a suitcase held a collection of worm puppets for sale, made by Madison J. Kripps – my family already owns one. Depending on who you ask, it is either a worm with hair or a pickle with a moustache.
Then while we waited for the show to begin, I heard a cat meowing. I thought it strange that I hadn’t noticed that Witch Bitch Thrift had a store cat.
Instead, a black cat marionette peeked around the doorway. She wore a black floral dress with a ribbon that glowed under the black light, and claws painted multicolors. She entered cautiously, the way a real cat might inspect a room before deciding whether the humans inside were worth her attention.
She greeted audience members. She jumped into laps. She mewed and gestured, carrying on conversations without saying an actual word. The cat, Brunehilda, eventually sang with the harmonica-playing clown. Then a phoenix-like marionette entered, flew onto the couch and settled down, its breathing synchronized with the breathing of the puppeteer. For a few minutes, the person and the puppet seemed to become one creature.
Then the cat chased the clown away and began playing peek-a-boo with the audience. The Puppet Cabaret hadn't even officially started yet.
Gagne came out to introduce the evening, explaining the Puppet Slam format and the support provided through the Puppet Slam Network, which grants funds so participating puppeteers receive payment for their work. She also gave the small audience instructions for how to respond: gasp when something is surprising, laugh when something is funny, and let ourselves react. Puppets need a willing audience.
The first formal piece was Meat Clay by Alfie Free, a Connecticut-born puppeteer and University of Connecticut puppet arts student. In the short film, two puppet characters sitting in a car discover a small piece of red clay and begin wondering what it is.
“Dude, what is that thing?”
As they debate its identity, the clay is manipulated in front of the camera. It becomes meat, then a creature that might have had eyes. The conversation becomes unexpectedly philosophical: What makes something alive? What makes it worthy of attention? Is the difference between an object and a living thing simply that someone decides to love it?
By the end, the clay has become a devilish face with eyes and fangs. The characters leave the car to retrieve it, only to discover that it has disappeared.
“I told you it was alive.”
It was one of my favorite pieces of the evening because it gets at the strange bargain puppetry makes with its audience: I know this isn't alive. You know this isn't alive. But let's pretend it is and see where that takes us.
Marie Sawyer followed with a shadow-puppet performance featuring baseball-playing seals. The audience was invited to make seal impressions while the seals passed a ball back and forth until one hit a home run into outer space. A rocket landed on the moon and then a seal emerged to retrieve the ball.
Carole D’Agostino, whose work has included puppet fabrication and performance for the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the Kennedy Center, Disney and Sesame Place, presented a cat attempting to bake in a kitchen while dancing to music. When the cat became frustrated, the entire puppet turned around, revealing a different facial expression. A mundane activity became an emotional and hilarious drama simply because a puppet was doing it.
Sarah Frechette's delicate scarf puppet emerged from a green wooden treasure chest. It danced to accordion music before becoming trapped inside, replaced by another puppet made of chainmale with black, claw-like hands. A small red glass goblet and metal spoon became part of the increasingly mysterious scene. A magnet, I assume, meant to pick up the spoon didn't work and eventually Frechette simply used her own hand.
Max Kountz presented a short, dark piece featuring a skeletal puppet in a red dress with long black hair. Later, he returned with Chair Tutorial, one of the funniest performances of the evening. Wearing a large mask, he stood at a table and demonstrated how to fold a sheet of paper into a pop-up chair. He then attempted to sit on it.
The chair collapsed.
He made another.
It collapsed too.
Soon he was producing chair after chair, increasingly frantic and determined to achieve the impossible. The expression on his mask literally shifted into frustration. Eventually he knocked over the table and stormed away, ending the piece.
There were darker moments, too. Cal Callahan's video BLUE used a simple sheet of paper animated by hands, distorted CRT footage and guitar-pedal effects to explore memory and grief following the loss of a childhood friend to mental illness. Later, Callahan performed No God, a wordless piece featuring a blue marionette whose skin tone shifted from blue to yellow. At the end of this piece, the puppet seemed to kneel despite having no lower limbs. It breathed. It bounced with the physical rhythm of someone crying. It wiped its eyes and finally lay down, giving in to the grief it clearly was baring.
Gagne was visibly moved and acknowledged that, although there had been no planned theme for the evening, cats and death seemed to have emerged as recurring motifs. Her own contribution was another iteration of Widow Bunny, a character through which she has documented her grief following the death of her husband. In the video, she wears the pink bunny costume he once wore, moving through shadow-puppet imagery of the accident and scenes of mourning. A knitted mask gradually unfolds across the bunny's face, revealing a skull beneath it. It is grief turned into a video, into a costume, into a puppet.
Then the evening became absurd again.
Fae Rothauser sat on a stool and slowly picked petals from a flower while a harmonica played (the same harmonica from the clown). Her face did nearly all the talking. When she reached the final “he loves me not” petal, she clearly could not handle such tragic emotions – but then a pounding heart emerged from her chest: their own puppet heart, still attached by arteries through their shirt.
The heart then began lip-syncing to Whitney Houston's “I Will Always Love You” and it ended with Rothhauser smiling.
Sarah Frechette returned with Evil Dead, opening a vintage suitcase to reveal a red-haired skeleton marionette. The skeleton danced as its wooden bones rattled, its limbs separating and reconnecting through an elaborate system of strings and elastic.
Madison J. Kripps performed another installment of Earl the Pearl (from what I have seen in the past, he has been debuting pieces of this work over the year), a sea shanty performance involving an ocean of blue fabric, a papier-mâchéd five-gallon water jug labeled “THIS” which when opened on his chest, revealed an interactive pop-up book with moving fish and sailors, and a song about turning to drinking “THIS” as a solution to the problems of life at sea. During Chair Tutorial, the final piece about failure, a section of the stage flooring came loose. It seemed fitting because what makes these Puppet Slams so compelling is their embrace of the perfectly imperfect.
The theater at Witch Bitch Thrift is a makeshift black box, assembled with care and affection which shines through despite the couch having peeling upholstery. Performances encounter technical problems: a magnet doesn't pick up a spoon, lyrics fall onto the floor, the stage floor comes loose. But none of this breaks the spell.
Puppetry is an art form built around the act of pretending, but it is also an art form that makes its own construction visible. We know there is a person behind the puppet. We can see the strings.
We can see the hand inside the heart, the person breathing behind the animal, the piece of paper being manipulated by human fingers.
And still, we believe.
Maybe this is part of why puppets remain so deeply embedded in childhood. They give children a way to make the impossible ordinary. A stuffed animal can become a person. A cardboard box can become a house. A puppet can have a conversation, get angry, fall in love, die and come back to life.
My own children have spent years building elaborate worlds around an IKEA stuffed dragon and puppet. When my daughter was small, she wanted so badly to use the dragon that her brother had so I made a second one for her. She took it before I had finished it, before it had its intended eyes. The eyeless dragon became a character in its own right. And this is what puppetry does: It doesn't require the object to be finished. It doesn't even require it to be particularly convincing. It just requires someone to believe. Later, while looking at my notes from the evening and watching some of the short videos I had taken during the Puppet Slam, it was clear something was missing. On my phone I could still see the mechanisms, could see the scale, could see the performer – but in the room, I had been somewhere else.
That is the special gift of puppetry with a live audience. For a few minutes in a small black box theater inside a thrift store in New Haven, a group of artists can make you believe in all of it.
Though this was the last Puppet Cabaret of 2026, follow Pinned and Sewtured & Witch Bitch Thrift to get notice of the 2027 season.