The Jungle
Trouble Puppet's expanded take on Sinclair's novel is as grisly and graceful as ever
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., March 25, 2011
The Jungle
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd., 573-2540
Through April 3
Running time: 1 hr., 15 min.
Witness now the full production of this puppet show in which anthroform fabrications of papier-mâché are made to enact the slaughterhouse nightmares wrenched from Upton Sinclair's novel-length exposé of Chicago's meatpacking industry circa 1906. The full production, yes, as the show was previously workshopped to much acclaim in 2010. This one, too: grisly, grueling, graceful.
Connor Hopkins, the driving force of Trouble Puppet Theater Company, knows what he's about, and much of that is decrying and opposing the exploitation of workers by the Merciless Forces of Capitalism. What the director has enlisted here to help him in the ongoing (if sometimes subsumed) crusade is: 1) Sinclair's groundbreaking and troublemaking work; 2) a skilled and practiced cadre of puppeteers; 3) brilliant tech support (ah, the props and costumes, the set, the lighting, the music!); 4) a fine sense of the narrative and of the personal necessary to render The Jungle's original ur-oshawonkian text into something an audience can identify with and give a digested-meat shit about.
This expansion's not an expansion of duration – the show still runs no longer than about, oh, 75 minutes. But thanks to a grant from the Jim Henson Foundation – a group that you can be sure recognizes excellence, puppetwise – it is an expansion of production values. As we follow the joys and agonies of newly immigrated Jurgis' journey through the (metaphorical and literal) abattoir, we're treated to choreographies of workers and puppets more diverse than the workshop version allowed, with props beyond that first iteration, with lighting (by Stephen Pruitt) doing things to Hopkins' efficient ebony set that, if that lighting were a lover doing similar things to you, you'd likely climax several times before exhaustion left you panting and useless. (And, no offense to Barry White, but Justin Sherburn has this show's soundtrack composed and performed to perfection.)
There's that thing about how light can't truly exist without darkness, yes? Then it's the meat factory's shadowy and at best crepuscular ambience that allows Pruitt's spots and fades and other illuminations to give the aurora borealis a run for its photons, the story's darkling flow that affords Hopkins the opportunity to brighten Jurgis' doomed, damned existence where best he can.
It's the blackness of a very fortunate theatre into which this flood of vision imposes a spectacle of meat, of puppets, of humanity's struggle against its own baser tendencies of subjugation and apathy.
