The banquet is a scene out of a Bruegel nightmare, or Henry VIII gone berserk. The pompous king has cheeks like sides of mutton and narrow evil eyes. Around him are his grotesque courtiers, with obscene folds of flesh and distorted features. One has a pointed beard as sharp as his stiletto nose, another looks as if his face has been crushed by a pestle and one woman's spiraling hair towers like twin Babels above her head. These are all characters in “Fool's Fire”, Julie Taymor's first movie for television. They are bizarre and bulbous puppets, gargoyles molded out of latex with actors inside manipulating the creatures to make them look amazingly alive.
“The true quintessence of gastronomy,” toasts one of the king's ministers. But, before anyone can eat, the food comes to life. The braised pheasant flies from its bed of truffles, the fish flips and flops, the wild boar spits out an apple and snorts. Nothing discourages the diners from gorging themselves from the groaning board – and groaning their delight. Then the camera pans under the table, where we find Hopfrog, the dwarf who is the court jester, the object of the king's malice and the tragicomic center of the tale. Hopfrog is played by Michael Anderson, known to television viewers as the dwarf on “Twin Peaks” and one of two live actors seen on camera in major roles in “Fool's Fire.” As the monarch reaches down to hand Hopfrog a bone, there is a glint in the jester's eye. Before the story is over, he will have his fiendish revenge. Based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story, this is a chilling Gothic tale in which justice triumphs over wickedness.
Until now, Taymor's work has generally been seen by limited groups of people in small Off Broadway theaters. “Fool's Fire”, which will be presented on “American Playhouse” on PBS on Wednesday will be her first national exposure, with an audience expected to exceed three million, far more people than have seen her entire body of work to date.
At the age of 39, she is a pre-eminent practitioner in what could be called the Theater of Transformation. From her imagination has come an extraordinary concatenation of images and ideas: giants, ogres and beasts; a danse macabre, and landscapes of the most exquisite beauty, as in “Juan Darien,” the mythic musical she created in collaboration with the composer Elliot Goldenthal. While other conceptual directors in the experimental theater, like Robert Wilson, maintain a cool esthetic distance from their work, she plunges into her art with a passion. That art is visceral as well as visual and verbal.
Each of her last three works has, in fact, ended in scenes of immolation: a funeral pyre in The Transposed Heads, a burning that turns the title character in Juan Darien back into a jaguar (his original semblance) and a conflagration that destroys the king and court in “Fool's Fire.” Grendel, the forthcoming opera by Goldenthal and Taymor, will begin with a cremation. In each of these instances, fire leads to transformation.
With its strong literary roots, the work is close in spirit to the Magic Realism of Latin American novelists. Relating her theatrical process to those writers, she says: “If you give people a base of reality that they can hook into, then you can bend that reality. You transform it in front of their eyes, and you take them somewhere else, so that they can see the world from a fresh perspective.”
In her work, Taymor has created a richly layered world that resonates with primal emotions and merges artistic disciplines. She designs puppets just as she designs and sculpts masks, but she is not a puppeteer – the dread P word that the director keeps trying to avoid but that adheres to her like superglue. She does not manipulate puppets in performance, and puppetry is only one of her many tools. It has, however, become her signature. Totemic figures of grand comic design dominate her work, and her use of puppetry has carried it into venturesome regions far away from the concept of children's entertainment. Her art has the most fervid admirers. As Stephen Sondheim says, “Anything I would say about Julie and Elliot is going to sound like a paid advertisement.” “Juan Darien,” he adds, “is always startling, always theatrical. Julie is uncategorizable as an artist.”
There is, of course, a kinship to other conceptual directors, like Martha Clarke (in her use of visual artists for inspiration) and Theodora Skipitares (who tells historical and scientific stories with puppets and masks). But Taymor's work is instantly identifiable and sui generis. Combining live actors with scenery and puppets as animated sculpture, she repeatedly alters the audience's perspective. By crosscutting full-size and miniaturized landscapes, she can approximate cinematic long shots and close-ups. Her art is both micro- and macro-cosmic. As audiences travel through the looking glass of Taymor's fantastical vision, the mystical can seem mundane and the mundane can be transformed into the miraculous.
Anyone expecting the artist to be as bizarre as her imaginings is due for a surprise. Taymor is open, self-possessed and clearsighted about her methods and goals. She is tall and attractive, and when she is working she wears rimless glasses that give her a certain old-fashioned look. Her conversation is filled with enthusiasm, punctuated by a natural curiosity. She does not project the aura of an authority figure, and she knows it, a problem when she was directing her film. “Females have high voices,” she says. “I was constantly aware of trying to keep the pitch down so I wouldn't sound strident. Finally, they gave me a megaphone,” which she used briefly as a joke, shouting orders to her puppets and people.
She and Goldenthal, who live together as well as work together, share a private life in a NoHo loft that is filled with scenic artifacts: skeletal puppets, sculptured heads and shaman masks. They consolidate contrasting backgrounds: he was raised in a housing project in Red Hook, one of the roughest sections of Brooklyn; she grew up in a suburb of Boston. He likes baseball; she likes to ski. They are a team, though they do work on individual projects. Goldenthal has supported his operatic and orchestral composing by writing movie scores (“Drugstore Cowboy” and, currently, “Alien 3”). They share an artistic sensibility and an attitude toward work. “Both of us are intuitive artists who then become analytical,” Goldenthal says. “The will for craft gets more and more heightened.” First comes the inspiration, then the artistic discipline.
Ever since she was a child, she has been staging plays, at first in her backyard garage in Newton, Mass., in collaboration with her sister. She is the youngest of three siblings. Her father, Dr. Melvin L. Taymor, a gynecologist, is a nationally known expert on infertility; her mother, Betty Taymor, has for many years been an important figure in Democratic politics in Massachusetts. In its original Hebrew form, the name Taymor means date tree.
Julie shunned dolls, but in the second grade she was already drawing character faces. By the time she was 10, she was acting with the Boston Children's Theater. It was in Boston that she first saw the work of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater, and realized the metaphorical power of puppetry. From an early age, she was self-directed, and her parents encouraged her to express herself. Asked what her parents think of her work, she says, “They're used to it.” At times, she took the oddest path. Once, as a teen-ager, she made a sculpture by wrapping her boyfriend and making a mold of him, George Segal style. The sculpture was kept in the garage. At 15, she traveled to Sri Lanka and lived with a family under an international exchange program. Graduating at 17 from Newton High School, she went to Paris, where she studied mime with Jacques Lecoq and also deepened her interest in masks.
At Oberlin College, she majored in folklore and mythology and joined Herbert Blau's experimental theater company, whose members also included Bill Irwin. In an ensemble, they worked on a portentous theater project about the Donner Pass tragedy. Irwin, a winner, as is Taymor, of a prestigious MacArthur award, recalls that she always had “a physical intensity,” both as a performer and designer. For her, he says, design “was not a matter of leaning over a drafting board. She would pick things up and put them on her head” – and then move into action.
After the depressing cannibalism of the Donner party, the students took strikingly different directions. Irwin went to clown school and began his road to New Vaudeville fame, and Taymor, attracted by “the vitality of East Asian theater,” left for Indonesia. She planned to stay three months but, with the help of several grants, she remained for four years. Ingesting native cultures and studying Indonesian art, she maintained a hands-on approach, organizing a traveling theater company, which brought plays of her authorship to outposts. Once she was harassed for political reasons; authorities thought she was anti-Suharto. “They said, ‘Where were you in 1964?’ And I said, ‘High school!’ A lot of things were fermenting,” she pauses, “or was it fomenting?” Repeatedly putting herself at risk, she suffered several accidents and a variety of illnesses, but kept performing and observing.
Traveling through the wilds of Indonesia, Taymor witnessed native ceremonies and, at one point, walked along the edge of an active volcano. “From a young age,” she says, “I've always liked to be thrown into adverse circumstances.” There were so many fearful episodes during that four-year adventure that her mother considered her daughter's journey “a baptism by fire.” Taymor's reaction, then as later, was characteristic. In art as in life, she pushes herself to the edge of experience, and steps back to act as her own observer and to objectify the event.
For Taymor, the travel was transforming. She makes it clear that she adapted rather than borrowed native arts. “I don't do Indonesian shadow puppetry, and I wouldn't put a Bunraku puppet into one of my pieces. If I appropriate things from other cultures, it's in terms of technique,” which she then turns into something ideographic and individualistic. Her early theater pieces were drawn from her own experiences, but soon she began investigating literary and historical sources. At first, she also designed for other directors, The Haggadah for Elizabeth Swados and The King Stag for Andrei Serban. In these and other works, she revealed her liberating sense of theater – eerie puppetized plagues for The Haggadah and gigantic flying creatures soaring overhead in The King Stag.
She and Goldenthal were introduced by a mutual friend as two people who shared “an interest in the grotesque.” They began as artistic collaborators. After five years, they started living together. It was Goldenthal who suggested that they make a musical passion play out of ‘Juan Darien’, a short story by the Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga. For both of them, Juan Darien (presented in 1988 by Lyn Austin's Music-Theater Group) proved to be an artistic breakthrough. It was a daring theatrical adventure, transporting theatergoers to a primitive Uruguayan village for this story of the conflict between civilization and barbarism.
To dramatize this chimerical tale, Taymor used masks, kinetic scenery and a painterly canvas inspired by Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera. In the breathtaking opening scene, a miniature church disintegrated before our eyes and was replaced by a lush jungle crawling with nightmarish creatures. Goldenthal's score, liturgical as well as folkloric, was sung in Latin and Spanish.
The principal problem, says Goldenthal, was in integrating the visual, movement and musical styles. “In order for us to judge, the entire show had to be up on its feet, and that's expensive.” In pursuit of perfectionism, they made great demands on their art. “If the audience was not moved in a very emotional level,” Taymor says, “then it was a complete failure.” Those who saw it – and many returned again and again – did not forget it. The show toured America, Europe and Israel, sometimes playing in Broadway-size houses. Juan Darien brought Taymor to the attention of Seiji Ozawa, who hired her to stage Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan next fall. One of the many people astonished by the musical was Lindsay Law, the executive producer of “American Playhouse.” “I had never seen anything like it,” he says. “I wanted to put a camera with her and see what else might happen.”
Taymor's first idea for television was to transpose Juan Darien itself, a project that was rejected because of the “American Playhouse” premise that the work should deal with American subjects. In substitution, she offered two Poe stories, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘Hopfrog’, to demonstrate two sides of Poe and of Julie Taymor. The first was to be done with live actors in black-and-white, and with no puppets; the second would use the traditional Taymor landscape of live action and puppet animation. It was soon clear that ‘Hopfrog’, retitled “Fool's Fire”, would fill the prescribed hour by itself.
Made last August in New York, under the production auspices of Rebo Studio, the movie used a combination of 35-millimeter film and high definition television techniques. “Fool's Fire” would have daunted a more experienced film maker because of its technical complexity. Taymor had participated in a film making workshop at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, but otherwise was as new to movies as she had been to the jungles of Indonesia. As usual, she learned while creating, helped by various collaborators including G. W. Mercier as production designer.
As an admirer of Fellini, she momentarily considered casting the roles with grotesque-looking people, then decided to have two actors (Michael Anderson and Mireille Mosse) appear on camera and to have the rest of the cast concealed behind masks and within huge puppet costumes. She sculptured the character heads in clay in her studio and the designs were realized by a team headed by Michael Curry. “The king,” she says, “is a composite of Charles Laughton, Sydney Greenstreet and Charles Durning, all those incredible actors who would have played the part. One of my favorites is the guy with no eyes. When I was sculpting him, I got very frustrated and I started pounding him. Some people think the skinny one with eyes close together looks like President Bush.”
Many of the puppets, scenic miniatures, costume designs and storyboards are assembled in a fascinating exhibition at the Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center (through April 25). Even standing within a glass case, the puppets project diabolical personalities. Seen from one side, one of the cubistic characters is downcast; from the opposite side, he has a cockeyed grin. The figures look as if they are about to march into animation.
For the climax of the movie, a ballroom was constructed in three different sizes. With the help of the ‘blue screen’ process, akin to the traditional movie process shot in which actors are filmed in a studio but appear to be on location, live action scenes were matted into mockups of miniaturized castles and cities. The backgrounds were influenced by artists as diverse as Giotto and Anselm Kiefer. Watching documentary footage of last summer's shooting, all of it done in a studio on the West Side of Manhattan, one can see confusion bordering on chaos, none of which is apparent in the movie. In the Taymor manner, it is a phantasmagoria, “a large story on a low budget.” “There's a plus when you don't have 20 or 30 million dollars and you have to do all these pyrotechnics. It forces you to be very creative.”
For her leading actor, Taymor needed a dwarf. Asked if Anderson were the only one who auditioned, she says: “No. I saw about seven.” Seven dwarfs? She laughs. “Six or seven. Probably less than seven. The reason I cast Michael was not only because he gave the best reading, but because he is completely confident about who he is.”
For Anderson, it was a particular challenge. As he points out, previously he had been used as “a special effect.” For “Fool's Fire”, he became the emotional center of the story; around him were special effects. Before Anderson was hired, Taymor told him that the role would be stressful. He would have to stand on a tightrope, swing on a chain and perform a scene in the nude. In response to that last suggestion, he said, “As long as you don't use me as a sex object.” Taymor laughed at the actor's joke, then caught herself as she realized the sadness behind the humor.
In an early shot, Anderson is seen running for his life across an endless cabbage field. Actually the actor is on a treadmill, covered with fabricated cabbages and operated by hand. For the actors working in a non-air-conditioned studio with the temperature rising to 105 degrees, it was excruciating to be encased in the bodysuits. In playing their roles, the unseen actors had to learn to be puppeteers. They synchronized the movement of the puppet mouths with the dialogue, while other assistants, referred to as “body doubles,” manipulated the limbs of the characters. Through the use of camera movements and changes of lighting, expressions were added to the faces.
Contemplating her choice of subjects, she says: “If you look at the work I've done, you might say: You're not a dwarf, you're not a monster. What is it that you relate to in these stories? I don't think it's easy for me to answer that. But the more work I do, the more I begin to see threads.” One theme that runs through her work is that of the outsider. As she explains, “I've always felt somehow on the outside of any group I've been in, whether it's the theater community or a foreign culture.” Then, reconsidering her statement, she says, “I'm more a traveler than an outsider.”
People are always trying to categorize and to define her work, something that she finds especially difficult. When “Fool's Fire” was screened at Sundance, she says, “There wasn't a peep out of the audience, and I'm going, Oh, my God. This is my first audience. I was intimidated from laughing. Then I watched the other films at Sundance and the comedy jumps out and says, ‘I'm funny now, I’m meant to be laughed at.’ I don't work that way. We're always straddling: you could cry or you could laugh.” Sometimes, her audience turns out to be surprisingly aware. “I remember showing a videotape of Juan Darien to two 10-year-olds who hadn't seen the show. When the scene came on where Juan grabs the face of his mother and takes her mask off and washes it, the 10-year-boy went, ‘Oh, he's washing her soul.’ He got it exactly, quicker than some adults who are extremely literal-minded.”
As she looks to her future, Taymor refuses to be limited by her past successes; she keeps gathering experience. She has already staged productions of The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew for Theater for a New Audience, and would like to do more Shakespeare, with Richard III at the top of her list. Presently, she is working on redoing a segment of her Tempest for a series on public television in which artists will explore their work for an audience of young people. In her provocative interpretation, Caliban is a ‘mudman’ and his head is imprisoned in a rock, as represented by a sculptured clay mask. When Caliban thinks he has become a freed man, he cracks open his mask and for the first time the actor's face is revealed.
The next natural step would be into feature films, which seemingly would offer her more latitude and a wider audience than theater. Up to now, Broadway has not been receptive to the musical creativity of Taymor and Goldenthal. She would like to make films of two of her theater projects, The Transposed Heads and Juan Darien, and in anticipation she has reconceived them specifically in cinematic terms. For new works for film and stage, she is looking to other fabulists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and John Gardner, as well as to original projects, including one about “an inner city Pinocchio.”
John Gardner is very much on her mind. For several years, she and Goldenthal have been working on their opera of Grendel, which, as in the Gardner novel, is Beowulf told from the point of view of the monster. A consortium of opera houses is being put together to present the work in 1994. When the opera is completed, it should be the boldest (and the most elaborate) of their collaborations.
With someone who is so caught up in the idea of transformation, it seems natural to ask her if she would like to be anyone else, or any other creature, or to live in a distant time. She confronts the questions with pragmatic self-assurance. She likes being Taymor and collaborating with her partner and facing the artistic options that now are available. For this cross-cultural voyager, there are many magical worlds to be explored.
In 2018 someone asked Goldenthal whether the music for "Fool's Fire" was extant. "Alas no. Unable to find the original tapes." Twitter