GoKawiilBeneath the Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street in Boston, tucked away in the basement, sits a library. A puppet library. It’s been there for decades, and despite innumerable changes in the nearby retail storefronts, this hidden artistic community treasure remains.
Throughout the cellar, puppets of all shapes, sizes, and materials sit idle, ready to be borrowed by the public free of charge. Sara Peattie, a Boston-based puppeteer and puppet artist, runs the operation.
Peattie began her puppeteering career with Bread & Puppet, an iconic political puppet theater with roots in Vermont.
“It was very intense,” Peattie recalled. “A lot of people never really come back. … It’s formative. And it was a very intense time. It was the ’60s, you know, the Vietnam war. People were fighting. It was a whole thing.”
Peattie was involved with Bread & Puppet while it was actively making theater about that notorious quagmire. “I was in high school and I joined them and we did a tour of Europe,” she said. “It was all Vietnam-based.”
Puppet show on the road
Though she was involved with the theater, Peattie wasn’t the one actually designing characters for Bread & Puppet–“That’s Peter Schumann,” she explained. She added that while he “is a great artist, he’s also a pre-war unreconstructed German, especially as far as women are concerned.”
While their time at Bread & Puppet was important in their artistic journey, Peattie and fellow puppeteer George Konnoff eventually agreed that it was time to move on. “There wasn’t much scope in Bread & Puppet,” Peattie said. “So when George wanted to start something of his own too, we went off to San Francisco.”
During their time in the Bay Area, the duo created the Puppeteers’ Cooperative in 1976 as a way to connect puppeteers nationwide. The group focused on putting together “puppet parades, pageants, and ceremonies of celebration and complaint, using simple materials and movements to build community cardboard extravaganzas.” The alliance has since worked with many prestigious events across the country, from the Lincoln Center Out Of Doors Festival in New York to the First Night celebration in Boston.
After a few years in San Francisco, Peattie and Konnoff moved to Vermont. “They didn’t have enough interesting weather,” the former joked. Eventually, they found their way down to Boston in the late ’70s, and have been here ever since.
... continue reading