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Shapeshifters
The Mummenschanz magic continues
BY IRIS FANGER

Mummenschanz Next
Created by Floriana Frassetto and Bernie Schürch. Lighting by François Thouzet. With Frassetto, Schürch, Raffaella Mattioli, and John Charles Murphy. Co-presented by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series and Broadway in Boston/Clear Channel Entertainment at the Wilbur Theatre through February 9.


If the laughter of children delights you, or the thought that there’s an afterlife for the debris of our world beyond litter, you’ll love Mummenschanz Next, the most recent creation of the 30-year-old mime-dance-mask-and-puppet troupe from Switzerland. Using little more than their imaginations, and evoking the same from the audience, the four performers make a host of characters from little more than some hunks of foam rubber, a set of sticks, and a whistling dot of light.

In truth, the Mummenschanz Four — Floriana Frassetto, Bernie Schürch, Raffaella Mattioli, and John Charles Murphy — do not exactly assume characters on stage, unless you believe that inanimate objects have spirit lives. Witness the two oversize, pastel-colored blobs that enter early in the show. While their outlines are vaguely bulbous, with only a changeable mouth at the height of each circumference, they conduct a meaningful exchange spiced by a cascade of emotions, yet never utter a word. By just crinkling up their foam-rubber exteriors, they behave as rudely as pushy strangers bumping others out of line. Later on, a trio of shapes bounds on stage looking like fugitives from a toddler’s first puzzle board — square, triangle, and circle. But they are perfectly lucid in presenting a schoolyard confrontation, where the square and the triangle gang up on their unlucky comrade and squash him (or is it her?) between them.

Mummenschanz means " masquerade " ; however, the term also refers to a card game played by Swiss mercenaries, a game of chance. Both definitions help to explain the playful mood of the show, which consists of a series of perhaps 20 unrelated short skits, following quickly one after another, that depend on our surprise at the incongruous ways the materials are used. Three wheelbarrows are the chief props in one playlet: the first becomes a shield, the other two are worn as masks. The second act of the 90-minute show opens with a pair of stiff-backed shutters in a mysterious relationship with two frisky glass doors. An enormous, ragged-looking plastic bag becomes a friendly monster that can barely keep itself from falling off the edge of the stage into the laps of the front-row viewers.

Ultimately, the objects transform into humans, but not exactly in our image. Flat, cut-out shadows like that of Peter Pan are pasted on the black-clad actors, who transform into figures sporting enormous heads with eyes on the ends of antennae. The characters are mostly gender-neutral, but sometimes the sexual clichés of flirting and machismo take over, even when such behavior seems startling in a set of cardboard boxes. The humor in bringing the objects or ridiculous incarnations of people to life serves to center the proceedings, though there are some poignant moments among the visual, ever-moving gags.

The pieces are presented in low light on a plain, black-draped stage, which allows the performers to keep their secrets. Sometimes they wear masks; at other times three or four of them become a huge visage in which each performer takes a different role — an eye or a nose or a mouth. Often the costume covers the entire body, with the actor rolling around inside to make the creature move. The creators of Mummenschanz must have welcomed the invention of Velcro as a special gift.

According to the program note, when Schürch and the late Andres Bossard founded the troupe with Frassetto in 1972, they aimed to invent a new form of theater. However, Mummenschanz has many antecedents. Among them are the clowns of the silent films; the Japanese theatrical form known as Bunraku, wherein black-clad men visible to the audience manipulate large-size puppets; and the 1920s experimental Bauhaus Theater of Germany that substituted forms and shapes for the human body on stage.

While Mummenschanz’s method of presentation is not quite dance, it’s certainly dance-like. And though the performance cannot be described as drama, the small skits contain elements of dramatic structure. Still, some of the grown-ups at the opening-night performance seemed baffled by what they were seeing. The children, on the other hand, had no difficulty catching on.

Issue Date: February 6 - 13, 2003
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