
Underwater in Dead as a Dodo. Photo: Richard Termine
As a piece of craft, Dead as a Dodo, a new piece written and directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage, the leaders of Norwegian American puppet company Wakka Wakka, presented as part of Under the Radar, is sheer magic. Its puppetry, designed by Waage, of course, provokes wonder at every turn and brings new creatures and tricks every scene: A lonely skeleton boy boogieing with an equally skeletal dodo. An almost life-size mammoth rising up from the floor. A giant fish that reveals itself in luminescent color when we dip underwater. A trio of devils that feel like the love child of the Grimms’ trolls and Jim Henson’s Animal. An array of knee-high creatures that look like animate lanterns and then suddenly take flight. A giant geode that’s also a heap of creepy purple worms. But it’s not only the puppets–it’s the entire built environment, both stark and sophisticated, including lighting, projection design, costumes, infernally catchy tunes. Multilayered video (by Erato Tzavara) is projected on a series of string curtains (scenic design also by Warnock and Waage, as are the costumes) to create dazzling 3D effects. Even the puppeteers’ outfits, a glittery spangled black rather than the usual puppeteer matte, add a layer of visual mystique and depth to what we see. The performers disappear into and emerge out of the rocky subterranean landscape: they’re visible but feel more like artifacts of nature than performers. Thor Gunnar Thorvaldson’s songs, too, while they punctuate the piece somewhat randomly, are bright and joyous and sweet.
Ask me what happens in the show, though, and I’m on shakier ground. The press release name checks Dante’s Inferno, Tales from the Crypt, and Silly Symphonies cartoons; I can see all of those visually, to excellent effect, but narratively, you just kind of have to go with the flow. Which, again, is enormously engaging to watch and listen to and marvel at, but I did get increasingly more baffled as the show proceeded. It’s a shaggy dog sort of tale, where our heroes go from adventure to adventure, some of them more engaging than others. (For me, the least successful bits are the few times humans–or more humanesque figures, anyway, like a gondolieri on the River Styx or a naturalist/explorer/colonialist from the “realm of the exquisitely imagined”–enter the scene.)
We start in a cavern in the Realm of the Bones, where our bony friends Boy and Dodo dig for, not surprisingly, bones. Boy, who’s already missing an arm and a leg (the dance between the one-armed, one-legged skeleton and the equally skeletal but endearingly ungainly dodo is a puppeteering high point) feels himself starting to disappear, to be absorbed back into the “glitter basalt” that comprises the landscape and garbs the puppeteers. The villainous Bone King and Princess have snapped up all the bones that Boy might otherwise use for repair. After a series of skirmishes with the Bone King, Princess, and Doctor, Boy and Dodo go on the run. While Boy is in danger of disappearing, Dodo has mysteriously sprouted feathers, and begins to imagine the possibility of returning to the Realm of the Living–something that is also, for some reason, a threat to the Bone King.

The cavern in Dead as a Dodo. Photo: Erato Tzavara
As they journey across the other realms, our heroes survive the fiery River Styx, visit the Realm of Monsters, have run-ins with devils, and are almost swallowed by a giant geode that is also sort of a worm and also the beloved of a European exploring gentleman who’s wandered in from some other realm (my least favorite character). Dodo and Boy are ultimately separated, as Dodo comes closer and closer to becoming alive and Boy begins to dissolve further into the basalt. When Dodo finally makes it to the realm above, she seems to be in a lab, with a fox whizzing around in some sort of drone keeping tabs on her.
In the bone kingdom part of the show, I got the impression that some sort of ecological catastrophe had wiped out life aboveground and the few survivors, all reduced to skeletons, lived in this subterranean world (hello, Inferno). “The surface is dead. Everything is artificial. Nothing lives anymore,” says the Bone King. But as Boy and Dodo go on through other realms of the under- and overworld, this becomes less clear. Because there are plenty of (what seem to be?) living creatures in various places: the gondolieri; the fish; the explorer, and that’s leaving aside all the other beings who might be in some interim stage of being as are Boy and Dodo.
Tonally, too, there are some oddities. There’s a lot of cartoonish whimsy: in the songs; in the gondolieri who while nominally Italian has a bit of Swedish Chef to him; in Dodo’s reaction shots and boingy limbs. But there’s also a lot of macabre imagery and darker notes; while Dodo’s journey is joyful and a little bit inspirational, Boy’s seems to require a fairly sophisticated understanding of death. Macabre whimsy is a difficult thing (even Tim Burton fails as often as he succeeds), and in the magic moments when Dead as a Dodo pulls it off, it’s jaw-droppingly awesome. There’s a few puzzling sequences I’d happily trade for more time underwater in the River Styx or floating among the lantern-people, but it’s still full of marvels.