SHHH. SHHH. HOOO. WOOF!

Photo: Jiri Sediak

= SHHH. SHHH. HOOO. WOOF! is a marvelous, wordless puppet play from The Naive Theatre (Liberec, Czech Republic), created by author Vit Perina, director Michaela Homolova, designer Robert Smolik and musician Filip Homola. It’s designed for children as young as two years old. Four puppeteers present the fable of a dog who goes in search of his lady dog friend. He meets several other dogs on the way. They frighten him, but they turn out to be his friends, and they help him find her. He succeeds, of course. As the Beatles sang, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

This slight, gentle production appeals to children and teaches them at a cognitive level preceding speech. Our hero’s journey is largely by train (I suspect that the SHHH of the title refers to the sound of the steam engine), and the tracks are laid out on the floor of the small theater. No one in the audience is far from the puppets. The puppeteers handle the fur-on-wood puppets and their moving joints standing above them, with thick, rigid wires (they’re like rod puppets operated from above). They’re dressed in black jackets so we can believe we don’t see them in the dark theater. 

The puppets in SHHH. SHHH. HOOO. WOOF! are small and unintimidating - we look down on them even as we learn from them. This work for children illustrates one of the principle cognitive mechanisms of puppetry: we feel superior to small puppets and in a way that helps us learn from them. Their proportions reflect their importance, not actuality - our hero dog is nearly as large as the locomotive he tools around in. And the music is so delicate we’re almost not aware of it. Wonderful work!

review
Steve Capra
September 2019
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