At Mum Puppettheatre, art moves, literally and figuratively.

Robert Smythe was five years old when he realized he wanted to start his own puppet theater.  

What he’s created is not merely for five-year-olds.

In 1985, the former props master for Peoples Light and Theatre Company and Guggenheim Fellow followed his dream and founded Mum Puppettheatre, an artistically ambitious theater company that incorporates live actors with puppetry in staging classical and contemporary theater. Over the years Mum has toured the world, collected 13 Barrymore Awards, and established itself internationally as a company devoted to compelling, emotionally engaging interdisciplinary work.

Such a distinguished pedigree and yet the Center City-based Mum still seems to be a well-kept secret, if only because the word “puppet” tends to evoke certain impressions of what occurs on the stage. Generations who grew up with “Sesame Street” and experienced their seminal theater moment at a performance of “The Lion King” may comprehend puppet theater as “Punch and Judy” or “Lamb Chop” fare. Yet, while Mum does stage popular shows for children, including perennial favorites “The Velveteen Rabbit” and “A Christmas Carol,” the company frequently flexes its muscles and puppet strings on substantive dramatic work – substantive adult dramatic work.

“Theater that uses puppets is a way you can go to places that you can’t go to in other ways,” said Mum Managing Director Lisa Shelby, who joined the company last year. “The art form of puppet theater is something many people in the U.S. don’t know or understand. People leave here feeling like they are coming out of an experience that seems magical.”

Many new audience members were recruited to that magical experience last spring, when Mum produced its own version of the “The Fantasticks,” the legendary off-Broadway show that features a romantic score by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. It is the simplest story in the world, but one where (quite literally) most of the world saw it performed by human actors. Director Aaron Cromie re-worked the musical arrangements and derived inspiration from New York Times illustrator Chris Sickels, who designed sculptured puppets that were operated by the actors. The results defied expectations and enchanted audiences and critics, bringing Cromie his first Barrymore award. This quasi “Romeo and Juliet” story was reinvented with simplicity and innovation. Working also as puppet masters, the actors united with unique works of art that captured the idiosyncrasies of the characters in their carved faces.

This year Smythe and company have assembled a season of intellectually provocative material that relies on similar themes. It began with last fall’s “Rhinoceros,” the Eugene Ionesco absurdist play that tackles concepts of individuality, conformity, and authority. The fluidity between puppetry and live actors was demonstrated in a seamless transition between shadow puppets conversing among each other who then emerged on stage as real people. As the characters find themselves conforming to an overpowering force, they revert back to the shadows, as puppets once again.

In March, Mum resumes its 2007-2008 season with Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and concludes with an adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

“This season was really chosen through a collaboration that Robert and Adrianne Mackey [director of ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Margarita’] had,” Shelby explained. “Animal Farm is a project we’ve been involved with for two years. We’re looking at it as a metaphor for revolution and resistance and conformity. How those things come together had us thinking about other plays that would compliment that kind of a theme, but in a different way.”

Robert Smythe doesn’t see the integration of actors and puppets so much as a challenge. He sees it simply as another way to tell a story.

“My background in art has taught me that there are many ways to accomplish one’s aims: many techniques, many approaches.”

Smythe graduated from Wesleyan with degrees in art and theater. Before college, he got to work briefly with an upperclassman at Phillips Academy in Andover named Peter Sellars, who later became the prodigious, inventive and notorious theater director.

“Working with Peter opened my eyes to the infinite possibilities of a created world, which is what theater is,” Smythe said. “Puppets, or music, or text, or light, or scenography all bring their unique qualities to the mix. One wouldn’t want to have a canvas that was entirely red with nothing to relieve it; there needs to be something to provide contrast and interest. I think puppets do that in theater.”

“Theater,” he added, “is about the imagination, not everyday life.”

Mum’s motto is “art that moves.” It’s a rich statement, casting the puppets as works of art that come to life in performance alongside human actors. It also suggests the kind of theater that is produced in this intimate space in Old City. From Shakespeare to the staging of folkloric tales and children’s classics, Mum artists employ every discipline to tell a story. Actors must learn to move well and communicate by means other than just their voices. They are never upstaged by puppets, nor are they sidekicks or mere operators of inanimate objects.

“In ‘A Christmas Carol,’” Lisa Shelby noted, “it’s remarkable the way in which the puppets allow a way to see insight into a character and in how they are able to portray a character’s memories and feelings about those memories.”

Regionally, Mum is quite set apart in its skill set. It’s where young artists come to learn about puppetry and theater. It’s where children can peek backstage after a performance and view the tools that make the magic. And while area theater companies may make itinerant use of puppetry in certain plays, Smythe and his colleagues maintain the expertise. They are currently working on plans to start a training program for people interested in the three facets of puppetry: performance, the design and construction of puppets, and creating work that uses puppetry.

For Smythe, the so-called magic of theater doesn’t merely happen on the stage, it’s a symbiosis between the performers and the audience. Heightening that experience with an innovative use of space, puppetry, masks and movement brings the two entities closer together. Mum’s home, a charming black box theater that can transform from a small puppet stage, to a theater-in-the-round, provides an intimacy that suits the kind of theater Smythe is working to create each time he and his colleagues commit to a new production, whether it’s a fairy tale or contemporary drama.

“I love seeing theater and performing in a theater where there is always a sense that we are all in it together, rather than a large space where the front row gets bowled over by performances that have to reach the last row,” he said. “I like performances where it is possible to hear the actors and the audience breathe, because one of my aims is to get us all to breathe together, to unconsciously find the rhythms of thinking and feeling together. Puppets do that for us. The audience and the artists, together, agree to give life to their imaginations and they do it by breathing together to bring that inanimate piece of art into the world of flesh and blood.”

Mum Puppettheatre, 115 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA. Tickets for the Mum Puppettheater’s Spring 2008 season now available at mumpuppet.org or (215) 925-7686