Quick look
AMES, Iowa - Ebenezer Scrooge comes to life one carefully engineered movement at a time.
A tilt of the head. A slight bend in the knees. A measured step across the stage.
During a recent rehearsal of the ISU Theatre's new adaptation of "A Christmas Carol," two students stood beside a three-quarter life-sized puppet of Charles Dickens' famous miser, working in perfect synchronization to create something audiences instinctively recognize as human.
The illusion feels like theater magic, but behind it lies a blend of artistic expression, engineering principles and materials innovation.
"Puppetry is full of dichotomies, and one of them is that puppetry is both art and science," said Amanda Petefish-Schrag, associate professor of theatre and the production's director. "A puppet needs to convey emotion and character while also functioning as a machine."
Audience members see enchantment, she added, but behind the scenes, puppeteers think about leverage, balance, material strength and human anatomy as much as character and emotion.
Those same principles shape every aspect of the ISU Theatre's production of "A Christmas Carol," which runs Nov. 5-8 at Iowa State's Fisher Theater and features more than 80 handcrafted puppets designed and built by Petefish-Schrag and students in collaboration with faculty experts in art, printmaking, textile science and materials research.
Learning to disappear
The production was adapted by Petefish-Schrag and her husband, composer and musician Ben Schrag, and reframes Dickens' holiday classic in the tradition of the Victorian ghost story, with a chorus driving the action and puppets bringing Scrooge and his fellow characters to life.
Some of the puppets are no larger than a child's toy, while others tower nearly 13 feet into the air.
"The main challenge for every puppet, regardless of size, is how do you convince an audience that an inanimate object is alive?" Petefish-Schrag said.
Unlike actors in a traditional play, puppeteers succeed when audiences stop noticing them. Even while standing in plain sight, they must transfer every bit of emotion and intention to the puppet, allowing the character, rather than the performer, to command attention.
"The biggest challenge is letting the puppet do the acting for you," said Cooper Carolan, a freshman from Larchwood studying theatre and urban and regional planning. He performs with the Peter Cratchit puppet, among others, in "A Christmas Carol."
Petefish-Schrag said actors are trained to communicate emotion through facial expressions, posture and gestures, but puppeteers must transfer those instincts into materials.
In rehearsals, she frequently reminds students of small but telling human habits.
People who are grieving don't always look directly at one another.
Fear can live in hesitation.
A slight lean can communicate vulnerability.
"Emotion often lives in subtle physical details, and together those details become a character," Petefish-Schrag said.
Sammy McDaniel, a senior from Johnston studying computer engineering and theatre, said that work becomes even more challenging when two performers share control of a single puppet - which he does when guiding the Scrooge puppet in tandem with fellow cast member Sabrina Wright, a junior from Cambridge studying biology and performing arts with a minor in psychology.
"When you have two people performing as one puppet, you really have to be in sync, communicate clearly and work together," McDaniel said.
The smallest deviation or mistake can fracture the illusion, he said, but when it works, audiences stop seeing two actors manipulating an object.
They just see Scrooge.
Innovation through collaboration
Operating puppets can be an intense physical workout, and the 16 student cast members of "A Christmas Carol" - most of whom had no prior puppetry experience - had just eight weeks to train their bodies for the unusual movements required to guide puppets onstage.
To help protect performers from injury and physical exhaustion, Petefish-Schrag enforced a strict rule that no puppet could weigh more than three pounds.
"Adding even an extra ounce can significantly increase the physical difficulty," she said.
Petefish-Schrag and students on the production's puppet fabrication team collaborated with Raluca Iancu, associate professor of art and visual culture (printmaking), and Rachel Eike, associate professor in the department of apparel, events and hospitality management, to find creative solutions for design needs.
Eike introduced the idea of using discarded textile offcuts - including linen, cotton, and blue denim scraps - from student design labs and apparel manufacturers, which Petefish-Schrag and her team were able to process into custom non-woven paper pulp sheets at the ISU Student Innovation Center with guidance from Iancu.
"These sheets could be molded into puppet faces and bodies that weighed up to 50% less and gave new life to materials that might otherwise have been thrown away," Petefish-Schrag said.
Paris Mickelson, a sophomore from Dubuque studying art and theatre, said the transformation is part of what drew her to the project and working on puppet fabrication.
"All of the faces of the puppets were made from scraps of paper, and we made our own paper pulp," she said. "It was amazing to see what is possible."
Elsewhere in the production, shadow puppets were made from a leather alternative developed by Iancu, using abaca fiber and replacing synthetic finishes with kakishibu, a traditional Japanese coating made from fermented persimmons.
Even Scrooge has a particularly fitting design note, Petefish-Schrag said.
"We created the Scrooge puppet using a fiber recipe similar to the formula used in U.S. paper currency," she said. "That felt appropriate since Dickens often wrote about money, labor and inequality."
Building future-ready skills
For Petefish-Schrag, the production's greatest success isn't the puppets themselves but the experience and interdisciplinary collaboration students gain creating them.
"Our cast, crew and creative team featured students from more than a dozen different majors," she said, citing architecture, art, biology, business, education, engineering, environmental science, fashion design and merchandising, history, industrial design, marketing, performing arts, scientific illustration and visualization, theatre, and urban and regional planning among the academic areas represented.
"As part of this production, students are designing structures, testing materials, revising prototypes and figuring out how people interact with objects," Petefish-Schrag said. "The same creative process that builds a puppet is the process used to solve all kinds of real-world problems."
As stage manager, Vanessa Rivas-Pena, a junior business management student from Ames, coordinates rehearsals and communication with the cast and crew, and said she sees direct connections between the production and her future career.
"I'm planning to pursue a career in business management, but I love the theater and helping manage this production has been a really valuable learning experience that will help me succeed in the future," she said.
"No matter what field you're in, you're always working with other people to solve problems and find better solutions together."
