“Do people have good or bad memories of something, and can I tarnish it? Can I ruin something for someone in a good way? That’s my goal.”
Shaun Michael McNamara takes classic movies and morphs them into raunchy adult versions of themselves. His company, All Puppet Players’ most recent production? A comedic and unique production of Jaws: Live, Abridged and Completely Underfunded. When I asked about why McNamara wanted to adapt Jaws into a 18+ stage show, his retort was “I have a question for you, why not adapt it?”
“It’s a classic, obviously!” McNamara explained, “It’s the first Summer blockbuster, so for our eighth season it seemed like it would be fun to come in and do a big budget movie on stage for $400, that seemed like a very funny concept to me. So we are bringing all $400 worth of entertainment to the stage.”
While Shaun and I spoke, the crew was constructing a rather sturdy looking boat out of cardboard, gaffer tape, and zip ties, among scattered roast chicken puppets. Claire Burnette, the Jaws’ lighting designer worked along the catwalk, as Shaun lovingly teased her about “yelling over his interview."
“Don’t tell anyone I said this, but Claire Burnette is the best lighting designer you could possibly have, but she’s also-”
“I’m nosy too!” Burnette interjected, laughing.
“Yes, nosy! She’s drunk as well, you can quote me on that.”
“I hate it when you do this! I’m going to go cry now,” they both laughed. The time I spent in their theatre was joyful for me, but the crew of the show also clearly love not only what they do, but each other as well.
“This is the best part about working in a puppet theatre,” McNamara said, “everyone is a little bit nuts, which means you’re all officially sane.”
Working in a puppet theatre isn’t the only thing that has caused McNamara to go insane. He told me he watched Jaws over 25 times in the last two months while writing the script for the show.
“I will watch [the movie] three times through where I really have a good grasp on it and then scene by scene I’ll go, and I’ll write the dialogue out and start crafting jokes and building on things and before I know it the script is done and the movie is done and I never want to watch that movie again and we’re done.”
As for watching Jaws again, McNamara didn’t seem too enthused about the idea.
“I think we’re good. I think I get it.”
As the construction of the boat continued, I watched it go from a pipe frame, zip-tied cardboard, to a fully realized, non-seaworthy, fishing vessel. Creating a full set plus props and puppets for $400 is a challenge in and of itself, but McNamara told me that the toughest part of the show wasn’t the budget, it was translating the scenes to the stage. He told me “All of them” were difficult.
“Every. Single. One.”
The stand out challenge however, McNamara told me, was that the nearly entire second act of the show takes place on a boat, which made it a challenge for the production team.
“We have built this sort of water proscenium and we’ve got people on little scooters that zip through behind this proscenium with barrels on their heads and shark fins on their heads, so you never know where they're popping up, or where they're going to appear or where these funny, sort of bizarre things are going to happen. So yeah, the second act is the hardest. The second they get on the water, it’s a nightmare,” He laughed.
As for the puppets, McNamara said that they “design them in house, and then send them out to a guy named Jay Tyson who builds. He used to build for the muppets. He’s built everything I’ve done for almost seven years now.”
McNamara’s favorite puppet for the show, is the titular character of Jaws. He told me “the shark is pretty funny. He is a ridiculous, big balloon shark and he talks on the phone a lot, which is creative license. He’s hilarious. He taunts them constantly by calling them, so I think he’s probably my favorite.”
All Puppet Players are self described puppet anarchists, and McNamara himself said that he isn’t big on doing things people have seen before. He told me the audience can expect “theatre at its most creative. I think what they will see is something they haven’t seen before and they’ll see it with puppets. Dirty-mouthed puppets. That’s what they can expect, a dirty-mouthed puppet cardboard spectacular.”
“I think the word is foul mouthed,” Claire chimed in.
“Stay out of my interview Claire,”
“Why?”
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| Shaun Michael McNamara |
For the rest of their season, All Puppet Players has three upcoming shows, Die Hard: A Christmas Story, which is APP’s reigning holiday classic, and Waiting For Henson, an original absurdist play that toys with the ideas of meaning and meaninglessness, and the muppets style western comedy, A Fist Full of Puppets.
Further along, somewhere in the future is a Game of Thrones satire which McNamara described as the “current thorn in [his] side.”
“I announced two years ago that we were going to do every season of game of thrones in 90 minutes with only three actors, and I wrote a treatment and I will still eventually do it, but I just haven’t found the joke yet,” McNamara explained, “I think that one is the one that will haunt me until it’s finally on stage. I will do it, but I think I need a definitive ending and we don’t have a definitive ending to Game of Thrones yet.”
“I’m R.R Martin-ing it. I’m just going to wait until I am almost dead, and then I’ll pull it out.”
Jaws: Live, Abridged, and Completely Underfunded runs from October 5th until October 27th and promises to be an evening of pure and total puppet anarchy.
In McNamara’s own words, “If you are looking for something different, and you are looking for something that is funny and irreverent, something that mixes muppets with family guy then we are your e-ticket, we’re the ones to come see, because I think that we’re doing stuff that a lot of theatres would never do in their right mind, and that’s where we succeed because we are out of our minds.”
CLICK HERE for more information on Jaws: Live, Abridged, and Completely Underfunded hich runs through October 27th
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