Nick Lehane:
Chimpanzee

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Nick Lehane’s Chimpanzee is a heartbreaking exploration of anthropomorphism: our double-sided desire to endow nonhumans with human qualities and to take those endowments away. Chimpanzee follows a “lifetime in the mind of a chimpanzee” over the course of an hour. And specifically, the lifetime of a chimpanzee who was once a part of cross-fostering experiment but is now caged in a testing facility—a real historical phenomenon in the 1960s and 70s which saw several chimps raised among human families, only to be surgically experimented on as a part of pathogen studies once these cross-fostering experiments ended. Lehane masterfully uses the puppetry medium—specifically that of tabletop puppetry, a technique derived from the Japanese tradition of Bunraku—to tell the story of a chimpanzee, confined to a cage, whose torment is interrupted by memories of his foster home.

Lehane uses the medium specificity of table-top puppetry to great effect. The limited, confined space of the table becomes the chimp’s cage, using the claustrophobia inherent to table-top puppetry—a feature that can often be an obstacle for puppeteers trying to maneuver three bodies around a single object—to great dramaturgical effect. However, the chimp also enters into a dreamscape—one where the table becomes a laundry room, a tree in the front yard, a child’s playroom. The chimp’s imaginative escapes never fully transcend the confined space of the table, however; rather they provide a brief moment of relief where we all forget it’s there. 

This is not the only way Lehane seamlessly incorporates rather the affective dimensions inherent to table-top puppetry. Without demanding the puppeteers either play explicit dramatic roles (which often feels clunky and competes with the puppetry itself) or serve as cheap metaphors (the puppeteer as God being one of my least favorite), Lehane uses their presence to augment the emotional stakes of his piece. Bunraku—and three-person puppet manipulation in general—offers occasion to inhabit what queer theorist Eve Sedgewick calls “the middle ranges of agency.” 1 While watching a Bunraku production of The Odyssey by Handspring Puppet Company, Sedgewick is struck by how the puppeteers’ control over the puppet is simultaneously dependent on tender devotion. For Sedgewick, the puppeteers inhabit both these affective orientations—one of dominance and one of devotion—at the same time, providing a model for her (in her psychoanalytic idiom) for how to engage both influence over and susceptibility to the world without either annihilating it, or allowing it to annihilate you. 

Lehane takes this affective dimension of Bunraku one step further; while he gestures at the possibility of finding the “just right” orientation in between these two extremes of agency, he brutally activates for us the all-too-easy slippage in either direction. 

This binary itself—between absolute control and absolute passivity—is a human-made problem. If, as Lehane teaches us, the chimp, “straddles the human and the nonhuman” and can be both “part of the human realm” and made to be a “disposable object,” it is the human that traps him in this liminal space. Lehane lures us into forgetting the puppeteers are there—a credit to his collaborators, Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, and Emma Wiseman—allowing us to immerse ourselves in the chimp’s internal world, bathed in soft light such that the puppeteers recede unseen into the darkness. However, the puppeteers assert their influence at select moments, pulling focus ever so slightly by taking away a play toy or tucking the chimp into bed. When the chimp is caged under the harsh florescent light of the testing facility, the puppeteers become the bars of the cage as the chimp shakes them and clammers in desperate hope for freedom. The puppeteers recoil at his blows. They pin him down in his fit of rage, forcefully willing him into submission. Tender devotion becomes violent dominance so fluidly that we almost miss the shift between them. And then the puppeteers recede again, obscuring their role in the chimp puppet’s anthropomorphism and his subsequent dehumanization. In so doing, Lehane allows us to fully believe in the life of the chimp while refusing to let us forget who ultimately determines the conditions of that life.

If, as the above epitaph suggests, we risk missing something if we refuse to endow animals with human emotion, perhaps what we risk missing is not only the best of human impulses—to see ourselves in others—but also the worst—to believe that what we recognize as “ourselves” somehow belongs to us; that our “humanity” is both ours to give and to take away. This brings me to my final point which is that Chimpanzee—as any puppet show about an ape must do—nods at a parallel history of human objectification: that of American slavery and the minstrel show, both of which not only reduced humans to objects, but used ape imagery to do so, often through animated objects. In fact, American puppetry still reproduces such iconography today. 2  Chimpanzee negotiates this living history. During one of the chimp’s reminiscences, we watch him open a toy chest to discover two figurines: one, a mechanical monkey and the other, a white baby doll. The chimp first pulls out the mechanical monkey—an echo of what is known as “Sambo art,” which derives its aesthetics from the minstrel show, for instance, the Monkey Organ Grinder and “Jocko the Ape Negro,” dressed in his bell hop uniform. 3 The monkey toy gives out a muted roar when the chimp shakes it—a noise he finds displeasing so he shuts the monkey away in the box and pushes it away. The chimp then begins playing with the white baby doll, stroking its head and eventually cradling it in his arms. The chimp thus reflects back to us the double-sided impulse of anthropomorphism: the one that endows humanity to those we want to have it—the white child—and takes it away from those we would deny it to—the objectified other.