Papermoon Puppet Theatre: A Bucket of Beetles

Taking a Pint-Sized Perspective: Befriending Insects with Papermoon Puppet Theatre

An Essay by Skye Strauss

In our era of looming environmental catastrophe, much is said about scientific innovations––from lab-grown meat to varied means of breaking down plastics. It is easier to sell ideas that require no change in habit or mindset. Perhaps lacking adult conditioning is a prerequisite for thinking of truly creative solutions because it facilitates seeing the world differently. With the choice to stage a child’s story, Papermoon Puppet Theatre gives us a protagonist who sees a friend in every living being––a change of perspective that might save the world.

A Bucket of Beetles follows a boy on his forest adventure with a rhinoceros beetle and a grasshopper. What matters most is the contrast between the boy and the adults we see. The puppet boy literally looks friendlier—his big eyes, impish smile, and flapping feet stand in contrast to the pinched masks worn by the adult characters, which incorporate living actors into the puppet world. We see the adults quantify and collect, measuring each beetle or bug before capturing it in a collector’s bucket. They use big leaves to either entice bugs into their grasp or to shoo away those too aggressive to capture. The boy befriends instead, discarding his little net and offering up leaves for snacks without any further agenda. 

As a result, the boy gets taken on a wild ride with his new bug friends. Unexpected twists and turns make it clear that this really is a four year old’s story––told in a “yes, and…” fashion. First, he witnesses a bug battle––a series of matches that start and end with a gong, like a wrestling or boxing match. Only when a bug falls does it become a collector’s item for the boy. Afterwards, the grasshopper is nursed back to health by a spider. Then, boy and bug journey underground. 

This is when you find out that a transformative trick has been hiding in plain sight: As boy and bug, projected in shadow on the back wall, continue to fall endlessly downward, the fabric “trees” that have been sitting on the stage rise. Tall trunks with exposed root balls become a root system and form a climbing-scape for the puppet boy and his bug buddies when they reenter the stage in three dimensions. The boy carries his lantern high in front of him in the darkness of this underground cavern, and when he touches the tree roots, his own golden light calls to life a series of other lanterns hidden in the tangled web. The further away from the adult world he travels, the more magical his domain becomes.

The same light turns into a new way to befriend others. When a big rhinoceros beetle enters, it comes toward the boy’s lantern. Though the little grasshopper looks afraid of it, the beetle seems too entranced by the light to bother threatening anything or anyone—wings flapping, legs clicking, it seems drawn in by its curiosity. It hooks the light on its horn and flies around the stage before returning to the boy, who pats it gently. The boy hops on its back, and together they take off. After the trio exits the stage in three dimensions, we continue to follow their flight in shadow on the screen that is the back wall. A black shadow in a white ball of light zips past golden trees, a maze of roots, and a field of houses on stilts. The human world was still waiting to be looped back into the story.

When the adults arrive in the same subterranean world, they fail to follow the boy’s good example. The bug collectors, in eerie downlit masks and boiler suits, are accompanied by shadows of trucks and logging equipment. As beetles swarm around the stage, represented by both lacy puppets and their shadow doubles, they are scooped into buckets by the jabbering collectors. It is only a matter of time before the natural world fights back. First, a huge moth passes over them in shadow––generating uneasiness among the collectors. Then the stage is littered with red eyes—the slitted irises of wolves and big cats peer out of an otherwise shadowy back wall. The human predators turn prey and flee in fright but cannot escape the danger. The red eyes cue a chain of destruction. On the shadow screen, flames break out in the forest around the raised houses. A haze of smoke creeps onstage as the trees are reduced to stumps. While the embers die down, people survey the damage. The three-dimensional trees of the set are folded up and carried away, marking human and natural destruction as intermingled and co-mourned. The greed of the adult world has done great damage.

The opening montage of the performance showed a world in harmony—presenting, among other images, an exploratory human eye that looked at, but did not take, the various shadowy beetles crawling over the screen on the back wall, followed by an image of human dwellings on ladders nestled companionably in among the trees. After the fire, the broken bond between the human and the natural demands a long journey. The boy and his bug friends join the shadowy silhouettes of refugees with their remaining belongings in baskets on their heads. Along the path, the boy’s bug friends come and go. He walks on by himself until palm trees begin to appear in the background. The rhinoceros beetle, in white light, watched over him until its image irised out. Even though bugs and boy parted company in three dimensions, returning the boy to the human world, the beetle still monitored his journey until he arrived somewhere lush and plentiful again. Bows took place among the shadows of trees in blue and gold light.

It is always heartening when a performance with an ecological message is also made of materials consistent with its theme. At the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium presentation, “Artist Panel 2” (focused on materials), Maria Tri Sulistyani, the director, talked about the piece’s origin story. During COVID, the company gathered branches for their set and used foraged twigs to help build their original puppets for the show. Using thread they already had on hand, they colored the puppets by wrapping them in string––imitating the tangled lines of children’s crayon drawings. Ironically, in order to take the performance and its message global, the materials had to change. To clear customs, fabric trees took the place of branches, and the found plant matter in their puppets had to be replaced with metal armatures covered in papier-mâché and washi tape. Hearing Sulistyani tell the story, there is respect in the admission that it took the company members a very long time to imitate the beautifully irregular shapes of nature.

If the response in Chicago is any indication, the show’s reach is worth the necessary time and compromise needed to allow it to tour. Judging by the crowd at the Chopin Theatre, it successfully reaches out to a broad audience of both adults, drawn to its stylized storytelling, and children, attracted to its imaginative content. Having this enjoyable, intergenerational story about the symbiosis between human and nonhuman reach a packed house in every new country and city certainly feels like hope.