Baxter Theatre & Handspring Puppet Co.: J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K

The Displacement of Home

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Baxter Theatre and Handspring Puppet Company’s J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K follows the novelist’s protagonist, Michael K., and his mother through an epic journey from Cape Town to Prince Albert, South Africa (Michael’s mother’s birthplace) and back to Cape Town during Apartheid amidst a fictional civil war. Baxter and Handspring are thus presented with a challenge: how to bring to the stage both a sense of rootedness—of home—and the feeling of endless migration—of displacement. 

This tension is created across numerous registers of the piece, which begins with an actor who creeps hesitantly onto the stage. He assesses his surroundings and whistles. As the rest of the ensemble begin to emerge from the brush while leaves fall around them, they give us the sense of guerilla soldiers about to put on a piece of guerrilla theater. One member of the ensemble places a body wrapped in an orange blanket downstage, which is slowly unwrapped until a puppet emerges. The soldiers transform into puppeteers as Michael K. is brought to life. 

We are consistently reminded throughout Michael K.’s migration that we are in a clearing that this troop of performers found amidst a war to put on their play. We are in a haven but one that could be threatened at any time. We are consistently reminded that the puppeteers are present and a part of the world of the play. Not only are they visible the entire time, they share Michael K’s material conditions: War is their backdrop as much as it is the backdrop of Michael’s story. The puppeteers make this evident in multiple ways during the show. At one point, when Michael is hungry and is offered a chicken pie by a kind stranger, he shares his pie with his puppeteers (who can actually eat it). At another point, when Michael and his puppeteers are sleeping and accosted by a rogue goat, the puppeteers wake each other up, calling each other by name until they are all alert and ready to puppeteer Michael’s escape.  

As Michael and his mother move from place to place, they are stopped at checkpoints, attacked by bandits, conscripted into work camps, and slowed by Michael’s mother’s progressing illness. While we move from a bureaucratic office to a roadside stop to the hospital bed where Michael’s mother eventually dies, the majority of their journey entails a lot of walking. “The story of my life has not been an interesting one,” Michael tells us. Director/adaptor Lara Foot captures the mundanity of state violence, displacement, and otherness, which consists primarily of banal desolation interrupted by brief moments of conflict. Michael and his mother walk and walk and walk as Michael pushes his mother in a makeshift cart. While the production initially shows the onset of Michael and his mother’s journey in miniature—diminutive versions of both puppets soar across the stage—it switches to a series of projections to capture the constant and endless movement of the title character. In these projections, Michael’s puppeteers disappear: We watch the puppet move autonomously as he walks through wide expanses of mountains and fields, dwarfed by the terrain. The projections serve to create a sense of the epic scale of Michael’s journey and how small he is within it. His is a story of being moved but with the forces that push him often erased from view. 

The scenic backdrop for Michael’s epic journey is a cutout of the façade of a house that is treated as a blank canvas for much of the piece: Projections of different backgrounds are laid over the house so much that we forget it is there. However, once Michael finally arrives at the farm where his mother was born—now without her, since she died in transit—a projection of a housefront is laid over the blank cutout such that the projections and scenic world onstage finally merge. In contrast to the puppetry and the cutout backdrop, the projections feel immaterial: They hover in indistinct space, disconnected from the tactile world of puppet theater. The concrete solidity of the house cutout, however, lacks specificity; it has functioned as a neutral backdrop without context. When the two merge, the production gives us the sense of home amidst war. Just like the opening scene, we feel that we have found ourselves rooted in a safe haven. And yet, the forces of displacement are always present. Home only comes into focus in this world because of a trick of the light: Once the projections shift again, home, too, will disappear. And this, of course, is what happens. Michael, who has started growing a pumpkin patch on his mother’s farm, is swarmed by militia who destroy his pumpkins—a symbol of rootedness that extends throughout the piece—and force Michael to flee back to Cape Town.  

We end as we have begun. We watch Michael K. take his last breaths downstage after which he is wrapped in an orange blanket. The full ensemble creeps back onstage and we are again in the grove where the play has been performed. We hear sirens blare and the ensemble flees. Yet, as Michael told us when he dreamed of regrowing his pumpkin patch: “The grass does not stop growing because there is a war.” Michael K. asks us to contend with what home means under forced displacement by a regime with no consideration for the land they seize.