Cabinet of Curiosity: The Cabinet

All the World’s an Asylum: The Cabinet Equally Disturbs and Entertains

An Essay by Tim Cusack

A tall, intricately carved cupboard looms ominously in half light on the stage of the former Victory Gardens Theater as audience members filter into their seats for The Cabinet, a reimaging of a piece director and puppeteer Frank Maugeri originally created for the defunct company Red Moon in 2010. This mysterious object hums with potential energy. It feels almost sentient, like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but this structure is a galaxy away from the sleek minimalism of the iconic symbol in Kubrick’s science fiction epic. Oddly askew quadrangular shapes comprise its drawers, their knobs practically beseeching to be tugged on in order to unleash/unlock whatever is contained within them. The elaborate embellishments signal to me that what is about to be called forth from this edifice is not of our time or place, and the three clearly delineated horizontal sections suggest separate playing areas for the performance. 

However, I don’t quite know what to expect, other than that the piece is an adaptation of the quintessential German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), originally directed by Robert Weine. Having never seen the movie, all I know is that it features a sui generis production design and is considered to be one of the first horror flicks in cinema history. Not being a fan of horror movies, my anticipation for the start of the performance is heightened by a shot of anxiety: What if it’s scary or gory? Will I be able to sleep tonight? (It was a late curtain.) What exactly is inside that Cabinet? By confronting us with the behemoth that is both the playing space from which human actors and puppets will relay the sinister tale and the titular character of the piece, Maugeri stokes our curiosity (his company is called Cabinet of Curiosity after all) for what lies within and what’s about to happen when all of those doors open. 

As it turns out, a lot lies within—an entire world—and one of the ever-replenishing delights of the show is experiencing all of the surprising ways in which the Cabinet transforms into various playing spaces: panels unfold outwards, doors pop open, puppeteers dangle from ceilings. Each kinetic occurrence reveals a hidden tableau, and a great deal of the energy of the piece is derived from this incessant process of uncovering, concealing, and emerging. In this way, the Cabinet functions like a multiform puppet booth, but it can also serve as a projection surface for text and even a short silent animated film depicting a murder. Punch & Judy meets wayang kulit (Indonesian shadow puppetry performed behind a screen). 

The first moment of action establishes that any section of the Cabinet can become activated when the middle door at the bottom opens. I was assuming that the broad center segment, visibly evoking the outlines of a puppet booth, would be the focus of the action, so I was not expecting a pair of hands to suddenly push out an old phonograph record player onto a hinged platform angled towards the deck of the stage. I wonder if this is a conscious homage to Thing from The Addams Family? (Maugeri has been very open about growing up as “a ‘latchkey kid’” who was raised primarily by his family’s TV set tuned to cartoons, reruns, and schlocky suspense movies [Maugeri: 63].) This image becomes a visual leitmotif that will echo throughout the performance as disembodied black-gloved hands snake up from holes in the floor or descend from above to manipulate the puppets. These particular hands crank the gears, place the record on the spinning turntable, and gently set the needle into its groove. 

We hear what we come to learn is the voice of Cesare, a patient in Dr. Caligari’s insane asylum, who will serve as narrator for the 60-minute performance. Of course, the device of a narrator conveying the story in puppet theatre has a very long tradition—from the tayū (chanter) in the Japanese Bunraku theatre to the interlocutors in hand-booth forms, such as mamulengo in Brazil. The disembodied voice emanating from the Victrola serves to both convey the narrative and bridge the gap between our human world and the far-stranger puppet world of the Cabinet.

Mickie Mayer performs quite the feat of dramaturgical legerdemain by transmuting Weine’s striking images into poetic text. While Maugeri’s adaptation retains the original structure of the film by using a narrative framing device, by shifting who the narrator is, his production radically alters the function of the frame and the audience’s relationship to the events onstage. In the original film, the narrator is a young man named Francis, victimized by the serial killer Cesare who has murdered his best friend and abducted the woman he loves. By shifting the POV to the killer himself, Maugeri maneuvers the audience into an uncomfortable position—everything we experience is being filtered through the consciousness of a man who is, by his own admission, only demi-conscious and subject to the irresistible commands of Dr. Caligari that he create yet more corpses. (Or perhaps to express this more accurately: to consign his fellow performing objects to their “natural” inanimate state). As the narrating voice puts it: “I was born a somnambulist. /Afflicted with perpetual sleep/yet as able to walk and do and be on this earth/as any of you who watch and listen now.” 

Further complicating this process of identification is that the person speaking is in actuality a puppet. If he is indeed trapped in a liminal state between consciousness and unconsciousness (just as any puppet is liminally both alive and dead), then the implication is that everything we are about to experience is the lucid dream of a nonconscious performing object—and even more disturbingly, that we ourselves might be a fragment of that dream. Further complicating our empathetic response is this puppet’s appearance and the manner in which he is enlivened by the human performers. The puppet’s very materiality exudes an air of neurotic psychosis: grayish skin, a head just slightly too large for its body, eyes that are either sleepily shut or alarmingly wide open, and a shock of wild, stringy hair. This latter detail both references the wigs worn by the actors in the source material, but also effectuates one of the more startling means of physically manipulating the character: the aforementioned puppeteers dangling from the “flies” frequently grab Cesare’s hair in order to operate him. It’s an inherently violent gesture that creates both visual excitement and theatrical surprise but also serves as a metaphor for Cesar’s relationship to Dr. Caligari, who after all, is perpetually messing with his patient’s head.

Maugeri’s cast continuously astonishes us with their tightly choreographed physical daring and dexterity, while simultaneously creeping us out by their appearance. Faces covered in deathly pale makeup, dark circles under monocled eyes, black skull caps that bring to mind medieval physicians, they cluster around Cesar and the other rod-puppet characters with Bunraku-like intimacy. Two puppeteers will operate the body and the hands while a third descends from above to grab the head. Always co-present with their co-stars, they are as much a part of the asylum world as the puppets. Maugeri has stated about his artistic practice, “Rarely do I cast ‘puppeteers’ but rather dancers eager to work with objects, as the dancer knows their way through time and space gracefully and intentionally” (p 67). While I don’t know for certain the training background of the performers who appeared in the piece during the Chicago festival, they certainly seemed like dancers with their precision and energetic focus. At one point, one of these “doctors” tries to escape from the Cabinet by scrambling out of the doors on its lower level, only to be pulled back in after a brief scuffle. They are trapped in the asylum just as Cesar is trapped in a pop-up book he happens upon in Dr. Caligari’s office depicting his many crimes across the centuries. Being a puppet, therefore, makes him immortal but also ensures that he will never enjoy a reprieve from this tortured (non)existence.

The indestructibility of the puppet, along with its craftsmanship, underscore the awareness that there can be no release from this narrative of compelled violence, only the pleasures to be had in aestheticizing it through art and the satisfaction that arises when artistic discipline depicts it. I walk out into the mild-for-January northern Chicago night and can’t quite shake the feeling that I, too, am sleepwalking in a dreamlike existence. I am haunted by a line spoken early in the performance by the recorded voice “Upon entering the asylum, all that existed was the asylum itself.” The Cabinet presents a series of ontological containers that nestle inside of each other: pop-up book, asylum, performance contraption, theatre building, world. Where I am situated along that continuum of existence remains a mystery waiting to be solved.