Tortoise in a Nutshell: Concerned Others

Piecing Addiction Together: Puppetry, Projections, and Personal Narratives in Concerned Others by Tortoise in a Nutshell.

An Essay by Ana Díaz Barriga

Puppeteer and Tortoise in a Nutshell co-director Alex Bird opened Concerned Others on January 19, 2025, at the Instituto Cervantes by making a quick sketch of a figure on a piece of paper, which was projected for the audience to see by means of a camera positioned above him. Upon completing the first figure, Bird proceeded to draw another one, slightly shifting the position of its legs, then another one and another. The audience saw the action of running in slow motion emerge as Bird drew the different figures. When Bird stopped drawing, pictures of the frames projected onto the screen animated the person depicted, speeding up its action. 

Bird transformed the space by introducing a meticulously detailed miniature cityscape, populating it with intricate buildings and static figures. Disembodied voices speaking about experiences of addiction accompanied Bird’s action as he used a camera to zoom into scenes from this city. There were two screens above the miniature set: one showing captions of the voices as they described the taboos that surround dialogue on addiction, elements of society that can lead people into a lifestyle of substance abuse, and the effects that addiction has on those surrounding the addict; the other screen showing the shots that Bird recorded. Although all the figures in the city were static and gray, the voices gave them dimension and suggested their potential as characters, contextualizing their lives. All the figures inhabited the miniature city, but their lack of defining characteristics and the distance between them, amplified by their scale, showed their isolation.  

According to the company’s website, Concerned Others combines puppetry and multimedia projections with recorded fragments from interviews “with those with lived experience of substance dependence, their family and friends, as well as health and social care professionals and policy makers and consulting charities specializing in addiction support services.” This combination of storytelling devices does not provide a linear or cohesive narrative; instead, Tortoise in a Nutshell creates tableaux that spectators can piece together to reflect on how addiction occurs and the role that society plays in that process. 

Bird moved the miniatures of the city from the table and brought on a puppet that appeared to be hanging out at a bar or perhaps the kitchen table in its own home. The puppet’s face looked as if it had been drawn on a piece of paper, but the puppet’s head was a screen allowing it to rapidly change facial expressions. The hand of the puppeteer took the place of the hand of the puppet, as it held onto a glass or a bottle of beer. The screens above continued captioning the voices collaged with audio and video from advertisements for various alcoholic beverages. Images of drinks flashed on the puppet’s face, quickly replaced by its concerned expression suggesting how intrusive thoughts of addictive behaviors can become.  

Bird then brought a different puppet onto the stage. This time the puppet was smiling as projections above it displayed a city. When the puppet checked its phone, the texts it received appeared on the screen for the audience to read. The puppet was on its way to a job interview, but its self-doubt creeped into the projections, ultimately leading to the puppet removing its own face, revealing underneath a different expression showing its true feelings of worry and anguish. The fonts displaying the puppet’s text messages became progressively blurry and scrambled. The disembodied voices spoke about the importance of judgement in human preservation but also about how judgment can lead to isolation and self-loathing. 

Concerned Others takes elements of “verbatim theater,” a form where “[t]he words of real people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during an interview or research process […]. They are then edited, arranged, or re-contextualized to form a dramatic presentation” (Hammond & Steward qtd in Vachon & Salvatore, 2023: 385). Furthermore, verbatim practitioners Wolfgang Vachon and Joe Salvatore argue that the refusal of a theater-maker to self-locate—i.e., to disclose who they are in relation to the theater piece they have created—invites audiences to ask themselves how their biases “influence how [they] will receive this piece” (2023: 386-387). Unlike traditional verbatim performances, Concerned Others subverts expectations by eschewing direct actor re-creations. Instead, Tortoise in a Nutshell deploys puppetry and multimedia to detach interviews from specific individuals, compelling spectators to actively reconstruct narratives and interrogate their own preconceptions about addiction. The puppet with the phone was replaced by a series of boxes showing everyday spaces: a bathroom, a living room, an office, an entryway. Bird held a camera to these rooms so that they were projected onto the screens. The voices told stories of addiction that situated these circumstances in the rooms. The voices thus became the puppets that inhabited the spaces and contextualized the characters: People with substance-use disorders do not exist in a vacuum but rather are surrounded by a society that, in many cases, is failing to support them.

The motif of the running figure came back throughout the performance in between these scenes: After the miniature cityscape, Bird spun a magic lantern that projected this image. Before the audience encountered the rooms and their accompanying voiceovers, Bird held a circle with the moving figure in different poses on each side. When the circle (a thaumatrope) spun, it made the two-dimensional figure appear three-dimensional. Finally, after taking the boxes away, Bird flipped the table he had been working on to turn it into a screen. He began to run in front of it, giving flesh and blood presence to the runner. As the runner went from the two dimensional into the three dimensional, he stopped being just an idea or a stereotype. He might have been escaping from his intrusive thoughts or from the social judgement placed on him, but perhaps he was running to a future where substance dependency is recognized as a social issue that concerns not just those who suffer from it but a broader social landscape that encompasses the spectators themselves.