Blind Summit: The Sex Lives of Puppets

Carnal Knowledge: Blind Summit’s The Sex Lives of Puppets

An Essay by Scott T. Cummings

Who knew that puppets have orgasms? Who would have thought that a series of kinky confessions could be so funny? Apparently, Mark Down knew, and the mad genius behind Blind Summit has channeled his insight into The Sex Lives of Puppets, a wild and delightful cross between an X-rated cartoon, a vaudeville double-act, and the Kinsey Report.

More than a decade ago, Blind Summit scored a major success with The Table, a tabletop show for a smart-ass cardboard puppet named Moses that toured widely and was a highlight of the first-ever Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in 2015. The Sex Lives of Puppets is well on its way to matching that success. After a couple of years in development, the piece premiered at London’s Southwark Playhouse in January 2024, played the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, had a London revival that fall, and in 2025 started touring internationally, leading to a 2026 six-city US tour that included eight shows in Chicago at the Biograph’s Začek McVay Theater.

You don’t think of it while watching the show, but The Sex Lives of Puppets is a curious instance of verbatim theatre. The dialogue is based on transcripts from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL), a recurring study conducted every ten years by a team of British universities. Mark Down collaborated with veteran Irish actor/writer/director Ben Keaton to fashion the script and then stage it through a number of workshops with a core group of actor-puppeteers. The show presents itself as a series of interviews with one or two puppet characters representing survey subjects answering a question about sexual behavior—What does sexual well-being mean? How does sex change with age? Do you ever disagree about sex?—each of which is announced on a placard carried across the stage with theatrical flair. The puppets sit on the edge of a wide-and-shallow raised table, each one manipulated by two performers dressed in black who are standing behind them; one of them also voices the figure. Even before they are activated by the puppeteers, each of the figures designed by Down and Russell Dean conveys a vivid, distinct personality. They have soft, stuffed muslin bodies cleverly costumed from head to toe and large sculpted heads that suggest a colorful caricature of an ordinary, everyday, off-the-street person. 

But their conversation is far from ordinary. In matter-of-fact terms that become more and more animated, they discuss sex in intimate, frank, and often graphic terms, including subjects—genital details, safe words, butt plugs, and a mysterious secretion called a “cum blob”—that are sure to make some spectators uncomfortable. In effect, the comedy begins right there with the shockingly explicit chat coming from these charming puppets, but Down and Keaton have scripted the source material with a precision that turns each interview into a finely tuned comic routine. And the actors—Down, Isobel Griffiths, Dale Wylde, and Elliot Liburd—have the vocal chops and comic timing to bring it to life. 

The piece is flat-out funny most of the time, and the actors do not hide how much fun they are having in the process. Each pair, both the speaking actor and the silent partner, focuses on their character with a kind of intense empathy that influences our own responses. The sheer skill of their manipulation, coordinating the gestures of arms and hands, the tilt of head and torso, and the fluctuations of the voice—all with uncanny vitality—adds to the pleasure of the experience. All four actors give excellent performances, but Griffiths and Down voice the majority of characters, for good reason. She is exquisite and endearing in the subtle sweetness of her voices; he is rougher and grander in his rendering of male and female figures alike, but just as evocative. In their scenes together, the give-and-take of their banter flows like poetry.  

The Sex Lives of Puppets runs just under 90 minutes in performance with an intermission in the middle. At that length, Down and company recognized the risk of it becoming a one-trick pony. Most of the show is decidedly verbal, but they found moments to vary the tone and the style of presentation. The first half ends with “What is puppet porn?”—a scene in which a white 10′ x 12′ backdrop becomes the screen for an explicitly pornographic shadow play ironically accompanied by the cheesy orchestrations of  “I Love All The Love in You” from 1968’s Barbarella. And the show ends on an equally free-spirited, over-the-top note that presents a series of different puppets that are smaller than the stars of the show—soft, featureless, anonymous, more like generic muslin dolls—who one by one come together on top of the table in erotic permutations that erupt into an all-out puppet orgy. Indeed, the show goes out with a bang.

But even more important to the texture of the experience are the interview scenes in which something other than sexual gratification is at stake. In “What’s Your Secret Sauce?” we meet an older couple named Dmitry and Robin, each on their second marriage. “I whacked him off,” she says with blunt candor right at the start, recounting “the auspicious day” when they first met. Eventually, though, Dmitry confesses how lonely he was after his first wife died, and Robin says he had become “a large man who seemed rather small.” The laughter subsides, and the scene becomes tender and poignant. “After a while you want to be touched,” he says as he pats her on the knee. “You want to touch someone.” The scene—and by extension the entire show itself—reminds us that sex is more than carnal: that it is emotional and psychological, that it manifests love (or the absence of love). It is hard to leave The Sex Lives of Puppets without a smile on your face, but the show runs deeper than that. It is a perfect example of how puppets can explore a subject and reveal an aspect of our humanity in a way that humans cannot.