What's that puppet doing in my play? Smitten by puppet love, 5 playwrights compare notes on writing for objects brought to life.(Paula Vogel, Erik Ehn, Crystal Skillman, Kira Obolensky, Octavio Solis)(Interview)

As playwright Octavio Solis tells it, in the puppet world playwrights are the "low men on the totem pole." Why? Because this is a world in which the power and the prerogative belong to either the puppet artist--the all-encompassing puppeteer/playmaker/director/guru--or to the puppet company, the collective of artists working for a common mean, whether that be political assertion or children's amusement or creative expression. Puppet theatre began, in all likelihood, with the cave man: It was a tool of pageant and ritual, a pure experience. Puppeteers today are ...