An image from Nick Lehane's "Chimpanzee." Photo by Richard Termine.
By Georgia Sparling
For most Americans, puppets are either for kids or for comedy. Professional puppeteer Nick Lehane’s work is something altogether different.
“Puppetry is really well suited for telling the stories of the internal life,” says Lehane, a New York City-based puppeteer who will speak about his work as a theater maker on Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. Lehane is Lesley’s fall Strauch-Mosse Visiting Artist and is speaking as part of the Thought Leadership Series at Lesley.
Puppeteer Nick Lehane
Although adults are Lehane’s primary audience, it was his early exposure to puppets that opened the door for his future career. His father worked as a director in children’s television, and after a summer studying with a theater company, came back with “some kooky, exciting ideas about puppets,” Lehane remembers.
After studying acting at Carnegie Mellon University, the Pittsburgh native was reintroduced to puppetry during his own summer studying theater when he met Tom Lee and Matt Acheson, a pair of artists who create puppetry performances.
“It was a transformative moment for me in terms of seeing what was possible with puppetry and the poetic power of puppetry,” Lehane says.
He went on to work with Lee and Acheson to learn more about the craft and eventually began creating his own puppets, performing in puppetry shows and designing his own, including his award-winning “Chimpanzee.”
A scene from "Fly Away," co-created with Derek Fordjour and performed in New York City during the pandemic. Photo by Richard Termine.
Based on "Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees" by a primatologist Roger Fouts, the piece tells the true story of chimps raised in homes and taught American Sign Language but who were later banished to a life of isolation in biomedical facilities when they became too unwieldy to live in close contact with humans.
The hour-long story is told without words and traces the life of one such chimp. Lehane’s puppet is created in the Japanese Bunraku style, a tradition in which multiple actors manipulate the movements of each puppet. Through the course of “Chimpanzee,” the character expresses a range of emotions from joy to confusion and ultimately abandonment, inviting the audience to forget about the hands controlling the puppet as they become immersed in the story.
Lehane acknowledges that it’s difficult to explain the alchemy that happens during a performance as the audience suspends reality and no longer sees the puppet as an inanimate object but as something with an inner life of its own.
Observation becomes investment, and, Lehane hopes, empathy. That’s his ultimate goal.
“Creating art that beckons an audience to see the world ever so slightly differently, and ideally, from a place of greater empathy and curiosity is an exciting challenge for me,” says Lehane. “I think at its best, if we're lucky, puppetry can play a part in that.”
Register to attend Nick Lehane's lecture on Zoom.