Interview: Brian Henson of PUPPET UP!- UNCENSORED at Kirk Douglas Theatre
"This is a show about laughing at how we interact."
Back in the 2000s, Brian Henson, who was tasked with training puppeteers for the Jim Henson Company’s many film and television projects explained to his then girlfriend his primary complaint. “We would train about 20 puppeteers at a time hoping to find 2 who could ad lib. But if they couldn’t ad lib, my father didn’t want to give them a speaking role,” Henson explains. When his girlfriend heard this issue, the answer seemed obvious to her: the puppeteers needed to undertake training in improv comedy. After all, she reasoned, there was already a whole art form that was training performers to ad lib and think on their feet. So Henson attended a Groundlings show and, with the expertise of many others, collaborated to devise an improvised puppet show for friends and family.
When that small showcase became a success with invitations to perform at the Aspen Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Puppet Up! was born. All these years later, Henson’s girlfriend has become his wife and the show continues to be an audience favorite in Los Angeles. “Over the years, the show has kept the same title but it’s been evolving and evolving all the time. It really clicked in as a really good live show. At this point, it’s about 60% improvised with reenactments of scenes my dad and mom created in their twenties.”
Though Henson acknowledges Puppet Up! is a hard show to describe to those who have never experienced it, he thinks audiences embrace the bizarre nature of the piece. “The audience responds to the fact they can’t understand what the show is— that it’s a hard show to describe. The word of mouth response is usually ‘I can’t describe it, but I think you’ll like it.’ It’s highly original, highly unusual, with a reputation of being very funny. What more could you ask from a live performance?”
Henson promises the upcoming run at the Kirk Douglas Theatre will showcase “new material and a tighter theatrical experience than it ever has been.” He is excited to be offering a VIP package which includes interacting with some of the puppeteers and meeting characters from Henson Company classics including Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. “With a puppet,” Henson muses, “ we are given license from the audience— with an actor, an audience makes assumptions based on race, skin color, build— but with a puppet that’s all out the door. There are no preconceptions of characters so we can have fun with how we interact with each other as human beings. This is a show about laughing at how we interact.”
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