by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | photos by Matt Masin
The Sower took the worst of it.
The iconic farmer was the most famous casualty of King Kong’s Lincoln-transplanted rampage. Turns out that giant gorillas scaling the Nebraska Capitol Building don’t have much respect for the symbolism of a statue seeding the culture of the state. The Sower was tossed aside like the cardboard he was made of during Saturday’s final performance of King Kong: The Puppet Show.
After nearly a dozen shows in the last year, writer/director/actor Ladd Wendelin delivered the final public staging of his puppet-based reimagining of the King Kong story at Party in the Parks on Saturday.
Working behind a cardboard set piece probably 8 feet wide by 4 feet high, the trio of puppeteers and actors Wendelin, Spencer Wolfe and Michael Booton breathed life into Kong, his captors and (in this version) his Nebraska victims. Portability has been a must for the puppeteers and that went for Saturday’s Party in the Parks, too, in the back corner of the Jayne Snyder Trails Center. It was a tight squeeze with environmental distractions, but that’s par for the course for the trio that’s performed the show at Zoo Bar, The Grove and Lincoln East High School in the last year. Plus, they could’ve turned the Trails Center sink on to simulate the crashing waves surrounding Skull Island’s sheer rock cliffs, if needed.
After 30 minutes of menacing Skull Island music and waiting for Nebraska Girls’ Shakespeare Company to finish their performance, the towering gates meant to keep the beast at bay opened to reveal a plain, but important cue card. It read simply “1933.”
Like the first and most iconic Kong movie, the puppet show opens with Carl Denham, a failed filmmaker who only produces Animal Planet-meets-The Gremlins movies, such as When Marmosets Attack and How To Train Your Leach. But Denham has bigger aspirations than his B-movies and a secret map to an exotic shooting locale. To sell a crew on the picture and charter his transport to Skull Island, Denham enlists the help of the beautiful but unemployed Ann Darrow.
It was an appealing stylistic decision for the show to stick by the comedic kitsch of the 1933 version — surpassing the updated but awkward travesty of the 1976 film and foregoing the long-winded seriousness of Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. With a stagetime of just more than 30 minutes, the play kickstarts itself by poking fun at the motor-mouthing of conceited actors in Hollywood’s early years, smart-mouthed Irish beat cops and overzealous, fedora-wearing reporters.
In terms of target audience, the show was a good-natured and sometimes irreconcilable combination of humor for the 40 children and adults at Party in the Parks.
It spoofed some of the orientalism of the original story with Airplane!-style naughtiness when a crew member is fortunate enough to “speak fluent gibberish” to communicate with the island dwellers.
The biggest laugh came in the form of uproarious guffaws from the kids when the lost ship crew did their best Scooby Doo-esque montage of running back and forth in and out of the frame while being chased by Skull Island monsters. All set to carnival music. Likewise, a Barney the Dinosaur cameo was a huge hit. Though admittedly, the laughing children weren’t quite sure how to respond when the stuffed toy was beheaded by Kong and the red ribbons trailing off its neck to represent blood landed in their palms.
For the adults (adults who are 70 or older or film buffs), a fast-talking, Depression-era radio broadcaster took shots at drunk Clark Gable, Bette Davis and John Barrymore on the opening night of Denham’s Kong exhibition.
I don’t know at what point children, as their brains develop, learn to suspend their disbelief, but when the play reached its climax with a parasol of swirling airplanes torturing the trapped Kong, the children scampered up to the edge of the cardboard, unable to lose themselves in the pure fantasy.
But their earnest cowering when Wendelin rose from behind the Skull Island gates in full Kong regalia, did prove one of the production’s central meta-narrative themes. In the opening moments of King Kong: The Puppet Show, Carl Denham declares that he wants to make a movie about something fantastical, that he wants to transport audiences to a place of wonder. Our 80-year pop cultural fascination with a massive gorilla fighting dinosaurs and knocking over our buildings (in our town and in others) has always been about escapism.
On its visual merits, though, you wouldn’t evaluate a puppet show as a movie, you’d try evaluate it as a puppet show. Playing to its own strengths, Wendelin adapted the story in ways that are above all, medium specific. Unlike your average child’s story hour, the puppets weren’t one-trick bobbing fixtures appearing with the same shapes and expressions in every scene. There were crucial changes in perspective: moments when a directorial Denham puppet would face the other actors, with his back to the audience looking at his “actors.” This showed not only attention to detail but also careful thought about how the show would appear from an audience perspective. The production played with switches in backgrounding and foregrounding as Kong took a smaller version of the kidnapped Ann Darrow to his far-off cave while her pursuers looked up in horror from small box of the mainstage.
When he spoke at Ignite Lincoln last month, Wendelin described Kong as “a love letter to the Lincoln community by destroying the Lincoln community.” It’s a love letter that saw through a small but successful Kickstarter campaign last year for art supplies and bits and pieces of an impressively versatile Kong costume and a mask capable of showing both anger and remorse.
As for why Kong’s demise on Saturday would be his final plummet from the top of the Capitol Building, Wendelin — a regular actor with TADA Productions and the Lincoln Community Playhouse — says it’s simply time to move on, let the sleeping gorilla lie, as it were.
And once the home city was decimated for the final time, its real-life children helped him pick up the pieces of the crushed buildings.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. This is still the best homage to King Kong in his opinion. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.