Message lost in the shadows
By JAMES D. WATTS JR., 03/13/2006
Zaloom waits for the start of his show. A. CUERVO / Tulsa World
Puppets in Paul Zaloom's Tulsa show have little punch
Maybe Paul Zaloom should put away the puppets more often.
Zaloom, best known as the fright-wigged star of the children's TV series "Beakman's World," has for much of his career been involved in performance art -- in particular, performances that combine biting social satire with puppets usually fashioned from found objects.
He presented his most recent work, a shadow-puppetry/stand-up comedy piece titled "The Mother of All Enemies," last week at the Nightingale Theater as part of Living Arts of Tulsa's 13th annual New Genre Festival.
The show is built around Zaloom's very personal, very profane re-imagining of the traditional Karagoz shadow puppetry show -- an ancient Arabic form of entertainment that features a mischievous character named Karagoz, who is a precursor to other make-believe miscreants such as England's Punch and Russia's Petroushka.
In front of Zaloom's light source, Karagoz is simply a gay fellow in Syria who wants to live with his boyfriend Henry. Naturally, this does not sit well with the rest of the world, and soon Karagoz is on the run, beset by various representatives of the law.
While in prison, Karagoz discovers a source of supernatural power in a place that is probably best not described in a family newspaper, which he uses to effect a number of escapes -- from prison, from an al-Qaida training camp, from the lecherous leader of a homosexual conversion group, from a gung-ho if addle-minded member of the Minutemen.
At the same time, Karagoz is inadvertently causing all sorts of disasters, from nearly blowing up the Statue of Liberty to knocking George Washington's head off of Mount Rushmore.
The physical aspects of the show are very good. Zaloom's shadow puppets, constructed by Lynn Jefferies, are inventively designed and surprisingly detailed. Zaloom manipulates them with aplomb and supplies a wealth of distinct voices for the characters.
A screen shot shows puppeteer-performance artist Paul Zaloom's shadow puppet in his show "The Mother of All Enemies" on Friday at the Nightingale Theater. A. CUERVO / Tulsa World
And Zaloom seems to relish those inevitable moments when things don't go according to plan. In one scene, one puppet has to give another a suitcase. "I wish God would somehow help me give this suitcase to you," one character said. And Zaloom's own hand reared up hugely onto the screen to hook the object on the other puppet's hand.
The problem is, when things in "The Mother of All Enemies" went right, it really wasn't all that funny.
One doesn't expect subtlety from a show titled "The Mother of All Enemies." After all, those first four words were a punchline from the moment they were uttered by Saddam Hussein back at the start of Desert Storm. Yet one expected from someone with Zaloom's reputation something more than crass and easy potshots at the most obvious of targets.
Zaloom is, I think, trying to make a point about the pervasiveness and absurdity of violence in our society -- how the eagerness to have someone or some group of people to hate warps the mind a little.
And that came through clearly in those times when Zaloom stepped from behind the illuminated screen of his puppet show for a little direct contact, like comparing the bumper stickers seen at a right-wing biker's convention with those that would be appropriate at the sort of secular humanist gathering Zaloom envisioned -- an "Agnostithon" or "WhoDaPalooza."
But Zaloom's best, most effective, and truly funniest work came as he described what happened when he received a letter from the U.S. Marines, encouraging him to join up with the few and the proud and use his "knowledge of Arabic languages" in the service of his country.
Never mind the fact that Zaloom doesn't speak Arabic, or that he's 54 years old, or that there's certainly going to be some problems when it comes to that "don't ask, don't tell" business.
At one point, Zaloom said, the Marines have in recent years discharged six translators specializing in Arab languages because these people were homosexual. In other words, he said, the Marines seem less concerned about sifting through mountains of intelligence files that could possibly save millions of American lives, and more concerned about "who I might be scoping out in the shower."
It was a moment both silly and sobering. And it showed the impact that Zaloom's brand of theater can have once he steps out of the shadows.