The 12th La MaMa Puppet Festival closes with a world premiere. En Mer Avec Louise Bourgeois, a tabletop object-theater piece about the French-American sculptor, gets four performances in La MaMa’s Community Arts Space, December 3–6.
Two performers, one table, an hour. Sisters Michelle Beshaw and Deborah Beshaw-Farrell play the 60-minute piece, which Beshaw conceived, wrote and directed. Both have spent years with the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre.
The title translates as At Sea With Louise Bourgeois. Bourgeois (1911–2010) spent eight decades turning her childhood into art: her parents, her mother’s death, her father’s infidelity. She is best known for her giant spiders, made in honor of a mother who restored tapestries for a living.
The show does not tell her life in order. On a small tabletop stage, found objects (toys, relics, things from around the house) get picked up, moved and given new jobs until they stand in for people and places from the artist’s past. Small things pile up and start to carry weight.
It opens on a woman trying to get out of family life. Bourgeois called herself the Runaway Girl, and her early work keeps coming back to figures crossing water, sometimes with a house on their heads. The two performers split that image between them: Beshaw-Farrell wears a ship on her head, Beshaw a house.
Beshaw also designed the puppets. Lighting is by Federico Restrepo, the festival’s producing director and artistic director of Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre. La MaMa E.T.C. presents the production in association with GOH Productions.
This is not the piece’s first outing. It began as a found-object work with a developmental showing at the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Beshaw’s earlier pieces include The Napier Project, made as a resident artist in the Mabou Mines Suite, and Wave: An Incantation at La MaMa’s 2019 Puppet Slam, where Beshaw-Farrell was in the ensemble. Beshaw has won two Innovative Theatre Awards for costume design.
The festival started in 2004 and runs across La MaMa’s spaces. This edition is built around the theme of oneness, and this show is its final production.
Performances are Thursday, December 3 and Friday, December 4 at 7pm, and Saturday, December 5 and Sunday, December 6 at 2pm, at 74A East Fourth Street. Tickets are $30 general admission, $25 for seniors and students and $10 for La MaMa members. The first ten tickets for every performance are $10, two per person, bought in advance. Festival packages cost $50 for two shows, $75 for three and $120 for five. The box office is on 212-352-3101.
