The Return of Basil Twist’s Underwater Puppet Show

In honor of its twentieth anniversary, “Symphonie Fantastique” is being revived for a twelve-week run.
Illustration by Ariel Davis
Illustration by Ariel Davis

Most people, when they think of puppets, are put in mind of the sock puppet that their third-grade teacher brought into class to tell them to brush their teeth. Much harder to learn is a marionette, such as Howdy Doody, which is operated, on strings, from high above the puppet’s head.

But until recently there was probably no such thing as an abstract puppet. “Or, if there was,” the forty-eight-year-old master puppeteer Basil Twist says, “there weren’t that many. That’s kind of why I did it.” One day, twenty years ago, Twist was walking down his block, and he saw a ten-gallon fish tank that someone had put out for the garbage collectors. It had a crack in it. “ ‘Hmm,’ I said, and I lugged it home, and I covered the crack with duct tape, and I filled the thing with water. I put a piece of silk on the end of a coat hanger, and I dragged it through the water. It looked fantastic.” Twist had just received his first grant, a thousand dollars, from the Jim Henson Foundation. So he went out and bought the biggest fish tank he could find, and started sticking other things into it. “Almost everything,” he says, “when you put it under water, is transformed and looks great. You put a black garbage bag under water, it looks great. Cotton balls, not so good. But feathers, great.”

He knew he needed music for the show that was now taking shape in his mind. He finally settled on Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” He named his show after Berlioz’s piece and premièred it in the basement theatre of the performance complex called HERE, on Dominick Street. Hitherto a storage facility, the space was spiffed up with the financial help of Twist’s grandmother and named after her. It is the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre.

On March 29, in honor of its twentieth anniversary, “Symphonie Fantastique” is being revived at HERE, for a twelve-week run. The show has just about everything: sparkles, like fairy dust; blue disks that bump into each other, like who the hell are you; skinny, hatted things that look like enoki mushrooms growing upside down. Twice I’m sure I saw an egg frying in a pan. There is also something whirling in a circle, like an enraged doughnut; then, marvellously, a black thing flying across a bronze-colored sun.

It is known that Berlioz included in his “Symphonie” a motif representing an Irish actress he was obsessed with, Harriet Smithson. Where, in the goings on in this tank, is Harriet? I don’t know. Twist will not do Harriet identifications. All he will say is that Harriet is always white. And again and again as the show progresses we see a tiny white thing, in the shape of Robin Hood’s hat, sailing serenely through. Is that you, Harriet?

After the performance, the five puppeteers will invite you backstage to tell you how it all works. Wear your galoshes. And reserve early. When the show premièred, the Wall Street Journal said it was New York’s hottest ticket outside “The Lion King.” This year’s incarnation may be hotter still. The tank has grown to a thousand gallons, and there will be live music: the excellent pianist Christopher O’Riley playing Liszt’s arrangement of “Symphonie Fantastique.” ♦