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recreated with love and attention. Puppets “invite empathy in the audience,” Dan once said. “(They) give people a chance to see the beauty of the simple physical gestures they perform in their daily lives.” That recognition, that sense of connection, is part of why he believes puppetry can be so magical, so powerful, and so true. Like so many people who encounter him, Dan has transformed our lives in countless ways, and in this article we’d like to focus on a few of the shows we’ve worked on with him and some of the things we’ve learned and observed. We both met Dan in the early 1990s, when he was living a kind of double life. In New York City, he was an award-winning performance artist, writer, and director in Manhattan’s East Village. But he was also working as the artistic director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, New Hampshire, very close to where Dan grew up. Andy’s can probably best be described as a kind of utopian avant- garde children’s theater. His humane and artistically provocative influence there can still be felt to this day. Not many people could successfully keep one foot in rural New Hampshire and their other foot firmly entrenched in the downtown New York arts scene, which he was not only a part of but actually helped to shape. Early performance pieces by Holly Hughes, Mary Overlie, Ping Chong, Lisa Kron, Dan Froot, Victoria Marks, and many others benefited from collaborations with Dan. During the culture wars of the 1980s, when performance artists like Hughes were being demonized and called to testify before the U.S. Senate, Dan was bringing those very same artists to work directly with children at Andy’s in rural New Hampshire during the summers. This became one of the hallmarks of Dan’s tenure there: the seemingly incongruous interaction of radical performance artists and children. Many of these young people, transformed by their encounters with Dan’s provocative and thoughtful friends, themselves grew up to be artists, teachers, and free-thinkers,
Puppet by Dan Hurlin from Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed (2016). Photo: Kat Kuo, Courtesy of Josh Rice and the New York State Puppet Festival
moving all across the world, where they carry Dan’s genius forward to the next generations. Dan’s large-scale shows, like The Shoulder (1998), Everyday Uses For Sight Nos. 3 and 7 (2001, Bessie Award), Hiroshima Maiden (2004, UNIMA-USA Citation of Excellence), Disfarmer (2009), and Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed (2016), incorporate puppets, actors, dancers, music, and writing. They also all incorporate some form of object manipulation, as have all of his productions in one way or another, going back to his early pieces, like A Cool Million (1990, Obie Award), Constance and Ferdinand (1991), and Quintland (1992), where he played all five of the Dionne Quintuplets. But it wasn’t until his 1997 show The Day the Ketchup Turned Blue that Dan turned his attention to a completely self-contained toy theater. The piece is a tribute to Dan’s friend John C. Russell, who had died of AIDS three years earlier. Russell wrote the script when he was eight years old. Out of this little story about a mother, a father, and a child,
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Dan constructed a toy theater that looked as if the entire thing had been made from Wedgewood china, in pale blue and white, with an exquisitely detailed proscenium. Dan turned Russell’s characters into delicate teapots and cups, and he made the villain a red hammer that ruthlessly wants to smash everything. And without changing a single one of Russell’s original words, the piece became a meditation on fragility, and a life taken too early by the pandemic of the 1980s. There was even a kind of magic trick at the end, when a candle seemed to extinguish itself, plunging us into darkness and closing the piece. Throughout Dan’s extraordinary career, he has used inanimate objects to tell all kinds of complex and emotional stories. With these objects, he doesn’t so much anthropomorphize them as unlock their unique emotional and psychological properties. In the late 1990s, for instance, Dan read about Alvin Straight, an Iowa farmer who wanted to visit his sick brother but who was unable to drive a car and didn’t have the resources for public transportation. His solution was to drive his riding lawn mower the 300 miles from his house to his brother’s house, on the shoulder of the highway. In his work The Shoulder, Dan’s approach was to expand this story to an operatic scale. Dan’s visual inspiration drew from American regional painter Grant Wood, and he commissioned the brilliant composer and sound designer Dan Moses Schreier to set Dan’s lyrics to a score that evoked everything from Aaron Copeland to Igor Stravinsky to George Gershwin. The opera was sung by two performers representing the farmer as an old man and his younger self. The vocal sections were interspersed with scenes performed by Dan in which he sometimes played everyone in an entire town. To accomplish this, he used an array of found objects, including toys, such as trucks, trains, and Kewpie dolls, as well as items like rusted cans and bottle openers. The Shoulder was the first show Brian
had the pleasure of working on with Dan, and he remembers how much fun it was to paint a vast ground cloth in the style of Thomas Hart Benton. The show was created by bringing artists and students with different talents together during residencies in which Dan was simultaneously the leader, collaborator, and friend to everyone. Beginning with a clear vision of what he wants, he then asks everyone to join him in figuring out how to solve problems. Like a choreographer who entrusts his dancers to each bring something unique to the table, Dan enables everyone around him to develop a keen sense of ownership and pride in the finished work.
These residencies usually take place at Dan’s home. In his native New Hampshire, Dan owned a house with a disused airplane hangar in the backyard that he had transformed into a studio; later, in upstate New York, he moved into a deconsecrated church and built a workshop in the basement. Many of the artists brought in for these residencies continue to work with Dan. The
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