By Jerry Tallmer
It isn’t everybody who once built a life-sized Fred Astaire for ventriloquist and puppeteer Shari Lewis to dance with.
For that matter, it isn’t everybody who has a large, disagreeable Two-Headed Pig Beast lurking against one wall of his and his wife’s rambling Westbeth apartment.
Ralph Lee is the culprit in both cases. “I built that for ‘Back Bog Beast Bait,’ a Sam Shepard play in the early ’70s,” Lee says of the Pig Beast. “The head is made of Celastic, a glorified papier mach; the body is plastic foam and cloth and latex. I knew him, Shepard, when I was acting with [Joe Chaikin’s] Open Theater, and had designed Sam’s ‘Mad Pig Blues.’”
And the mobile Fred Astaire for Shari Lewis?
“A very tricky thing,” says Lee. “One of her arms went into the back of the puppet. She controlled it with a stick. There was a cord to operate the head, and a false arm, and her shoes were attached to the shoes of the puppet.”
Does he know where that Fred Astaire is today?
“Beats me,” says Lee, in the vernacular of the World War Ii of his early boyhood. Seven decades later he is almost Shakespearean to look at, hawk-nosed, eagle-eyed, the fine white head of hair (eyeglasses crowning it) a twin to the sharp-pointed fine white beard. For all the at-home hot-weather garb — sandals, blue shorts, darker blue sports shirt — one is indeed put in mind of, oh, Lear, but a Lear uncrushed by time or tragedy.
Once you have built a dancing Fred Astaire and a Two-Headed Pig Beast, the bringing into birth a Greenwich Village Halloween Parade — now in its 33rd year — is child’s play. Well, almost.
Sometime in what must have been 1972 or ’73, Ralph Lee — by then a puppet- and mask-maker of some reputation — was approached by actor George Bartenieff, who with wife Crystal Field had launched their Theater for the New City right here in Westbeth.
“Halloween was always my favorite holiday as a kid, and now,” says Lee, “I had three children of my own — Heather, Jennifer and Josh. Yes, in this very apartment. And I felt they didn’t have any very satisfactory way of celebrating Halloween.”
There already existed a Gay Parade in the Village — ever since Stonewall ’69. This would be something else. “But I had to put George’s idea on the back burner, because I was touring with the Open Theater.”
In the spring of 1974 there was an Outdoor Extravaganza at Bennington College, in Vermont, where Lee was doing a stint of teaching, not all that far from another college town, the Middlebury, Vermont, where — his mother a teacher of modern dance, his father the dean of men — he’d been born and raised.
“The Extravaganza took place all over the Bennington campus, with all sorts of larger-than-life puppets. I orchestrated the whole thing, and felt that they had a life of their own. That fall I decided I could devote some time to the same sort of thing here in New York.”
The first Village Halloween Parade took place in the fall of 1974.
“I created — let’s see — a half-dozen or more giant puppets I’d made for other situations. That was the backbone. Plus around a hundred masks. George and Crystal were the producing agents for this event. [Several years later the TNC and the Halloween Parade went their separate ways.] It started at 6 p.m. at Jane Street and went through the courtyard here at Westbeth and then cut diagonally through the West Village, ending up at Washington Square. The idea was a parade for families, kids, straights, gays, everybody.”
There were, he recalls, about 200 people in the parade itself, and many more looking on — a number that would balloon through the years, once television got into the act, to what Lee estimates to be 200,000 annual participants and/or onlookers.
In short order kids in schools would be making puppets of their own. “The School of Visual Arts came up with some amazing things. We began to get steel bands, Dixieland bands, samba bands, Chinese dancers. We had very good relations with the police. They said the crime rate in the Village went down during these events. The streets were liberated of vehicles, and the parade floats were pushed or pulled.”
Ralph Lee’s glistening blue eyes darken as he says: “It was my hope that, rather than everybody coming to the Village, they do their own in their own community. We didn’t need New Jersey or Long Island. But it didn’t happen. Finally the police began to get concerned. They decided to reroute the parade straight up Sixth Avenue. I directed the whole thing for 12 years, and then I quit.”
It got too big for you?
“It got too big for me.”
What is not too big for him, or not yet, is the Metawee River Theatre Company, a far-sighted upstate troupe that takes its inspiration from myths, legends and folklore, takes its name from a stream that wanders down through Vermont and New York State to the Hudson, its masks and giant puppets from the hands and imagination of Ralph Lee.
It was founded in 1975 by six Bennington College graduates, one of them the Casey Compton who had been one of Lee’s students and has ever since been his wife. “But no hanky-panky until she was out of college.” Ms. Compton is also the company’s costumer and managing director.
“I was busy on another project that first season” — i.e., Greenwich Village Halloween — “but was curious about this, and the next year they asked me to come on board as artistic director. And the Metawee idea shifted from doing theater in town halls and small venues indoors, mostly without air-conditioning, to doing it outdoors, in such sites as the Bishop’s Green,” a patch of grass adjacent to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street — “the one place in New York City you can be outdoors at night in relative safety. We now also do a five-and-a-half-week season at Lincoln Center.” For this year’s “Peace,” Aristophanes `a la Metawee, Lee has provided puppets of War, Greed, Abundance, a Soothsayer, a Giant Dung Beetle, and, well, Peace.
Where do you keep these things, Ralph, between productions?
“Aha. Major problem. They come apart. The lighter they are, the more breathable they are. Metawee’s been wonderful for me; kind of like a laboratory. It has enabled me and my wife to explore the many ways masks and puppets can be used, and the relationships of these things to the actors.
“Metawee has found a devoted audience upstate that comes out annually to see what the hell we’ve done next. The myths and legends we deal with seem to hold meaning nowadays, even though they’re thousands of years old.”
All this began, as far as Ralph Lee is concerned, not thousands of years but 72 years ago, when, in Middlebury, Vermont, he entered a world “where, from the age of 7, I wanted to be in theater. All my childhood I’d been making puppets and masks. My first Halloween masks were for a Halloween parade in our town.”
When you say “our town,” one thinks of Thornton Wilder.
“Well, it can very easily blur into that.”
What theater had you seen?
“Very little. Plays at college. Shows coming through. I can remember seeing [monologist and author] Cornelia Otis Skinner doing the wives of Henry VIII. From Middlebury High School I went on to Taft for two years and then to Amherst, where I got my BA in Fine Arts in 1957. Spent most of my time in the theater.
“When I first came to New York in 1959 I was determined to be an actor. Studied acting with Michael Howard, and was actually in a [1960] Broadway production of Camus’s Caligula directed by Sidney Lumet at the 54th Street Theater. Colleen Dewhurst was in it. Kenneth Haigh [who’d starred in Look Back in Anger] was Caligula. Didn’t last long. Those were the days when you did plays with more than two people.”
It was as an Indian of the Andes in The Royal Hunt of the Sun [1965] that Ralph got to know costume designer Ray Diffen, for whom he subsequently went to work during a Stratford, Connecticut, American Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest that starred Morris Carnovsky as Prospero. “I ended up making masks for all the inhabitants of the lost isle.”
So here we are in the mid-’60s and Ralph Lee has connected with Joe Chaikin and Sam Shepard and the Open Theater, as participant in such famous productions as The Serpent and Terminal and Cowboy Mouth and Mad Pig Blues, not to be confused with Two-Headed Pig Beast.
“For that show I made Babe the Blue Ox, from the Paul Bunyan stories, and ended up acting in it too, as Jessie James, opposite Sam’s wife O-Lan as Mae West.”
Patron saint of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, you might say. Then again, you might not.
The Village Parade will start going up Sixth Ave from Spring St. at 7 p.m., Oct. 31.
