Planet Egg

Courtesy of Capital Fringe Festival

Mixing puppetry and produce
By Stephanie Merry
Saturday, July 21, 2012

Entering the Warehouse’s black box theater for “Planet Egg” feels like venturing into a mad scientist’s laboratory. On either side of a large projector, audience members are met with two tables scattered with debris -- cans and tubes and bowls of unidentifiable yellow liquid. These items are the fuel that powers this inventive, nutty and wonder-inspiring production.

Puppet Cinema is the New York-based group behind the genre-defying spectacle, and three of its members remain onstage during the course of the show: puppeteers Zvi Sahar and Justin Perkins and sound designer Ien DeNio. As the lights go down, the trio gets to work, creating miniature scenes on a rotating set, which are projected onto the screen above. The story kicks off with a crash landing, when a robot finds itself stranded on Planet Egg, which is populated by veggie-beings. Searching for food, the robot has chance encounters with a somewhat lethargic green onion and little mushrooms that hop around squeaking the show’s lone intelligible word (“Shroom!”).

What unfolds is a story that, amazingly, promises ad­ven­ture, suspense, even a dose of romance. All this is set to DeNio’s marvelous low-tech sound work, which replicates the noises of a flying saucer, the non-start of a faulty engine and gloopy sloshing when one character tries to free itself from a puddle of egg yolk.

As movie budgets get ever more bloated and 3-D and IMAX films become increasingly widespread, it’s heartening to see what can be accomplished without all the bells and whistles. It turns out, all you really need is a little bit of produce and a lot of imagination.