What do you get when you combine your favorite Chuck Norris action film, a passionate, sizzling love story, and puppets? A Cambodian puppet show, that’s what. I have seen your amateur, “hand up the puppet’s bottom” kid shows and they all pale in comparison to this artistic gem of a puppet show presented at the Wang Center on October 10th.

To think that as a little kid I looked forward to these pathetic displays of puppeteering as my 3^rd grade teacher tried to reenact “The Three Little Pigs” with her hand up a wolf puppet’s butt. After watching this show, I felt disgraced to have ever enjoyed such tacky entertainment as a young child. I left the show with a new-found adoration for the people involved in creating the magical, puppet environment. Sure, it may not have been “Lord of the Rings,” but it was definitely up there on my list.

The story is about a soldier who must leave his home to go off to war. He must leave his wife and his beloved dog to watch the house. Later on in the story, an old woman, who is displaced by the war comes to the village and is offered shelter by the soldier’s wife.

Much time passes by and the soldier has yet to return home to his wife. Her loneliness compels her to start relations with another man and eventually they are discovered together by the old woman. To avoid public embarrassment, the soldier’s wife and her new found boo plot an attempt to burn the house down with the old woman in it. They plan works and they flee to another village.

Much later, the soldier is walking down the street of a village and sees his wife cleaning clothes. The soldier’s wife pretends not to know who he is and they go before a judge to settle their case. The wife tells the judge that she has never seen the man before, while the soldier insists that they lived together in a house with their dog.

All of a sudden the dog appears and goes straight for the woman and then to the soldier. In recognizing them, the dog proves that they were once family. The case is about to be dismissed when the ghost of the old woman appears and testifies that she was murdered by the wife. The wife must go to jail and the soldier and his dog return to war.

It may not be a happy ending, but happy endings are for immature, naïve children. This story went straight for the meat and potatoes of the human condition. Much of what is portrayed in the story is not spoken with words, but rather with music and interpretive dance. There are many symbols that are used throughout the play to provoke imagery and cause the audience to interpret what is going on.

Vermont's Sandglass Theatre's puppets combined with Sovanna Phum's Cambodian dance and traditional shadow puppets, under the direction of Mann Kosal and Eric Bass, did a wonderful job of illustrating a story of Cambodian culture. Who thought puppets could be so interesting?

Sovanna Phum: http://www.sovannaphum.com/