The Jungle Book Goodman Theatre

There are the parade lions at Chinese New Year celebrations, of course, and the wind-sock whales in outdoor productions of Moby Dick. Just recently, audiences had an opportunity to pet wood-and-fabric foxes in The Iron Stag King and gawk at an LED-studded dragon in She Kills Monsters. On a grander scale, Chicago has seen horses and even elephants recreated through ingenious puppetry.

Snakes are a special kind of marionette, however—especially huge hungry pythons looking to snack on little boys, such as we encounter in The Jungle Book, Mary Zimmerman's spectacular stage adaptation drawing on Rudyard Kipling's stories and the subsequent Disney film. Though serpents are vertebrates, their surface appearance is that of boneless creatures, devoid of muscle definition or recognizable facial expression. Their movement, too, must be executed, not in fragmented flex/extension units, but in full-body contractions.

Kaa, The Jungle Book's python, is just over 26 feet long and composed mainly of large-diameter dryer hose encased in a series of ethafoam rings, which taper at one end to a head carved from more ethafoam. His "skin" is fashioned from a gold-and-gray Harlequin-pattern fabric matching the suit worn by Thomas Derrah, who voices and partly operates Kaa.

In the second act, we see Kaa in segments protruding from a series of underground burrows, but when we first meet him, his motor skills rely on attached rods manipulated by Derrah and Timothy Wilson (who plays one of the wolves in the play's early scenes). In order to ascertain that Kaa's motion accurately replicates that of a single creature, Red Moon master puppeteer Blair Thomas was called in to coach his two operators in guiding Kaa's sinuous S-curves with the fluid synchronicity of ballroom dancers.

What makes Kaa more than simply an interesting visual effect is the anthropomorphic personality growing out of his natural behavior. Unlike Shere Khan, the tiger who lies in wait and then strikes at his prey, Kaa hypnotizes his victims into a peaceful trance (making for easy swallowing). The heavy use of onomatopoetic sibilants in the lyrics of his song, "Trust in Me" heightens the seductive quality of his treacherous lullaby. Asked how he arrived at his character for the wily reptile, Derrah replies, "It's always best to let the puppet speak [for itself], and then put your own focus into and through it."

The Jungle Book runs at the Goodman Theatre through August 18.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Contributing Writer