Long Island Puppetry Festival Comes to Sag Harbor, Southampton

Puppets Take Long Island, a eight-week-long joint festival between the Long Island Children’s Museum and Sag Harbor’s Goat on a Boat Puppet Theater, begins this Thursday with the first performance of “That Squirrel Stole My Underpants” with puppeteer Bonnie Duncan.

The festival, sponsored in large part by a grant from New York State, is in its first season, but Jim Packard, the theater manager for the Long Island Children’s Museum, is hopeful that it will continue on for years to come. “The goal is to provide entertainment for the families of Long Island and provide work and an audience for Long Island puppeteers,” Packard said, “Puppetry can present almost any topic in a fun and creative way. It provides a uniquely centralized experience for the entertainment.” More than 13 different puppetry companies from the United States and overseas have come together to work in locations throughout the Hamptons and the rest of Long Island.

Puppeteers in Packard’s experience tend to be multidisciplinary artists — writing their own scripts and music and crafting their puppets from scratch or otherwise modifying found objects. “More than almost any other type of performer, puppeteers create their own worlds so carefully that they really know how it has to be,” Packard said, citing the use of different types of puppets — hand, marionette and shadow — to tell different types of stories. “Puppetry is really one person's vision brought to life with others' help,” he said.

At Goat on a Boat Theater, located at 4 Hampton Street, Bonnie Duncan’s “That Squirrel Stole My Underpants” will run from Thursday to Saturday.

From July 18 to July 20, the Puppets in Prague Company will present their rendition of "Snow White," utilizing marionettes created by Czech puppet master Mirek Trejtnar.

July 25 to July 27, “A La Carte in a Fool’s Kitchen,” depicting the battle between a clown chef and a lobster condemned to dinner, will be performed. The final show, “The Reluctant Dragon,” based loosely upon the Kenneth Grahame children’s story, will run from Aug. 1 to Aug. 3. All puppet shows will be held at 11 a.m. with special overflow encore performances at 12:30 p.m. following the first Saturday perfomances.

Additionally, the puppet shows will also appear in Amagansett Square at 5:30 p.m. on Fridays, with “That Squirrel Stole My Underpants” on July 12, "Snow White" on July 19, “A La Carte in a Fool’s Kitchen” on July 26, and "The Reluctant" Dragon on Aug. 2.

Southampton will have its own puppet performances at the Southampton Center, 25 Jobs Lane, at 5 p.m. on July 21, with “The Case of the Missing Kitten” by the Wonderspark Puppets, and July 28, with “The Al E. Gator Show” by the Puppet Company.

For more information visit the festivals website at www.puppetstakelongisland.com.