This would be a special project in celebration of both the 25th anniversary of Marquette's Helfaer Theatre and the jubilee year of the Roman Catholic church. Marquette alumnus Father George Drance, a Jesuit priest and New York actor and director, had been invited to return to his alma mater to direct a production of his choice. He told Ravel he was working with his friend and colleague, Alfredo Galvan, on a translation of the liturgical allegory (formally known as an auto sacramental) La Vida es Sueño, or Life is a Dream, by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca.  Never before translated into English, Life is a Dream (written forty-one years after Calderón's more commonly known comedia of the same title) presented Father Drance with the opportunity to stage the work as a rich, visual tapestry. He writes in his program notes: "…the chance to work with material of this scope is itself something of a dream. Theatrically speaking, the auto [sacramental] presents possibilities for stunning spectacle. The characters and images of the play are both out of the lavish playfulness of the Baroque stage. Calderón's notes describe ornate spheres, mythical beasts, processions, dance and song.” The text, he continues, “leaves room for a variety of acting styles, from the vaudevillian rivalry between Understanding and Free Will to the rascally antics of Shadow to the heightened language of the divines." Father Drance told Ravel that he wanted to bring this to the stage with actors, puppets, and original music composed by Elizabeth Swados, the Obie-Award-winning creator of Nightclub Cantata, Runaways, and The Trilogy. Life is a Dream, written during Spain's golden age of literature, is a one-act musical play that deals with the creation of the universe and Man's struggle between good and evil. The main characters of the play, performed by actors, are Man, the Four Elements, Shadow, and a Pilgrim. In this production, the Prince of Darkness appears   on the shoulder of Shadow as a small, humorous, rod-puppet devil, manipulated by an actor dressed and hooded in black. Much of the interaction between the two as they plot the fall of Man is like the comic banter between alter egos. The heavenly court is represented by three ten-foot-tall backpack puppets, named Power, Wisdom, and Love. Father Drance's concept was for these to look like traditional religious icons; how I designed and fabricated them was up to me. Also, appearing intermittently throughout the play would be a chorus of birds, fishes, and beasts, manipulated by actors dressed in black garments and hoods. (As in Bunraku puppetry, these actors appeared on stage and worked the puppets from behind. Their position and black costumes made their presence discrete.) The set was to be minimal, so I focused on the creatures as a visually significant way to fill both high and low spaces with compelling shapes, textures, and movements. I figured I would need to make fifty puppets, some of them multiples of the same image, such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. The task seemed enormous, mostly because I wanted the puppets to have integrity as works of sculpture beyond their function in the drama. I wanted them to be elegantly textural. When I first mentioned to Father Drance that I was thinking of creating most of the puppets from handmade paper, he seemed puzzled and anxious; he was unfamiliar with pulp as a material for casting. But I showed him the angelfish puppets I had finished by then and he was pleased. He told me he realized that paper was the right medium because it is what I already knew.  From an engineering standpoint, I needed tough, durable skins for lightweight puppets, so I used a pulp mixture of cotton rag and abaca to cover armatures I had carved from pink insulation foam. I was able to fabricate hinged mechanisms for the birds' flapping wings and moveable mouths for the angelfish, confident that they could withstand six weeks of daily manipulation by the puppeteers. I individually made all of the feathers for the parrot, big red bird, and egret, pouring pulp directly onto large window screens and embedding string in each, as a quill. During the course of rehearsals and performances, feathers would become curled and sometimes bent, but could be easily straightened. A little wear actually added an appealing softness to the birds' silhouettes. Ultimately, I used pulp to create all of the bird and fish puppets, the small Prince of Darkness, a human-sized pair of skeleton arms, two large animal masks (a rhino and a lion), and the over-sized and elongated hands of Power, Wisdom, and Love. Although I pigmented wet pulp in the base colors for each puppet, I enhanced their dry surfaces with translucent glazes mixed with iridescent and metallic acrylic paints. My goal was to effect a certain lavishness intended to visually suggest the spirit of the Baroque without obliterating an overall folk art quality, for these plays were originally performed in the   streets as well as in churches. It was never Father Drance's intention to create a literal period piece; he wanted to make the production relevant to today's world by interjecting elements that seemed compatible with Calderón's format. Thus, he included such things as flamenco dance steps; the wise-cracking interaction between Free Will and Understanding; hand bells and synthesizers, congas and timpani. Framing all of this was Swados's music, which also seemed to span the centuries and contained strong driving rhythms and a good deal of percussion. During rehearsal of one of her songs she asked the chorus members to pretend they were Rastafarians. I used all of these cues to guide me in designing the puppets. When I first watched actors rehearsing inside the icon puppets, I realized how important the large hands were. They were attached to sticks inside the kimono-like robes, and the handlers walked and gestured grandly and talked in otherworldly pre-recorded and amplified voices. The overall effect of their presence on stage, their sheer scale, was overwhelming. After a successful ten-performance run at Marquette's Helfaer Theatre in February, Father Drance was invited to bring Life is a Dream to New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine for three performances in June, 2000. "Had I known this was going to happen," remarked Ravel, "we would have designed the show differently." I think she meant it would have been streamlined. Undaunted, we crated and shipped all fifty puppets, several large esoteric musical instruments, and cartons of costumes and props. We bused forty-six participants, most of them students, to New York City for an eight-day stay. As I watched the production in rehearsal in the largest gothic cathedral in the world, I realized that this was where it had belonged from the beginning. Visually, acoustically, dramatically, it was being performed in the type of space for which it was written. There was no comparison with the Helfaer version. The Marquette drama majors were thrilled to be able to perform in a space like those used for medieval mystery plays, which played such an important role in the development of Western theater. As a paper artist turned puppetmaker, I loved every minute of the creative process.