Strange and beautiful, this puppet show I saw tonight named Fabrik. Although there are moments of levity, the holocaust is obviously a serious subject for cloth characters. But this troupe of puppeteers, clad in black fedoras and black tailored suits as camouflage on the black-painted set as they operated the small cast, did a fine job conjuring characters that aren’t quite typical puppet-show caricatures. In the years before the German invasion of 1940, Moritz Rabinowitz founds, operates and expands a burgeoning suit-making business in Norway. The story structures itself around his numbered rules for success in business (and parts of his various screeds on European politics and the rights of man), which he relates to the audience, intertwined with the realization that as a Polish Jew in Norway, the world is pressing in on him, his wife Johanna and their daughter Edith. There are few Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers, a poignant scene of Rabinowitz’s daughter practicing ballet and surreal dreams of flight that transition the years and scenes. The effects were minimal but creative. For instance, in one scene, a pair of the puppets realistically “swim underwater” merely by means of motions from the puppeteers and undulating colored lighting. Hard to explain, amazing to watch and like many novellas or short stories I’ve read, the enterprise ends just as I’m getting invested in the story, which in Fabrik’s case is based on a true one.
Fabrik