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“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
What makes us real? Or, better perhaps, what makes us feel real? These questions (are they the same?) surfaced incongruously as I watched the performance of a pure fantasy. It was a gossamer dramatic production by the Enchantment Theatre of Philadelphia.1 Replete with allusions to Commedia dell'arte, Bunraku puppetry, ancient Greek masks of tragedy and comedy, Isadora Duncan-type modern dance, and mime, this production was based on a 1922 children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams. The story, with its uncanny admixture of the tender and the bizarre, had dismayed me in the past, and I recalled having avoided it when selecting books to read aloud to my children at bedtime, a memory that each of them has subsequently confirmed.
Pondering this in the darkened theater on Rutgers University's Camden campus, I became slowly conscious of a marvel that was occurring: namely, that exposure to a new work of art founded on a former work was awakening in me an unanticipated fascination with the previous work and enticing me to reconsider what I had hitherto laid aside and shunned.
As the performance swirled me away from the here-and-now into resplendent realms adorned with cascading rainbow-colored fabrics and inhabited by masked dancers, larger than life-sized puppets, and miming characters who neither spoke nor sang but were accompanied by a narrative musical tape, a cluster of questions about what it means to be “real” exploded in my head like kernels of popping corn.
Pinocchio, carved affectionately as a marionette from a talking pine log given with great relief to a craftsman named