Puppeteers of America president pulls strings in major Broadway productions

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Paul Mesner romps around his studio in shorts and tennis shoes, pointing out the special mouth hinges and weighted eye balls that go into making the perfect puppet.\nHis specialty is traditional rod puppets, but he also works with hand puppets and marionettes.\nMesner is founder of Paul Mesner Puppets and the new president of Puppeteers of America, an organization that promotes puppetry in the United States, Mexico and Canada. He is taking the helm of the organization with 2,000 or so members at a time when puppets rule.\nIt's not just Bert and Ernie or Miss Piggy and Kermit anymore. Puppets have become major players on Broadway, starring in such productions as "Avenue Q," "The Lion King" and "Little Shop of Horrors," and they are featured in such movies as "Team America: World Police."\nCollege students also have taken note of puppets. The University of Hawaii and West Virginia University offer courses in puppetry, and students at the University of Connecticut-Storrs can get bachelor's and master's degrees in puppet theater.\n"The whole puppetry thing is incredibly vital right now," Mesner says. "And I can think of four or five universities that are turning out five to six graduate students a year and 10 to 20 undergraduates a year. Then there's Disney, which is training about 500 people to be puppeteers at their theme parks."\nJohn Bell, who teaches a puppetry workshop at Emerson College in Boston and has been a POA member since the 1980s, said Mesner would be good at bridging the gap between the older puppeteers and the younger ones.\n"He's part of that generation that came up after Jim Henson and among the people who saw the possibilities with puppets and were part of this real flourishing of puppet theaters, in combination with the avant-garde and the political art and with the new possibilities of television and film," Bell said.\nBell, who also runs Great Small Works, a puppet theater in New York, said it's an important time for puppetry because people no longer associate it only with children's theater.\n"Now when people find out you work with puppets, they don't say, 'Do you know the Muppets?' They say, 'Oh, there's some avant-garde puppet show in a water tank in New York.' It's just part of the consciousness of people now."\nAlthough puppetry has been on the move lately, it has been a constant in Mesner's life. Now 48, he made his first puppet as a child by adding strings to the back of his teddy bear. He went on to apprentice with a puppeteer in Nebraska during junior high and high school. And he learned early that puppetry would not be an easy career choice.\n"You have to be tenacious to make it in theater," Mesner says. "You get no respect and no glory in puppetry ... But what matters the most is when kids come up and tell me they loved my show."\nMesner produces puppet shows throughout the United States. His past productions include a two-hour opera collaboration of "The Mikado," "Strega Nona" and "Cinderella" in which the heroine heads off to the ball on a Vespa. Shows are often sold out, but some of his more ambitious productions, such as last spring's opera collaboration of "The Mikado," didn't draw as many people as Mesner had hoped.\n"We generally count on 2,000 people seeing a show. But every time I'm setting the bar a little higher," Mesner said. "We got 4,000 to 'The Mikado,' but we wanted 5,000"