You must MEET FRED, at the Boston Center Brookline
(celebrating its 45th year) is instrumental in bringing FRED all the
way from Wales to Boston
Two Welsh companies conceived MEET FRED, their hilarious and
deeply touching theater piece about a puppet and his existential existence. The
puppeteers from Blind Summit joined up with the Hijinx organization, which
creates extraordinary work performed by actors with and without learning
disabilities… and the result of their merger is remarkable.
Fred resembles those small, featureless, wooden models with
hinged appendages, used to practice drawing the human figure. No face, just an
oval head perched on a moveable torso. But FRED is definitely not made of wood.
He’s soft cloth, animated by three puppeteers in black who recede, like the
puppeteers in WAR HORSE did. We experience Fred’s enormous struggle to stand up
(literally and figuratively) in a world not particularly interested in him. He’s
got heart and gumption and he’s determined to make his mark. (Dan McGowan,
Morgan Thomas and Sam Harding work every joint and sinew the little guy has,
with McGowan supplying Fred’s charming, squeaky and sometimes defiant voice.)
Lucky for us, Fred’s adventures take him into Monty Python
territory: He meets a hostile job councilor in Richard Newnham, a bewildered
human date in Lindsay Foster and a fifty mile per hour hurricane, conjured up
by director Ben Pettit-Wade and stage manager Gareth John.
If you have seen Boston
