The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 47

BOOKS THE SUNDAY SUN BALTIMORE. MP. SKPTKMHKU M7 ART PUZZLE STEES SECTION RADIO Puppet odyssey in masks SPECTATOR MmlMXMMMMMMMiMMiMSMMiMM. By CERRI KOBREN The odyssey of Julie Taymor intersected the adventures of Odysseus at Center Stage a few weeks ago and the result is a whimsical, magical, mystical puppet and people and property show designed to stretch and tickle the imaginations of Maryland schoolchildren. Hired early in September to design sets, costumes, face masks and puppets for the local drama company's touring Young People's Theater, Ms.

Taymor had just three weeks to develop figures and features that can be put on, climbed into or held aloft so that 6 actors can present 30 different characters, the personae in the epic poem, "The Odyssey." Using a script by Jackson Phippen, associate artistic director of Center Stage, with the collaboration of Lenore Blank, co-director of Young People's Theater, and some improvised contributions from the performers and suggestions from Ms. Taymor too, the troupe makes its first appearance tomorrow in Western Maryland. Performances in Baltimore city and county are tentatively scheduled for later in the year. The play itself will be presented for students In grades four through six; younger children will get to work in imaginative, improvisational sessions with the actors. For Ms.

Taymor, the limited time meant 12-hour days in the company's third-floor workshops, with the actors as well as Center Stage prop crew pressed into service. But it was a different kind of pressure than she had lived with before and, in a way, she said, it was a relief "not to be challenged all the time, not to be solely responsible for a project, not to have a lot of conflict and confrontation." At 26, Julie Taymor has traveled more widely, tasted and tested more exotically, accomplished more educationally and professionally than most people would dare dream in a lifetime. Conflict, confrontation, challenge, responsibility: she had chosen to live and work in Indonesia, to direct her own multi-cultural theater company on Bali, to maneuver amid the red tape of several bureaucracies, to stay in spite of hepatitis and malaria and devastating accident. She is a woman of medium height, dark-haired, with marvelously expressive mouth and eyes. Grayish patches on her legs are permanent reminders of Indonesian disasters; she points to an all-but-invisible scar along her lower lip and chin, the result of a bus crash.

The youngest in her family, she figures her parents had learned to stop worrying by the time she came along; she has always gone her own way. At 14 she took off for India and Sri Lanka, on an "Experiment in International Living" program. Finishing high school in Boston at 16, powered by years of after-hours work in children's theater in that city, she left for Paris, seeking the physical discipline of mime, then came back to Vermont to work with Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater (which appeared at UMBC last week). In 1974, she graduated from Oberlin College, in Ohio, a Phi Beta Kappa major in folklore and mythology, with numerous extracurricular credits in drama, and won a traveling fellowship "to see, study and work in experimental puppet theater in Asia." There are, of course, puppet theaters elsewhere: in Europe the form is also popular. She chose the Far East in her grant application, however, "because Japan and Indonesia have the most sophisticated puppet theater in the world.

It is not for children. In fact, there is no children's theater at all. All theater there is designed multi-functionally, it is musical, visual, dramatic. Children don't have to understand all the philosophic implications to be entertained, to enjoy and follow the story." Around her are spread the production's masks, built to conform to plaster casts of the actors' faces, so that eyes, airways, mouths would be in proper position. Some masks come only to the upper lip; others, when prominence of jaw is important to the character, are made in two parts, an upper, held on by a band around the head, and a lower, held on by loops about the ears.

Some have wide openings at the eyes, allowing actors to direct their gaze and bat their lashes, and some have mere slits through which the performers can see where they're going, while painted-on eyes maintain a predetermined stare. Other characters are represented by puppets, tiny heads that fit upon a finger and gigantic figures, molded in the round or in relief, that have to be manipulated from behind. Circe's costume, a voluptuous frontal design, hangs from the neck of a masked actress who can only move sideways and must jiggle the hips by hand; this, by Julie Taymor's definition, is a puppet. The huge mournful head of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, is also a puppet; an actress, using long sticks, will have to move the great molded arms in stylized motions of weaving. "Some people will find in 'The Odyssey' Continued on Page 15 lilt Audrey Taylor wears this mask as the Old Nurse, who will talk with Telemachus, their dialogue bridging the action.

Her mouth is the puppet's mouth, but she sees out slits, darker lines under the eyes. Julie Taymor, top, has designed these heads for puppets of Penelope and Athena, in her arm, to dramatize "The Odyssey," a multi-character play for children using live actors, like the half-masked Judith Daniel, left above, as Telemachus; Harriet Lynn as Penelope and the two-part masked Peter Alexander as Odysseus. The play will use finger puppets and marionettes as well. Tales of Incredible Shrinking Comicsy Captain and the Kids" for his new employer. The look-alike features went through syndication, side by side, through the next several generations.

Carried on by Dirks's son John, "The Captain and the Kids" had lately been doddering along in a dwindling handful of newspapers, a great brontosaurus lumbering toward the tar pits and editors at United Features Syndicate finally elected to fold it. Over at King Features Syndicate, "The Katzenjammer Kids," the world's oldest comic strip, wheezes on. The circulation wars are thus formally concluded. Mr. Hearst won.

"Doonesbury's" Garry Trudeau has lately become the first cartoonist officially to resist the newspapers' widespread modern practice of reducing their daily and Sunday strips to barely readable sizes. Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes "Doonesbury," has announced a new contract stipulation that flatly prohibits client papers from reducing the strip beyond a specified point. Such a demand is unheard oHn the comic strip busi- iu At One day this past spring it came to pass that there was only one Hans and one Fritz left in the funny papers. Hitherto there had always been two of each, a mildly curious phenomenon dating back to the brawling circulation wars waged by two turn-of-the-century New York press-lords. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst are also said to have started the Spanish-American War, but there was only one of those.

Back when brightly colored comics sold newspapers, one Rudolph Dirks created "The Katzenjammer Kids" for Hearst's Morning Journal, got lured away a few years later by Pulitzer's Morning World and ended up in the middle of a heroic custody dispute. The United States Supreme Court finally established copyright case law in 1912 with a ruling that Hearst owned the title but that cartoonist Dirks owned his characters' likenesses. Hearst brought in another artist for "The Katzenjammer Kids." Dirks, for his part, created the utterly Identical "The ness. Universal unhappily expects to lose papers and executives at other syndicates are horrified. Not because it's inherently a bad idea, but because it is not the way things have always been done.

The "Star Hawks" experiment was abandoned in late July. "Star Hawks" was the first of the new science fiction strips that have invaded the comics in the last year or two a curious invasion, considering that adventure serials of any sort were virtually pronounced extinct earlier In this decade and it brought a startling innovation to the funny papers: The strip was double-tiered, the depth of two normal strips. didn't sell very well. These days, the price of newsprint being what it is, a syndicate salesman places a new feature with an editor only by persuading him to drop a strip he's already carrying; persuading him to drop two is a lot to ask. Over the anguished protests of artist Gil Kane, United Feature Syndicate finally cut the strip back to a single tier.

Kane continues to lick his wounds. "It was a fresh, robust idea," he says. "It could have been considered reasonable." -o These are some of the things that have happened lately in the comic strip business, a vast entertainment industry whose doings are not ordinarily the stuff of everyday conversation. You hear about the comics business chiefly when it is congratulating itself on the occasion of a watershed anniversary Popeye, star of "Thimble Theatre." turned 50 this year; "Gasoline Alley" hit 60 or when some very famous feature retires after a long and respectable run. News is made when Lucy pledges at last to huld the football in place for Charlie Brown.

News is made when. "Doonesbury's" Joanie Caucus is admitted to law school. News is made when "Mary Worth" finally docs the unwed-mother story. Behind the scenes there is a nuts-and-bolts business whose modern realities are seldom reported beyond the trade press, but which have everything to do with why your favorite features are, or aren't, run by your home town newspaper They have everything to do with why your newspaper is running fewer strips than it was a decade ago and why it is running them measurably smaller. They have come to have everything to do with the very esthetics of the medium.

The modern realities are that 1 newspapers are regularly going out of business these days and (2) the remaining papers fare increasingly staggering newsprint costs that make a page of comics an expensive luxury for many an editor. With few exceptions, papers carrying three pages of daily comics have cut back to two through the 1970's and those carrying two have cut back to one. The Sunday-comics count has been substantially reduced at most newspapers as well There are about 10 feature syndicates and they handle about 150 strips, plus a few dozen gag panels and their market is disappearing before their eyes. In a buyer's market, a seller is unwilling to offend a buyer And syndicate resistance was minimal when, in the early Continued on Page 3 i 1 1.