Beth Kattelman has been involved in many aspects of theater, but there’s one particular area in which everybody wants her pulling the strings.
Puppetry wasn’t high on the list of things that Kattelman imagined doing in her life, but she’s become the go-to person when local theater companies need puppets for their plays.
“I always loved theater, but I really never thought about the puppetry aspect of it,” she says. “I never thought that I would be able to make a living as a full-time puppeteer.”
Originally from Cincinnati, Kattelman entered the trade back in 1981 when collaborating with a friend on Christmas productions in elementary schools. Those efforts led to the creation of a corporation called Madcap Productions in 1984.
After five years as a full-time puppeteer, Kattelman moved to Columbus, receiving her doctorate in theater from The Ohio State University in 1999. Currently a resident in the Kenmore Park neighborhood, Kattelman works as an associate professor of theater at OSU and continues her work in puppetry.
She primarily builds hand and rod puppets, but will occasionally put together a life-size puppet – or even a larger-than-life puppet somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 feet tall.
When designing her puppets, she first considers the puppet’s role in the show and familiarizes herself with the script, collaborating with the stage directors in the process. She also considers her budget, the available fabric, the size of the needed puppet and a variety of other factors.
You may have caught Kattel
man’s work in Actors’ Theatre’s 2010 production of As You Like it; puppets were used for many of Shakespeare’s fairy characters.
“She was amazingly creative with the puppets she built,” says John Kuhn, artistic director of Actors’ Theater. “It was a fruitful approach to making a Shakespeare play accessible for children.”
You may also have seen Kattelman’s puppets in CATCO’s production of raunchy musical comedy Avenue Q, which features a variety of puppet characters to emphasize its parody of Sesame Street. CATCO’s Avenue Q was so popular in the summer of 2012 that the company brought it back for an encore engagement in spring of this year.
“Beth was instrumental in making this production (of Avenue Q) successful,” says Joe Bishara, associate producing director for CATCO. “She truly was our puppet master.”
Though it has no puppets, Kattelman’s current project includes directing an OSU production of The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende.
Brandon Klein is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
