Tom Lee: Blending Ancient Puppetry and Modern Science on Stage

Tom Lee is a multidisciplinary artist whose work uniquely bridges traditional Japanese puppetry with cutting-edge technology and modern themes, often exploring the deeply emotional intersection of the fantastical and the familiar. Splitting his time between New York and Chicago, Lee has forged a distinctive career that has taken him from experimental off-off-Broadway spaces to the Metropolitan Opera.

Real-Time, Cross-Continental Performance

Lee’s experimental approach was exemplified in his 2015-2016 work, The Return. Staged concurrently at the Seoul Institute of the Arts in Korea and La MaMa in New York, the production used the internet to interface objects and performers across 7,000 miles in real time.

For instance, shadow puppeteers in Seoul concentrated their constellations and lowered a helmet onto the shadow-puppet head of an astronaut, whose body was physically present in New York. The astronaut's spaceship was in New York, while the constellations remained in Seoul.

The accompanying narrative utilized relativity, telling the story of an astronaut who, by approaching the speed of light, experienced time dilation and returned to Earth generations after his departure, finding everyone he knew long dead.

From Actor to Avant-Garde Puppeteer

Lee’s path to puppetry was serendipitous. Born and raised in Hawaii, he grew up exposed to diverse Asian performance traditions, including Chinese opera, wayang kulit shadow puppets, and dragon dances. Initially, he pursued acting, earning a BFA from Carnegie Mellon in 1996 and subsequently seeking roles in New York (including the requisite Law and Order episode).

However, Lee became creatively absorbed by the environment of Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa. To support himself, he began working on set construction alongside La MaMa’s resident designer, Jun Maeda (who served from 1970 until 2020). Lee was inspired by Maeda, whom he remembered as a brilliant, untrained "outsider artist" who worked with "total abandon."

Lee started experimenting by carving wood and shaping sheet metal for La MaMa’s resident puppeteers. It was puppet artist Theodora Skipitares who ultimately encouraged him to create his own work. "Theodora lit a flame in me," Lee recalled, prompting him to completely switch gears and become a puppeteer. His first original piece was Hoplite Diary (2004), a large-scale theatrical smorgasbord embodying the dreams of ancient Greek foot soldiers.

Mastery of Kuruma Ningyo

Following Hoplite Diary, Lee developed a deep fascination with the 19th-century Japanese puppet style known as kuruma ningyo.

Unlike the more famous bunraku (which requires three puppeteers per doll), kuruma ningyo utilizes only one puppeteer. The performer sits on a small, wheeled cart (kuruma) and controls the puppet's feet using T-shaped toe-grips, manipulating the head and hands with their own hands.

Lee secured an NEA grant to study the form in Tokyo with the fifth-generation master, Koryū Nishikawa V, who is designated an Intangible Cultural Asset. Lee has continued working with his mentor for nearly two decades, expanding the traditional form's possibilities.

Expanding the Form

Lee's first major kuruma ningyo piece was Ko‘olau (2008), based on the true Hawaiian story of Kaluaiko’olau, a native Hawaiian who contracted Hanson’s disease (leprosy) in the late 1880s. Condemned to exile, Ko’olau shot the sheriff who came to take him and evaded authorities for three years in the mountains of Kauai until his death.

Lee's production honored the basic style of kuruma ningyo while radically expanding its artistic vocabulary:

• Mixed Media: The show combined live puppet action with live video feeds and low-tech camera zooms.

• 
  

• Shadow and Scale: The shadow image of a live actor was used to represent the sheriff, making him frighteningly large compared to the half-scale kuruma ningyo characters.

• 
  

• Staging Innovation: In a lyrical sequence, when Ko‘olau’s young son dies, the entire scene rotates 90 degrees, shifting the audience's perspective from a horizontal view to an overhead view as the body "rises" horizontally toward them.

Lee later collaborated with Nishikawa on more traditional works, including Shank’s Mare, which featured two intersecting stories, and adapted works by Ryūnosyke Akutagawa. In a significant departure from period Japanese social norms, Lee cast the ancient astronomer’s acolyte in Shank’s Mare as a girl, inspired by his own young daughters.

The New Puppet Canon

Lee's more recent work, Sounding the Resonant Path (2023), served as a memorial to Jun Maeda. The piece featured a puppet woodsman who carved a puppet head on stage, resulting in a puppet manipulated by another puppet—an unprecedented feat in kuruma ningyo. This was combined with sequences of shadow images depicting evolution, utilizing techniques similar to the 20th-century shadow-film artist Lotte Reiniger, but performed live rather than in stop-motion.

Beyond his original work, Lee frequently collaborates as a puppet designer and manipulator for other artists:

• Broadway: He performed in the acclaimed production of War Horse (2011).

• 
  

• Metropolitan Opera: He co-created and operated the river creatures for Mary Zimmerman’s Florencia en el Amazonas. He has also been an animator for the bunraku puppet used for Cio-Cio-San’s son in Anthony Minghella’s Madama Butterfly for nearly 17 years. Lee noted that the transcendent vocal power of opera singers makes his ribcage vibrate while he works.

Lee is also the co-founder of the Chicago Puppet Studio with Blair Thomas, which designs and builds puppets for artists nationwide. For Florencia en el Amazonas, their creations included glitter-spangled dolphins, shiny fish, glum iguanas, and colorful full-body birds, all based on real Amazonian fauna.

Looking to the Future

While his work on Florencia momentarily kept him tied to Earth, Lee has several sci-fi projects planned, signaling a continued exploration of the cosmic and the fantastical:

• Eden: Based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, set on an extraterrestrial planet.

• 
  

• Ursula K. Le Guin Adaptation: An adaptation of a novel set on a planet with ambigendered extraterrestrials.

• 
  

Closer to his traditional roots, Lee and Nishikawa are discussing a new collaboration, potentially adapting another work by Akutagawa or drawing from the classical Japanese repertory. For Tom Lee, the boundaries of puppetry are constantly expanding, not just to a "puppet planet," but to a whole puppet solar system.