Greensnake
By Carrie DuBois
Directed by Don Downie
The "junk puppet" play Greensnake premiered in the '99 Pop Festival, and then played theatres, schools, and libraries in NYC and toured regionally.
New York Times Write Up:
FAMILY FARE
Aug. 27, 1999
Beauty's Only Scale Deep
Children are used to fairy tales in which princesses are beautiful and princes walk around (or rather hop around) disguised as frogs. ''Green snake'' offers something different: a princess who isn't pretty and an enchanted hero whose green skin is more reptilian than amphibian -- he's a dragon, although the kind that breathes kind words instead of fire.
Such twists are to be expected in Nino Nada, a wing of the Pure Pop Theater Festival dedicated to putting a fresh face on children's entertainment. In ''Greensnake,'' it's a plain face, which reinforces the moral: it's what's inside that counts.
Based loosely on a 17th-century tale, the play centers on Dorugly (Uma Incrocci), the young woman who's pulchritudinally challenged. The good dragon, Greensnake, saves her from a shipwreck, and when she awakens from her near-death experience (with some loud help solicited from the audience), she's in an enchanted palace run by a master whose face she's forbidden to see. You don't have to be past kindergarten to guess who he is and that he and Dorugly will fall in love.
But complications ensue. Lulu (Megan McDonnell), the witch who saddled Greensnake with scales, is a would-be prom queen who's still mad that he refused to date her in high school. She sends the princess and her helper, an enchanted doll named Kabuki (Carrie DuBois), on a quest that involves a shape-changing, man-eating beast. Dorugly and Kabuki trick it into turning into a mouse and make it promise to become vegetarian.