On the surface, The Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s Famous Puppet Death Scenes is just that: a compendium of death scenes from the greatest puppet shows in history. The catch is that these shows don’t actually exist — each scene is an excerpt from a made-up story. Vignettes like “Edward’s Last Meal” from The Ballad of Edward Grue by Norman Strake and “Bipsy’s Mistake” from Fun Freddy’s Bipsy and Mumu Go to the Zoo present an invented history of puppetry to benefit the production’s ultimate goal: encouraging audiences to contemplate their own lives. “A puppet death is an extraordinarily affecting moment,” says Judd Palmer, puppeteer and founding member of the troupe. “It’s shockingly multilayered for what you think it’s going to be.”

Where did the idea for Famous Puppet Death Scenes come from?
We don’t normally do family shows, but we happened to be doing a big Christmas extravaganza family show of Pinocchio. But we decided to do the original Grimm Brothers version that is way more savage: Jiminy Cricket appears very briefly and harasses Pinocchio about his conscience and Pinocchio kills him right off the bat. He appears briefly later on as a ghost, but that’s it for Jiminy Cricket. He’s not the character people know from Disney at all. So we decided we’ll do the old-school style. We killed the cricket in scene two — brutally, because Pinocchio does it with a hammer — and it was just amazing to actually watch all the different emotions people went through watching this cricket die. First there was shock: “Oh my god they’re doing this. What are they doing to Disney?” and “Oh my god, what are they doing to my children?” Then they started to laugh, and then they started to actually feel sad for the little guy. Then there’s the moment when they think, “But it’s a puppet. Why am I feeling sad for a puppet?” It was an incredible rollercoaster; it was a weird bundle of emotions they had almost all at once. With each hammer blow there was a new one. From watching that we thought, “You know what? A puppet death is an extraordinarily affecting moment. What if we just did a show that was entirely puppet deaths and see how that works — and keep it exciting without all the dull bits of plot?”

The 22 death scenes are said to be from “the absolute best puppet shows in history,” but in reality you made them all up. What was the thought process behind that?
It’s funny how difficult that is to explain. There’s something about invented history — I guess maybe it’s an alienation technique. We were free to use whatever style of puppetry or art design or mood by saying we weren’t even the authors of these things. It gave us a platform to do whatever we wanted every 38 seconds. Plus it was also a platform for us to make fun of theatre. We’re puppet people so we’re sort of on the fringe. We’re not quite in it, but we’re not quite out of it. We’re able to mock — mock’s the wrong word because we have obvious respect for all the things the theatre’s done. But it’s always sort of fun to poke at.

Is there a unifying theme between all these scenes?
Well, death’s pretty prominent. In a funny kind of way, as much as the show sounds like it’s taking a children’s medium and making it awful, which it is as well, I find there’s something beautiful in the chaos. You end up sitting there contemplating…not your own death, but the meaning of your own life and the ways your dreams are kind of interrupted — the way they were interrupted for these poor little guys. So there’s something about interrupted dreams. There’s something, too, about the function of theatre. You can’t help but wonder what it is about art that we want to take it to such extremes: how that might affect our little souls or anxieties or terrors or what have you. In other words, it becomes a kind of rehearsal for our own mortality.

How gruesome are the deaths themselves?
It runs the gamut. A dictionary of maliciousness to puppets. Some of them are gruesome; some of them are elegant; some of them are touching; some of them are depressing; some of them are funny. It’s every way that we could think of. Of course, once we put the show onstage we thought up another 1,000 scenes that we should have, or could have had, in the show. And over the three years that we’ve been running the thing we’ve been switching scenes in and out, fussing with it a fair bit.

Do you spend a lot of time cleaning and repairing the puppets from all the abuse you inflict upon them?
Yeah, well, part of the point of puppet shows is that they are so absurdly labour-intensive. The audience, at the very least, has got to appreciate that a bunch of guys have really poured their blood sweat and tears into it in order to make it happen. Then there’s the back trouble: you can imagine us lugging all these things off the truck and then waving them around over our heads — they’re heavy and made of wood. It’s important for the audience to know that we’re suffering, in some way or another, for the healing of their anxieties. But no, it’s a pain in the ass, really.