Claire Saxe is a puppeteer. And the story of her life reads like Pinocchio played backward: real girl dreams of becoming a puppet. Or more accurately, it’s the story of a woman who dreams of being at once real and a puppet.
“I’m the kind of puppeteer who likes to be all the way in it,” Saxe said.
On one level, she is the puppet master, controlling the puppet’s movements and expressions, but at a deeper level, she is the puppet.
It’s a very primal connection, and, as Saxe puts it, “really fun.”
It must be. Because puppets and puppetry changed the trajectory of her life. Today, she is the co-artistic director of the Rough House Theatre Company, a small, plucky storefront puppet theater in Chicago, dedicated to boldly taking puppetry where no puppets have gone before. One of the notable participants in Chicago’s International Puppet Theatre Festival last January, the shoestring theater, with its annual budget $120,000, is best known for its edgy puppet shows, most notably their late-night puppet cabaret – Nasty, Brutish, and Short – and their annual Halloween horror show, House of the Exquisite Corpse.
But Saxe wasn’t always that into puppets. She used to be just another Oak Park child actor who got the theater bug early.
“I did my first play when I was five,” she said, “and never looked back.”
Saxe’s family moved to Oak Park when she was four. She went to Alcuin Montessori for elementary school, Emerson/Brooks for seventh and eighth grade (the school transitioned from a junior high to a middle school while she was a student there), and to OPRF. It was at OPRF that Saxe’s interest in theater took over her life.
“Oh my god, I was such a theater kid.” Saxe laughed. “I did almost nothing else. I was always working on at least two theater projects at once. There were so many shows at the high school. I couldn’t say no. I got shingles my sophomore year from just doing too many plays.”
Among her favorite roles: the lead in “Kindertransport,” about the rescue of Jewish kids from Nazi Germany just before WWII, and the role of Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker.”
But the highlight of her high-school acting career was being cast her senior year as Anne Frank in the Steppenwolf production of the Diary of Anne Frank. To be in this play, Saxe had to attend rehearsals during school hours at the Steppenwolf Theatre.
The school adjusted Saxe’s schedule to three classes so she was finished by 10:30 a.m., when she had to go into the city to rehearse until six at night.
“The high school was so lovely and accommodating,” she said.
After college, Saxe went on to study theater at Skidmore College, and then at graduate school in England, at University of Exeter before returning to Oak Park to try her luck in Chicago’s theater scene.
“I knew in Chicago I can afford to work 20 hours a week and spend the rest of my time making theater.”
Saxe started getting roles in local productions, but she found she didn’t get the same kick out of acting that she had gotten before in high school and college.
“I think having done so many plays and so many really good plays at OPRF,” Saxe said, adding, “with really good directors…” Her voice trailed off. “By the time I was, you know, 25, and had already done like 100 plays in my life, I was starting to feel like, okay, but what else is there?”
Saxe explored other ways to assuage her urge to perform. She was an intern for a while at the late lamented Redmoon Theatre, a company that specialized in large-scale puppet shows and public spectacles. It closed in 2015.
It was through Redmoon that Saxe met her future partner, Mike Oleon, co-founder, along with Max Wirt and Shelley Geiszler, of Rough House Theatre Company.
The Rough House was holding auditions for the role of a puppeteer to play a robot dog in an original play called “Into the Uncanny Valley.”
Saxe tried out for the role and got it.
“The puppet was incredible,” Saxe said. “Mike was building it, so it was custom-built to fit my hands and my body. It hopped around on the ground with these fabulous little legs, and it had one hand on the back and one hand on the head. It was such a good puppet.”
Playing the robot dog changed Saxe’s performing life.
“I did a couple more straight plays after that show,” Saxe said. “But I think at some point I really was like, yeah, I’m done.” Being a puppeteer just “felt more holistically enriching and more challenging.”
Saxe has never looked back. Today, Saxe divides her time between running Rough House Theatre company and teaching theater part time at her alma mater, Alcuin Montessori, where she has been the last 11 years.
“I find Maria Montessori’s pedagogy inspiring, creating a style of learning that was accessible for people who weren’t otherwise being served by the education system, but also creating these little microcosms of a kind of ideal society in the classroom, where people different ages and strengths are working together.”
Saxe does the same when she does her puppetry, “making like a perfect little version of the world in whatever room you’re in.”
The next event at Rough House Theatre Company is Puppets-in-Progress.
“The idea is that PIPs is like a puppet artist town square.” Saxe said. “It’s like a place where people come with works in progress, or questions, or ideas, or just out of curiosity of what puppet artists are working on.”
Puppets-in-Progress takes place from noon to 3 p.m., Saturday, March 23, at the Pilsen Arts & Community House, 1637 W. 18th St. in Chicago.
“PIPs is one of my favorite things,” Saxe said. “People will come in and be like, I haven’t started yet, but I have this idea, and I just want to say it out loud. Or like, I have an idea and I’m looking for a director. There have been a handful of people who found collaborators through PIPs who have gone on to work together.
“People come in and say, ‘ I made this object. Can I watch other people play with it? It’s just so beautiful to see a puppeteer’s object in somebody else’s hands. The transformation of the ordinary into the magical is among my favorite things about puppetry.’”
Visit https://www.roughhousetheater.com/ for more information.