Unmasking Big Nazo

Erminio Pinque on Character Building

by Vanessa Huang

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Nestled in the middle of downtown Providence, across the street from City Hall and Kennedy Plaza, sits the Big Nazo lab. On any given day, a passerby might be lucky to walk into the lab and find Big Nazo artists and performers rehearsing for a show or building puppets.

Big Nazo's window displays feature big faces and creatures saturated with color: greens, purples, and oranges. A giant leprechaun head, a huge orange creature with three bulging eyes, some flat cardboard cut-outs, and a puppet-person wearing a bright pink neon tank top with black polka dots crossing its green string-bean legs over a desk.

Inside the lab, where puppets of all colors and shapes clutter the space, I caught up with Erminio Pinque, artistic director of the Big Nazo Theatre Company and Band, to talk about the literal art of character building.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I grew up as a first-generation Italian-American kid in a rural area in upstate New York where everyone on the street was from the same village in Italy, or close to it. We later moved closer to New York City, where my elementary school was mostly working-class Irish and Italian families. In middle school, we merged with all the other schools, with kids whose parents were architects and graphic designers.

So high school was an interesting battleground of different aesthetics. I mean, real classic: the cheerleaders and the football captains, the band, and the—not the greasers, the drop-outs. And then you had every other archetype, like the 'bad boys' and the jocks. It was full of characters. I just found my place in between all that and got along with everybody. The guys who used to want to beat me up ended up liking me because I could draw cool stuff with ballpoint pen on their jackets. A classic thing was freshman year, when my friend and I used to draw for the school newspaper. Someone liked our work and arranged for us to take a free drawing class at this college. So we were two geeky high school kids—and this is the 70s, so when I say geeky, I mean it, like floral print shirts and that awful haircut you had to wear—going down to New York City to draw with grown-up, cool people. And there were nude models. So when we went back to school, suddenly all those tough guys who were always like, "Artist, faggot," were really interested.

How'd you end up cooking up characters in the lab?

I remember being an art student and Halloween time coming around. We were all trying to make our assignment—something you can wear that's a plant or animal form—so we were just like, 'Let's make this our Halloween costumes!' So we just went all out, and there were funky, amazing Halloween parties everywhere. And a lot of them gave cash prizes. We would go out and win them.

When I got out of school, I worked at the Puppet Workshop, where I learned a lot about Rhode Island by touring around. I think that work led to my interest in doing adult puppetry, 'adult' meaning not just for kids. There's a stigma about puppets, that they're 'kiddy,' fuzzy, and all singing and dancing animal characters.

So the groundwork for Big Nazo began when I started making puppets that were not cloth-covered or muppet-like. While I was a student, I'd started experimenting with foam. I was also interested in breaking outside of the stage. That was something that some of the walk-around characters at the Puppet Workshop would do: just a giant puppet walking around. That really appealed to me. So I traveled to Europe for the International Puppet Festival. In Italy, I was performing street theatre and everyone was yelling, 'Grande Nazo, Grande Nazo'—Big Nose—so that was how I got the name.

When I came back, one thing led to another. We went from being a street theatre troupe to having an act, performing the act, other people wanting to see the act, to forming a full repertoire. We eventually formed a rock band, because the idea was to keep taking puppets into places that they didn't belong. That was the thrill.

Tell us about those forbidden places.

Well, we've performed in every conceivable type of venue. We haven't done a funeral, but we've done every kind of private function: parties, graduation parties, retirement parties, hundred-year-old women's birthday parties. We've performed in bowling alleys, next to the buffet line at a Chinese restaurant in Woonsocket, in every kind of public space. We've done strolls where we've wandered into department stores and onto buses.

We even did a stripper performance once—we were constantly getting calls for male strippers. We finally looked at our listing and saw that Big Nazo was between 'Adult Entertainment' and 'Other Entertainments,' so I guess we sounded like some kind of male stripper club or something. So we eventually even did one of those shows, sending a puppet stripper. It was totally absurd! He had a foam body, foam muscles. That's a long story, which would be a whole other interview. It got ugly.

What is it like to play these characters?

Well, we're in an art form that requires a suspension of disbelief, meaning people kind of know that we know that they know that we know that they know that we're puppets and not real people. So it's really fun to respect the audience and to have fun with them by revealing that device, but not losing any of the power. One of the Nazo's unwritten laws is that we never reveal our identities: we never disrobe in public, take our head off at the end of the show, or take a curtain call as actors.

We also like to have a layer of realities where a character is not what it seems to be, takes its head off and reveals yet another head underneath it. It becomes very semiotically complex. Some people like that, and others think it's just funny, like 'Oh, the big man took his head off, and he's got a little head now. That's hilarious' and 'Oh and now that head came off cause it was bitten off by the monster and he's left,' but then miraculously he comes back with his head intact, like a Looney Tunes cartoon. No one asks why Wiley Coyote isn't dead if he just fell off the cliff. So we get into that world and it becomes exhilarating.

And when you give people that thrill, where it's not reality, you can then start talking about things in a way where people start to think of the bigger concept.

Can you say more about "The Bigger Concept?"

Well, if you have a character that can't be killed, maybe you're able to discuss violence in a different way. You can almost cartoonify how absurd certain things in society are.

I'm not sure sometimes if people realize that what we're doing is actually kind of subversive. We often create scenarios where a character embodies the archetypal conservative, sometimes even bigoted points of view. We make fun of consumerism and blind patriotism. That's all disguised within: it's not the USA we're talking about, it's an alien commander who's come to earth to invade, but he doesn't have an exit strategy.

It's pretty overt, if you're reading between the lines. But even if you don't get that, people like the themes. They just don't get that they should be applying this sensibility to their real lives. They all agree: no one should be able to scare others into submission; nobody should convince people through fear to do things that they normally would not be predisposed to do. These are all things that the average person agrees with.

We've done these things in very conservative communities. We've even performed our shows at a Catholic school once, where our volunteer was a nun and we had to make her dance to a rock song. We thought we were going to hear it at the end of the show, but people like it. They don't realize that what they're celebrating actually goes against some of their functioning values. So it's a strange place. You get this privilege of sneaking in and being embraced.

So you get all hugs, no hate mail?

Well, we did get one letter years ago. We were performing at a high school and had a school principal character who was like, 'You shouldn't be up here with this music and these puppets. You should be at home with your slide rulers doing your arithmetic to become engineers, people who can really give back to society.' So the kids started to boo this character and rebel against him.

But we got an angry letter from a woman who'd taken her grandchildren to the show. At first we felt bad that someone felt this moved to write, but when we looked at it, this letter was a badge of honor. She took offense to the fact that we were planting the idea in her grandchildren's heads that sometimes an authority figure should be stood up to: that you should listen to what the authority figure is saying, and if what they were saying was contrary to what you knew to be right, you shouldn't listen to that person. We take pride in the fact that we can portray a guy in a suit and a tie who walks out and says he's the king of the world, says stuff, and eventually you realize that this guy is not right. And that even if you're a little kid in second grade, you've got the guts to say, 'Boo, mister'! I think that's an important thing, because God knows every other second of that child's educated life, they're being told the opposite. So what's the problem with a circus coming into town one day and turning the world upside down?

That's what we do. And for a flash there's this brilliant revelation of 'Wow, this show has given me an idea that life could be wild!' But then you go back to life being just the opposite—depending on the world you live in—where people are constantly squashing you and making you fit in.

So if we resonate, it depends on the individual. We do have big, tall people coming into our studio now, men and women who say, 'Hey, in third grade, you guys ate my principal' or 'My best friend was eaten by the monster.' We always ask them, 'Did we change your life?' and they're always like, 'Yes, definitely!' So that's fun.

Vanessa Huang B'06 boos Big Brother and Uncle Sam.

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