For Free Pile Production’s first puppet musical, the western Massachusetts-based artist collective told the story of a tiny man living inside a speaker who goes on strike and refuses to make music. In their second, a group of puppets rebelled against an evil overlord. Now, with their third production, “The Living Room,” premiering at the Guiding Star Grange in Greenfield on March 21, they are taking the craft even further.
“We cranked it up to another level,” said Free Pile co-founder Bella Levavi.
In “The Living Room,” a “dysfunctional” queer couple attempts to clean out their living room, but the cleaning does not go as planned.
“Under all that stuff, sometimes they’re hearing voices come through, sometimes it’s a little shimmery when they look at the corner,” explained Mo Schweiger, another Free Pile co-founder who wrote the script with Levavi. “One character just has to know and the other is trying to avoid it at all costs.”
When the couple realizes what lies beneath the mess, the show pivots away from a romantic drama.
“The thing that ends up being in their living room is a portal to the land of the dead,” Schweiger said, offering a playful “spoiler alert.”
The plot for the puppet show grew from Free Pile artist Esther Solomon’s internship at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, California. There, they learned about the 1980s-era practice of landlords throwing out the belongings of tenants who died of AIDS, tossing their objects on the street when no family came forward to claim them.
In the show, the puppeteers pick up scraps from the couple’s clutter. Each object sparks vignettes about individuals’ stories, most of whom have passed away but whose impact lives on in the Free Pile members’ memories. When one puppet digs through the pile to find a red clown nose, the puppets tell the story of Levavi’s great-uncle, who escaped the Holocaust by joining the circus.
“We’re focused on the stories objects hold and the stories the objects tell and how to let go and remember that the stories are actually in you and not in the object,” said Zadie Belfer-Shevett, who wrote the score for the puppet show. “Often those objects are pieces of trash, and it turns out you don’t need to keep it as a piece of trash, you can make something totally new out of it and give it a whole new story.”
Schweiger said the group of seven artists embodied this idea while creating the show. The majority of the sets, backdrops, puppets and other materials originated as discarded materials. For the “Free Pile method,” as Levavi described, the artists used wheat paste to shape the puppets’ bodies out of strips of a mattress topper and stray fabrics, leaving the puppet’s “skin” as colorful patterns.
Free Pile co-founder Bella Levavi performing in the group’s first puppet musical in West Stockbridge Credit: Contributed Photo 
Free Pile co-founder Mo Schweiger performing in the group’s first puppet musical in West Stockbridge Credit: Contributd Photo 
Free Pile co-founder Zadie Belfer-Shevett performing in the group’s second puppet musical at the Brick House in Turners Falls Credit: Contributed Photo
“I feel confident in saying that I’m at the bottom of the pyramid in terms of technical skill of making puppets, and yet every time I make a puppet … I feel so happy and so attached to it,” Schweiger said.
Unlike other art forms like drawings or paintings, puppets have personalities. For Schweiger, these traits are not always up to the artist.
“I made my first puppet, and then her personality emerged immediately,” they recalled. “I opened [her] mouth and started talking and then suddenly [she] had three gay ex-husbands.”
Levavi said her marionette teacher often tells her, “making a puppet is like giving birth.”
With puppets’ “inherently absurd” appearances, Levavi said puppetry allows audiences to accept the surrealism of Free Pile’s shows.
“You get a lot of liberties creating worlds with puppets. Immediately, anything can happen and there can be a man living inside your speaker,” Levavi said. “You get the audience to immediately take their skeptical hat off, because they’re looking at a 3-foot-tall puppet made out of an old mattress.”
For “The Living Room,” “We’re aiming to transport people out of reality into surreal puppet death land,” Belfer-Shevett said with a smile.
To create this world, the seven artists started collaborating in September, each bringing their own mediums into the mix. Levavi defined Free Pile as a group of friends “that smashes together all of our skills of puppetry, assemblage, music, writing to make fantastical shows.”
But in Schweiger’s eyes, a common thread connects the Free Pile artists.
“We’re all obsessed with making art, I don’t know if it would work if any of us had a normal relationship to it,” they said. “The way that I understand the world is through making art, and I think that each of us sees the world in a slightly unique, off-kilter and strange way, and we want to make that literal in our art.”
March 21 marks the first performance of “The Living Room.” Schweiger described the first show at the Guiding Star Grange as a “work in progress” where audiences can give feedback after the show. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 to $30 each, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
After its kickoff show, the Free Pile artists will bring their puppets on the road to The Foundry in West Stockbridge on April 17, Croma Space in Boston on April 18 and 33 Hawley St. in Northampton on April 19.
To purchase tickets, visit freepileproductions.org.