IT’S not every day that you see a puppet show advertised as “not suitable for children”, but so it is with Everyman Theatre’s coming production of “Hand to God” by Texan playwright Robert Askins.

The title itself is questionable. It could just as easily have been titled “Hand to Satan”, since the central character, a puppet called Tyrone, is arguably the Prince of Darkness himself.

Puppets, like clowns, can be as terrifying as they are amusing and I know one Canberra theatre director who gave up his day job with a puppet theatre because he just couldn’t stand the puppets – he’d hate Tyrone.

This is very much an adult play, harkening back to the famous adult puppet musical, “Avenue Q”, a kind of prototype in which puppets are seen doing lots of nasty things, including having sex.

Askins’ play which premiered off-Broadway in 2011 then on Broadway in 2015, analyses the puppeteering world by setting it somewhere in the deep south of the US, where churches use puppetry for proselytising. Surely it’ll never catch on here. 

The characters include beautiful widow Marjorie, who sets up Christian Puppet Ministry at the local church, her son Jason who has a talent for puppetry, the lovelorn pastor Greg, the wholesome girl next door Jessica, whose alter-ego puppet is the sexy Jolene, the school bully and a cast of puppets.

I catch up with director Jarrad West as he prepares for the show and he tells me a familiar covid arts story – he first came across the play during a Zoom play reading club and was determined to stage it once out of lockdown.

“It’s a complex piece, which is on the surface, about puppets, but underneath much more about loss and trauma and the relationship between a widowed mother and her son,” says West.

“There’s something really human about the neglect that can happen when a parent and a child go through grieving, but in a self-obsessed way, with the parent not paying attention to the child… that’s inferred throughout the dialogue.”

West, it turns out, has a long history with puppets, having worked when young in his native WA as a puppeteer for the Constable Care Child Safety Foundation, so he knows a thing or two about puppets being used for messaging.

In the case of Constable Care, the messaging was strong – one show was about protective behaviours – “good touching and bad touching”, where a robot puppet was used to allow children not just to talk, but to touch.

Now West has assembled a crack team of human actors, Michael Cooper, Holly Ross, Steph Roberts, Arran McKenna and Joshua Wiseman, whom he’s been initiating into the art of puppetry.

In the play, West says, Jason wants to act, but he’s afraid he’ll upset his mother, so that becomes the function of Tyrone the puppet, who pretty much takes over, so that “it’s the ‘Tyrone Show’, really”.

West rejects the parallel between clowns and puppets, saying that there’s nothing clownlike in Tyrone, who gets the upper hand. Indeed he is so scary that people ask whether he’s possessed by the devil, a theme that runs throughout the show.

Puppet ministries, he believes, are predominantly in the south of the US, where there are also televised puppet shows about Jesus.

The play, he stresses, is not anti-God or anti-Jesus, but quite the opposite, as we see characters who rely on their faith. But salvation has to come though fellow-people and Askins has written a cast of beautiful characters, such as the sad Pastor Greg, none of whom is irredeemable.

In “Hand to God”, puppets are front and centre, so they’ve engaged expert puppet maker Emma Rowland to execute partly-articulated puppets, although actor Arran McKenna designed Tyrone. 

And the biggest theatrical treat? Michael Cooper as Jason, while playing Tyrone at the same time – “a real tour de force,” West says.

“Hand to God”, Everyman Theatre, ACTHub, Kingston, July 27-August 13. Not suitable for children.