“This wasn’t exactly standard fare in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” Sellars said. Her taste ran to the experimental-the likes of Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Giraudoux. After spending a month studying with the avant-garde puppeteer Sergey Obraztsov, in Moscow, she decided to present shows for adults as well as kids. Yes, she did the requisite “Beauty and the Beast,” but she set it in Japan, incorporating what she’d learned at a Bunraku theatre in Osaka. If she was staging “Rumpelstiltskin,” she would reimagine it as a story unfolding in ancient Egypt. She wasn’t content to simply churn out the usual children’s fare. For me, the beauty was in how serious she was about the deep traditions and skills of puppet theatre.” “I knocked on Margo’s door and my life changed,” Sellars told me. “It was the way to be close to my mom,” he said.) Scores of young people interned with Lovelace Marionettes, including the acclaimed theatre director Peter Sellars, who started working with her when he was only eleven years old.
It was a mysterious attribute of hers.” (Visser began directing some of the theatre presentations when he was a teen-ager. “She inspired people to want to be in her orbit, to help her out. “People loved being around her,” Visser said. By the early nineteen-sixties, her puppets-moppets no more, they were now known as the Lovelace Marionettes-were famous in Pittsburgh, and she was a local celebrity. She apprenticed with him in Vermont and then returned to Pittsburgh, where she had established a puppet troupe she called Margo’s Moppets.
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(Who knew that department stores were so instrumental in the development of puppeteering?) At the time, she knew only the basics of the craft, but, after she joined the Puppeteers of America, a professional organization, she met Cedric Head, the seasoned operator of a prominent marionette company, who became her mentor. Soon afterward, she signed on to stage regular shows at yet another department store, Frank & Seder. Photograph by Leonard Schugar courtesy David Visser She held on to her display job for a short while, but the minute she landed a four-week gig on a marionette show (this one at Gimbels, another department store in town) she quit her job at Kaufmann’s and dived in. Post-Punch-and-Judy, there is Lovelace swanning around in a turquoise-velvet, rhinestone-encrusted top, with an ostrich feather in her hair and there she is sporting a billowy orange-and-purple blouson and several inches of aqua eyeshadow. Pre-Punch-and-Judy photos show Lovelace wearing angora knits and A-line skirts, prim and constricted. Constructing the puppets, sewing their clothing, painting the backdrops, and then performing-it was exactly what she had hankered for. Perhaps she would have been content finding her métier in window displays, but, soon afterward she started at Kaufmann’s, she was asked to stage a Punch-and-Judy show for kids at a local arts fair.
It was the first time that she had done something that merged almost all of her interests, and, as her son David Visser told me recently, “she discovered that the sum was greater than the individual parts.”
Back home, in 1952, she was hired to design and build displays for Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh.
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She decided to take a crack at clothing design, and after high school she enrolled in a fashion program in New York, but she chafed at the commercial aspects of the apparel industry and left within a year. She was good, but not great, at all of it, and was vexed by the idea that to excel at one she had to give up the rest. Beginning in her childhood, in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, she had restless hands she was always painting or drawing or sculpting or sewing. Puppeteering is rarely an obvious career choice, but how Margo Lovelace (1922-2022) came to be a puppeteer is actually quite logical.
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