Puppets deliver moral tale

How can puppets promote meaningful social commentary, you ask?

As the mission statement of the triangle's own Paperhand Puppet Intervention explains, using these multimedia artistic objects can hopefully facilitate the process of "undermining, and eventually, eradicating the institutions of greed, hate and fear that plague the world in myriad forms."

With this hefty aim in mind, Paperhand Puppet Intervention's winter performance, Hungry Ghost, is particularly apt. A collaboration with Tori Ralston of Carrboro's Theater of Performing Objects, a visiting lecturer at Duke, the piece is based on the realm of the hungry ghost, a hellish location from Buddhist lore where the greedy and miserly are tormented in the afterlife.

The show, currently playing at Durham's Manbites Dog Theater, is much darker than Paperhand's previous work, consisting mostly of family-friendly performances.

Whereas earlier material featured stilt walkers and whimsical storylines, Hungry Ghost is the group's first project to merit a "mature audiences only" warning, not only for its sexual content but for its potentially troubling emotional implications as well.

"I think that the scariest part is the question of, 'Well, would this happen to me?'" said Paperhand co-founder and performer Donovan Zimmerman. "How can I be the kind of person that this would never happen to?"

Certainly, with the performance's focus on the ramifications of insatiable greed, it has an important-albeit unintentional-reflection on current societal problems, as well as a pleasantly unreproachful possibility for redemption.

"We started making [Hungry Ghost] before the [financial] crisis, but it's just as poignant now," Zimmerman said. "Because I don't know that the answer to all that is to start hoarding and become more clutching and greedy. I think that generosity is a real antidote that can actually lead to a different way of how we view the whole economic situation."