Three marionettes are suspended from the ceiling so as to stand on the floor in the beam of a spotlight. No dramaturge or workable playbook is on hand.
From left to right:
Anne. Anne Bonny (ca. 1699–1720 or longer). Arguably the most famous woman pirate in history, Bonny led a swashbuckling life. She’s said to have been born in Ireland and lived in the Caribbean. The bastard child of a plantation owner, she supposedly passed as a boy when she was young, married into the pirate milieu, signed on dressed up as a man and soon met another woman likewise dressed up as a man with whom she allegedly struck up a lasting and widely feared business as well as private partnership. It’s unclear whether Anne Bonny was executed or lived to enjoy her sunset years. More generally, we pretty much don’t know if we have any actual facts about her. Biographies and portraits of pirates are almost always works of the imagination of later generations. Peter Friedl’s Anne has Creole (or Métisse) features and bears resemblance not to a historic source but to an individual from Friedl’s own life.
Koba. The protagonist of Alexander Kazbegi’s novel The Patricide was a Caucasian bandit who is revered as a folk hero in Georgia. The young Stalin chose the nom de guerre Koba.
Blind Boy. This character resembles little Peter, Friedl as a child, but it’s also a reference to another figure of the stage: Blind Boy was a puppet character in the unpublished manuscripts (The Drama for Fools) of the great theater reformer Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966). Craig’s radical critique of the actor-centric theatrical tradition led him to develop the concept of the “über-marionette,” which was to replace the human actor on the stage in order to do away with realism of any kind. Perhaps more than the other two, this last marionette underscores how adamantly the trio in the spotlight’s glare resists simplistic readings, how much distance it produces—how much aesthetic space this work establishes.
