Colorful and existential: A musical puppet show about a post-human reality

 

Ah, summer. The brave wear sandals on city sidewalks. The cowardly avoid the subway platform turned public sauna. Anyone tough enough to stay in town has the whole city to themselves plus endless options of free entertainment at Open Streets, Summer Stage, public parks and pools, festivals in all 5 boroughs, and Open Call at The Shed. 

The year’s installment in the annual Open Call series, which alternates between visual and performing art, is a theatrical turn. (Here’s my write-up of last year’s visual art exhibit, Portals.) For 2026, The Shed team commissioned 4 new productions by early career playwrights and performers and each production ran for 2 days on consecutive weekends in July. (There will be one more invite-only production in the fall.) Read my review of another Open Call show, FITO.

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In the second row, an older woman wearing sunglasses on her head and prescription frames on her nose bridge, held an art project with pride. Hers had a bulbous head, googly eyes, and a prismatic plastic body suspended from a string on a stick. Around the room, others held their own hand-crafted characters — adults held theirs still, children made them jump with enthusiasm. During the previous hour, willing attendees arrived early for a puppet-making workshop for HUMAN, a musical puppet show about underwater creatures in a post-human reality faced with the decision as to whether we deserve another chance. 

 

While a friendly seahorse and an angry octopod certainly take liberties with the personalities of acquatic creatures, the idea that humans might completely destroy each other — as war rages on for the fourth year in Ukraine, Sudanese villages starve, Israel blocks aid to Gaza, and Americans drop bombs on Iran — seems perfectly plausible. The musical is colorful, and imaginative, and kid-friendly (the kids called out their thoughts from the audience, with and without invitation) but it’s not a kid’s show by design. 

 

 

When Nehprii Amenii began writing HUMAN at the end of 2019 she was trying to answer the question, what upsets you and what do you think we need? I didn’t ask how she ended up in the sea, but the show is full of metaphors that symbolize just how deeply she plunged into solutions. The performance begins with shadows of paper bodies sinking into the sea during the Great Terror (the Middle Passage). A Black mermaid Yemi, swims quickly with her arms outstretched but cannot save them all. Centuries later, an upbeat seahorse named Nacci (like the spiral), finds the humans’ things and questions what happened to them. 

 

 

Nacci’s underwater companions explain that the humans were land creatures who fought, destroyed, and polluted. Akashi, an octopus with a memory as long as the Akashic Record, assures Nacci that the sea community is better off without the human race. But as Nacci continues to insist, Yemi (shortened from the orisha Yemaya) suggests they consult The Council, a group of spirits who witnessed the Great Terror and survived for hundreds of years in an Atlantis-like civilization. The spirits approve Nacci’s request to revive humanity with one requirement: they will need a heart. Akashi has 3 hearts, canon for octopods, but refuses to help an organism who mostly knows destruction, selfishness, and violence. Harsh. But who among us can disagree? Nacci, always eager to find the bright side, is prepared to share his one seahorse heart so that human race may live again. We’re not all bad, right?

 

The puppets pose a question to the audience: what’s your favorite thing about humans? The children were quick to answer, but adults chimed in, too. Our music. Our food. Our art. Our ability to gather around stories like this one. Unlike other creatures, we’re gifted the capacity for imagination and written language. But, I wondered as the sea animals cobbled the proto-human together out of trash, what have we done with it? 

 

 

As existential as the show may be (or may have led me to become) the use of puppets lightened the mood and kept us from sinking down into the ocean’s midnight zone. The performers worked with puppet director Jon Riddleberger to bring the characters to life. It takes three people to make all 8 of Akashi’s arms bob as if they’re resting on currents. There’s no ventriloquism, or effort to hide that they speak for the puppets. The emotions come through in the puppet’s movements as well as the actor’s faces though they direct their gaze toward the puppet and not at the audience, which took some getting used to.

 

The puppets themselves are beautiful, crafted from recycled materials, just like the audiences’. Nacci fins are cornflower blue with a sun yellow belly. Akashi’s slanted eyes are nestled on his psychedelically swirled pink and purple head. Originally, playwright and director Nehprii Amenii constructed them using what she had on hand during the pandemic lockdowns, which was certainly an interesting time to meditate on the good of humanity. When the audience waved their own handmade puppets, glowing in the dark of the curtain call, it was a snapshot of us humans on our best behavior: creative, joyous, and connected.         

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

The Shed’s 2026 Open Call production of HUMAN took place on July 10-11, 2026. HUMAN was written and directed by Nehprii Amenii and featured Khalilah Smith, Kamau Nosakhere, Karlo Siriban, Kelah Winfield, and Ava Jones. The Shed’s Open Call programming is free to attend.