A Note: My name is Emily Batsford. I am a professional Puppeteer. On February 4, 2026, I saw the first preview of La Daniella and Ben Langhorst’s puppet musical ‘Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure.' Some moments (and puppets!) may have changed since.
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Every show that chooses to use objects as characters must be able to answer the question, “why puppets?” clearly and with focus. There are many reasons a production might choose to incorporate puppetry. Sometimes, a show may want to play with scale, or introduce elements of fantasy, or establish a sense of “other” in a character (Little Shop of Horrors, for example, uses puppets to do all of these things successfully).
Certainly, Gooey—the protagonist of Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure—is considered an “other.” In La Daniella and Ben Langhorst’s show, Gooey is not a typical mermaid. The toxic sludge of the Gowanus Canal is her home, and it has left her with a certain…je ne sais quois…that the rest of the world vehemently rejects. Still, she longs to find commercial success as a Mermaid Princess spokesperson for G’wond’rLand, a Disneyesque (literally—their spokesperson is Mikey the Mouse) theme park slowly taking over the entirety of New York City. G’wond’rLand is a loud placeholder for the gentrification caused by commercial conglomerates—a sprawl of hollow AI-generation, neverending product placement, and the promise of safety through the consumption of addictive pop culture.
To discover more about why this production chose puppetry to express some of these very human concerns, I spoke to Gaby FeBland, Gooey’s Puppet Designer.
“The use of puppetry in this show externalizes Gooey’s active imagination, uplifts the play’s environmentalist thread by endowing the living world…with the empathy and care that puppets inspire, and completes the show’s metatheatrical framing device,” FeBland shared. “When we meet Gooey, she is imagining herself as the host of a Pee-Wee-inspired show and explaining to an imagined audience that she quells her loneliness by crafting puppet ‘friends’ out of household items. As Gooey adventures into the Big City in pursuit of self-actualization and community, she encounters more elaborate, fully realized puppets.”
While there’s a clear dramatic function of puppets in Gooey, the puppets’ physical effect on the show’s staging and performances also holds equal weight.
Of the two main camps in the world of professional puppetry, one believes that puppeteers should be energetically invisible while puppeteering, so as not to distract from the audience’s connection to the puppets. The other believes that puppeteers should outwardly perform the full emotional arc of their puppets, to help the audience understand how to feel. No matter which method you subscribe to, the direction should support this choice. And this methodology can change across the development process of a piece.
In Gooey, Sushma Saha plays an anthropomorphized piece of Gowanus Canal gunk named Sludge. At the early performance I attended, the puppet—designed to be worn on a backpack— was operated through direct manipulation. The large and heavy apparatus caused Saha’s movements to come across unwieldy and muscular, rather than slimy and oozing. And I couldn’t help but wonder how Saha’s performance would change with a costumed look instead of a giant, stagnant object. Since that initial preview, FeBland confirmed that this puppet was, indeed, “shifted from a costume to a backpack puppet to a Bread-and-Puppet-inspired rod puppet with a moving mouth, before landing in her final form as a shield-style head with ribbons of trash bags that play off the actor’s deft, watery movement.” Construction, in the case of puppetmaking, can directly impact performance.
There has been a trend in the past few years of putting puppets on stage as a visual treat for audiences, rather than a dramaturgical choice. (Take the recent work of Alex Timbers, for example, who incorporates puppets into multiple shows, whether or not the script calls for them). Puppets garner empathy by design, but they are also a trap, and their likability can easily be used as aesthetic fluff.
In Gooey’s Disneyfication of Gowanus, we see a version of our culture that is so preoccupied with delight and distraction that it refuses to find the value in the grosser gunk underneath. FeBland, cites this as the reason she joined the show: “I resonate with our mermaid protagonist Gooey’s struggle to build a life and community in a gentrified, sanitized Brooklyn.”
One could view the show’s final tableaux—Gooey surrounded by puppet sidekick friends after they’ve beaten the greedy, bad guys of G’wond’rLand—as the well-worn, happy-ending trope of a Chosen Family. Instead, it resonated with me as a perfect and haunting tableau of the pressure to coat theatrical productions in spectacle, perhaps making them more digestible to audiences.
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Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure is extended at the Bushwick Starr through February 28, 2026.
