Stinky Cheese Man’ teaches preschoolers post-modernism
Puppetry adaptation of fractured fairy tales could be called Deconstruction for Beginners.
How old should children be to learn irony? The Center for Puppetry Arts’ The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales offers parents a test case. Paul Mesner Puppets of Kansas City, Mo., presents a faithfully flippant adaptation of the Caldecott Award-winning picture book by Jon Scieska and Lane Smith.
In book form, The Stinky Cheese Man offers beginning readers a taste of satire and post-modernist narrative trickery. The authors not only short-circuit the traditional happy endings, they scramble the usual book structure, so the Little Red Hen, for instance, barges in before her story begins. Paul Mesner Puppets follows the fractured framework as closely as possible as Jack, of the Beanstalk fame (operated by Mike Horner) attempts to read the book’s “fairly stupid” versions of traditional fairy tales and nursery rhymes, which either reach anticlimaxes or fail to end altogether. One tale comes to a sudden conclusion when the Table of Contents collapses on the characters, while the characters of another story storm out when Jack gives away the ending.