Elliot Lorenc’s The Ballad of Iron Jo will have its world premiere on Friday, April 25, at Hillsboro’s Bag&Baggage Productions under the direction of resident artist Mandana Khoshnevisan. The play, a contemporary folk musical based on a lesser-known Grimm Brothers fable, features four actor- musicians juggling thirteen roles, seven puppets, and three instruments.

Four instruments, Lorenc qualifies, “if you count the bucket.”

It’s a fitting parenthesis. Folk music includes a long, rich tradition of repurposing everyday artifacts into musical instruments – buckets, washtubs, spoons, saws, cigar boxes – and this same scrappy, improvisational quality extends to all dimensions of Iron Jo: Lorenc’s script is based on material they devised with three collaborators. In lieu of original composition, the play’s score is a patchwork of folk revival tunes from the 1960s. No particular musical arrangement is specified, freeing the cast to employ whatever instruments they happen to play. The characters’ genders are likewise left undefined, and thus malleable to any actor.

Rehearsal photos on Bag&Baggage’s Facebook page capture cast member Murren Kennedy outfitted with a harness-like contraption that serves as scaffolding for the titular Iron Jo, the play’s largest and most complexly designed puppet. The rig Kennedy wears (the brainchild of Bag&Baggage resident artist Signe Larsen) is fashioned from backpack straps and PVC pipes, and at the top of it sits Iron Jo’s head, a colorful mass of what appears to be mostly neckties inset with two protruding ping-pong eyeballs.

In terms of scripting, casting, instrumentation, and design, the unifying ethos of Iron Jo’s production seems to be this: Use the tools you have at your disposal. And this DIY sensibility perfectly mirrors the play’s moral message.

Iron Jo tells the tale of an idyllic medieval-style village as it finds itself in the grip of a mega- conglomerate called Coyne Enterprises. Much like Amazon, Coyne Enterprises seems to traffic in all imaginable goods and services, and while its CEO, the eponymous Coyne (played by Lorenc), cuts a Mr. Monopoly-style figure in his posh black suit, felt top hat, and red bow tie, he exhibits a less cozy, distinctly Jeff Bezos-like indifference to the welfare of those impoverished by his relentless pursuit of wealth. In that sense, Coyne Enterprises is less a merchant than an insidiously encroaching destructive force – also, you could argue, much like Amazon.

Coyne’s first victim is a creature named Iron Jo, whom he abducts from their home in the enchanted forest outside of town. This abuse is pragmatic rather than personal: Iron Jo knows the location of a magical pond whose waters turn all they touch into gold, and Coyne is predictably eager to harness its power for himself. His master plan? Divert the water into a spa ,where its magical properties will transform any unsuspecting bathers into golden statues.

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While imprisoned in a cage in the town square, Iron Jo steals an instrument from a down-on-their-luck busker named Aurelie (Rae Davis). Recognizing Aurelie’s desperation to recover their only source of livelihood, Coyne offers them an extortionate deal: Befriend Iron Jo, follow them back to the pond, and return with a jug of the magical water. In exchange Coyne will see to it that Aurelie’s instrument is returned. Facing destitution, Aurelie accepts and sets off on their quest.

Since every good quest deserves a side quest, let’s detour here and explore Iron Jo’s background and development.

Lorenc’s quest to bring Iron Jo to the stage began when they were planning their senior thesis at Pacific University. (Their degree is in applied theater, the umbrella term under which social justice theater lives.) Their introduction to the source material – a Grimm Brothers story called Der Eisenhans (Iron Hans or Iron John) – came by way of the book Iron John: A Book About Men by the poet Robert Bly, which used Iron John as an entry point into examining notions of manhood. Lorenc’s initial purpose was to adapt the tale in a way that challenged some of the book’s more antiquated precepts of gender, hence the fluid pronouns. Later, as an intern in Bag&Baggage’s now-defunct Emerging Artist Program, they would repurpose the concept for their 2021 keystone project, then titled The Ballad of Aurelie the Bold.

“The idea behind the Emerging Artist keystone has always been to take a fairy tale or a piece of folklore and use that as a basis for an adaptation,” Lorenc explains. “I wanted to pick a story that was identifiably a fairy tale, that lived inside of that realm, but that also had a lot of creative gaps – places where there might be opportunity for a playwright to expand or iterate.”

Lorenc found Iron John to be a particularly rich trove of fairy tale archetypes and iconography: kings and princes, otherworldly creatures, an enchanted forest, magical trinkets. In keeping with the fanciful nature of the story, one of Lorenc’s conceptual inspirations came from the animated limited series Over the Garden Wall. Like Iron Jo it’s replete with fairy-tale imagery, and it shares the play’s quality of masquerading as children’s entertainment while dealing in adult themes. “I wanted to do something similar on stage, and that got me thinking about puppets and how puppets can sort of operate in the same way.”

Here Lorenc brushes up against one of the covenants of live theater: the understanding that a play is a work of illusion, and that its success is partly contingent on the audience members’ willingness to suspend their disbelief in its artifice. In theory this should be a straightforward enough transaction, but in practice the failure to adequately camouflage the illusion – or at least divert the audience’s attention from it – often hinders total immersion in the story.

In that sense puppets are a kind of game-changer. Their artifice can’t be fully hidden, and positioning it front and center situates the world of the play on an unmistakably fantastical plane, dispelling the need to suspend disbelief at all. The effect in this instance is a heightened, cartoonish quality that nimbly lends itself to a show packed with meta-commentary, self-referential humor, and spontaneous bursts of song.

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There are some additional practical advantages to using puppets, which neatly address many of the complications inherent in double- or triple-casting. Theoretically they enable a single actor to play multiple characters simultaneously, and they make it possible to shift between roles in full view of the audience, conserving the time and backstage resources otherwise required to pull off a quick change.

There are narrative benefits, too. As puppet designer Signe Larsen quips, “I would much rather listen to a goose tell me about how bad capitalism is than just a person.”

For the world premiere of Iron Jo, Larsen’s challenge was to give the puppets from the 2021 production some structural and cosmetic upgrades while preserving their fundamental character. “Since we’re working with puppets that had a life before,” she says, “I wanted to keep the essence of who they were, so mostly they’re getting a glow-up.” In the case of Skyler, the aforesaid anti-capitalist goose, this involved the addition of armatures that would enable actor Trevor Harter to manipulate the puppet’s mouth and both wings in tandem. In the case of Iron Jo, some more intensive refurbishment was called for.

Since the puppets were originally constructed for a covid-conscious stream-on-demand production, they only had to be robust enough to withstand a single session of filming rather than repetitive long- term use. This time around, durability is a top priority alongside actor safety. Of Iron Jo, the most physically demanding puppet to operate, Larsen says, “It’s all arm moving the mouth hand-puppet style, but he goes up really, really tall and there’s a lot of play with height in his expression. Holding your arm up even at a ninety-degree angle for a long period of time, and especially for four shows a week for three to four weeks – my main goal with that one is sustainability.”

So in addition to the harness worn by actor Kennedy, the updated Iron Jo is equipped with a telescoping arm for adjusting the puppet’s height, and a trigger that controls its mouth. These modifications relieve Kennedy of the burden of performing those actions manually by elevating his arm Big Bird-style, a repetitive motion likely to cause fatigue if not injury.

Rounding out the ensemble is an array of stick puppets, hand puppets, and even some shadow puppets. The visual conceit, according to Larsen, is “like if you had a Muppet movie that was about anti- capitalism and it took place at a lower-budget renaissance fair. We’re going for that almost cartoon, storybook, fairy tale vibe with the Tudor houses and the baskets of marketplace goods.” It’s an aesthetic framework she hopes will get audiences excited to talk about the play’s sociopolitical themes.

Which brings us back to the quest at the heart of the story: Once Aurelie discovers Coyne’s agenda, they realize they have a responsibility to protect the magical pond from further exploitation, and to see to it that Coyne is stopped once and for all. But – and here the play diverges from traditional fairy-tale expectations in a key way – Aurelie isn’t a “chosen one.” They are an ordinary human with ordinary limitations, and they cannot bring Coyne to justice on their own.

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The canonical fairy-tale introduction “Once upon a time…” is laden with message. It tells listeners that the story they’re about to hear took place in a faraway past, in a world similar to ours but unbound by the laws of nature. It sets the expectation of a probable use of magic either as a primary source of conflict or a problem-solving mechanism, or both. Usually, though not always, it heralds an eventual happy ending.

Every culture and folk tradition has its own equivalent phrase, and they all adhere more or less to the same template: Once a long time ago… (Iceland); On an old day, in the old times… (Korea); In the ancient time… (India); Once there was, and once there wasn’t… (Turkey); A long time ago, in the days of our ancestors… (Nigeria).

In researching this piece I found it apropos that German, the original language of Iron John, has its own lesser-known stock introduction: In den alten Zeiten, in denen das Wünschen noch geholfen hat… or “In the old days, when wishing still helped…”

There’s a world-weariness, a disenchantment built into the phrase that feels terribly current: Once upon a time magic was real, and now it’s not. Once upon a time we could alter our reality simply by wishing, and now we can’t. The storyteller has seen enough to know that these bygone methods for influencing our fate have lost all their potency. Our present moment calls for a different approach.

When the power of wishing has been exhausted, what comes next?

Lorenc hit upon the answer while revising the script for Iron Jo, a process that coincided with the pandemic and the various social movements it catalyzed:

“The concept of making the show about something that specifically highlighted or discussed genderqueer identities pretty quickly morphed into a show that was really about social upheaval in general. I was personally getting very interested in labor rights and environmentalism and also anti- capitalist thoughts through the next couple of drafts, and so that really became the centerpiece of the story.”

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Western fairy tales have a roster of familiar adversaries. A non-exhaustive list: wicked witches, wicked stepmothers, mischievous magicians, bloodthirsty giants, bridge-dwelling trolls, fire-breathing dragons, imps, goblins, ogres, and wolves both big and bad. These beings have a range of corrupt appetites and an arsenal of sneaky tactics for satisfying them. Depending on the moral lesson being imparted, they might steal your firstborn or your voice, lure you into their oven with the promise of candy, grind your bones to make their bread, plunge you into a hundred-year sleep, or devour your grandmother and wear her clothing. The methods for breaking their enchantments are equally fantastical: bestowing a kiss, crying healing tears, destroying a bespelled artifact, guessing the villain’s real name and speaking it aloud.

But Iron Jo’s villain Coyne is mundane, not magical. There is no spell to break his greed. Instead, the townspeople of Iron Jo must resort to collective action to topple him.

“They first attempt to have a dialogue with Coyne Enterprises,” Lorenc explains, “and share their concerns with them.”

Unsurprisingly, Coyne is not interested in those concerns. So instead the village’s inhabitants set to work dismantling his empire – literally. They pick up their tools and take apart the Coyne Enterprises tower, piece by piece. After, they drive Coyne back to Iron Jo’s pond to make him clean up his mess.

Most fairy tales have a moral, and The Ballad of Iron Jo is no different. Its message is simple and timely: Only by working together do we stand a chance of defeating our oppressors. Until then, “happily ever after” will be forever out of reach.

The Ballad of Iron Jo

• Where: Bag&Baggage Productions, The Vault Theatre, 350 E. Main St., Hillsboro
• When: April 25-May 11
• Tickets/Schedule: Here