Yes, I Played a Horse on Broadway
A year of War Horse at Lincoln Center. Eight shows a week, three operators per puppet, no view of the show. What being inside a horse taught me about craft, listening, and shipping work.
Eight shows a week, from 2011 to 2013 at Lincoln Center Theater, I was inside a horse.
The horse was Joey, the protagonist of War Horse at the Vivian Beaumont. The puppet was the size of an actual horse. Three actors operated him at any given time. The audience could see all three of us. The puppet was so committed to being a horse that the audience forgot we were there.
The thing nobody tells you about playing a horse is that the most important muscle is your ear.
Listening as the only craft
The puppetry in War Horse is Bunraku-style: three visible operators, one animal. You cannot see your fellow operators when you are inside the puppet. You can feel their breathing. You can feel their weight shifts. You cannot watch their faces. The trio has to act as one animal. The way you do that is you listen. You listen to the actor playing Albert. You listen to the line. You listen to the way the line is said tonight, which is a little different from how it was said last night, because the actor is a person and tonight is a different night. And you respond, in the body of the horse, before you have time to think.
The entire art is response. Not preparation, not technique. Response. Everything else is what you bring to the room so you have something available to respond with.
The Tuesday matinee rule
Craft is what gets you to the same level on Tuesday at 2:00 PM that you reach on Saturday at 8:00 PM. Eight shows a week is not romantic. It is a job. The audience that paid for the Tuesday matinee deserves the same horse the Saturday audience gets. The way you give it to them is by getting your hands on the puppet, getting your weight under the puppet, hearing the cue, and not deciding tonight is the night you skip the easy work.
Most of the AI conversations I have now end up back at this puppet. The model gives you a great answer when you give it a great prompt, for the same reason the puppet gave the audience a horse when three of us listened. There is no version of either where the operator gets to be precious. You show up, you hear the cue, you respond. You let the thing the audience is paying to see be the thing on stage, not the thing in your head.
Invisible by design
The hardest part of being inside Joey was that I could never see the show. The show is what the audience sees. By design, I was inside the part of the show that the audience was meant to forget I existed inside. That is also a craft lesson. The work was successful when nobody noticed I was there.
I think about that any time I ship a piece of software, or an interview, or a deck for a client. The work is successful when the room responds to the thing, not to the operator. The operator is the puppet’s heart, hind, and head. The audience is watching the horse.
I held that horse on stage about three hundred and twenty times. I never got tired of the cue. I got tired of the subway home. The cue itself was always the same job, and the job was always: listen, and respond.
Cheers.