NEW YORK, NY.- Ralph Lee, a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses, as well as one enduring New York tradition, the Village Halloween Parade, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
His wife, Casey Compton, confirmed the death. She said his health had been declining for several months.
Lee was an actor, writer, producer and director, but above all he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive designers. His evocative masks and figures were seen in productions by his own Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York City Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies.
His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous puppets ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others — it was the “land shark” that turned up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch and returned several times over the years.
Masks were another Lee signature; his designs could be scary, sorrowful or phantasmagorical.
“There is something mysterious about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts was given over to an exhibition of his work, “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.”
Lee brought all his skills and interests to bear in creating the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, which he first staged in 1974 with production help from George Bartenieff and Crystal Field of Theater for the New City. A modest announcement in the Times promoted the event.
“Starting at 5 p.m., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square,” the announcement said. The parade was to be “a transient entertainment” with musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to wear costumes and join the procession.
It was not an instant success.
“There were not many people around besides us — maybe bums,” Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all holding sparklers, kind of looking at each other.”
But the next year the parade grew, and so did the audience, earning Lee an Obie Award. Soon it was a flamboyant fixture of the city’s October calendar, so big that in 1985 it had to be moved off the narrow side streets of the Village and onto the Avenue of the Americas. Lee stepped aside from running the show at about that time, but it has continued across the decades.
“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he told the Times in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to act any way they want.”
Ralph Minor Lee was born July 9, 1935, in Middlebury, Vermont. His father, William, was a dean at Middlebury College, where his mother, Mary Louise (Minor) Lee, taught dance.
He grew up in Middlebury, getting his first few years of education in a one-room schoolhouse, where he appeared in his first play. He portrayed a cat policeman, he said in a 2016 interview for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, and he particularly remembered delivering one line, catlike: “I have neeews.”
“The news was that I was going to be in the theater,” he recalled, “because I was really hooked.”
Puppetry was also an early interest.
“When I was about 12 years old I started making puppets, and I developed my own little puppet theater with all hand puppets,” he said in an oral history recorded for the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, New York. “I used to perform for school assemblies and birthday parties, things like that.”
He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, then studied dance and theater in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship before trying his hand at theater in New York.
He had small parts in three Broadway shows, beginning with “Caligula” in 1960, and later in the 1960s began working with the experimental Open Theater troupe. After that group disbanded in 1973, he made his way back to Vermont, taking a teaching job at Bennington College.
It was at Bennington in the spring of 1974 that he staged an innovative theatrical event called “Casserole,” which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic piece which confronts the audience with a variety of levels of reality and illusion.” Its scenes, which incorporated Lee’s puppets, were staged all around the campus, with the spectators transported from one scene to the next in hay wagons.
“I’d never done anything like that before in my life,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “And it was the first time that I had actually seen any of my puppets outdoors, and it seemed like they took on a kind of life outdoors that they just didn’t have inside.”
From there it was a short leap to the Halloween parade, and for decades Lee continued to stage theater productions outdoors as well as in. He became artistic director of the Mettawee River company shortly after it was formed by some Bennington theater graduates (including Compton) in 1975, and it staged shows in all sorts of places over the ensuing decades — Moreau Lake State Park in upstate New York, the lawn of the Putney School in Vermont, Windsor Lake Park in Massachusetts, Central Park and the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and many more.
Those works and others Lee presented often drew on traditions and mythologies from a diverse range of cultures. For years he traveled to Mexico to work with Sna Jtz’ibajom, a writers’ group that seeks to preserve Mayan culture, creating a new theater work with the group each time he visited.
“Most of our shows are based on folk material from one culture or another, and I find that very inspiring,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “You’re dealing with forces of nature and how they operate and how they clash with each other, and how things become resolved.”
In February, he and Compton received a lifetime achievement Obie Award for their work with Mettawee.
Lee’s first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Compton, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Lee’s puppets were generally carefully made works of craftsmanship that bordered on art. But the Lee creature that might have been seen by more people than any, the “SNL” land shark, was, he said, thrown together from foam, cloth and rubber laminate he had lying around the house.
“People still know about that shark,” he told The Post-Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For many people, it is my claim to fame.”
“When I was making it,” he added, “I thought it would get used once and shucked.”
In his 1998 interview with the Times, he acknowledged that some of his work could be ephemeral, but he said that when he carved wooden masks for puppets, he was hoping for something more.
“The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
