RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now, a story about mime on the radio. Yes, this will probably end up as a skit on "Saturday Night Live." It is OK, we can take it. So, without further ado...
The experimental Swiss mime troupe known as Mummenschanz took Broadway by storm in the 1970s. Now, the masked performers are bringing their hard-to-describe characters back to the U.S. for a national tour celebrating the group's 40th anniversary.
Andrea Shea of member station WBUR caught up with them in Boston.
ANDREA SHEA, BYLINE: Picture a pair of performers dressed in black, wearing velvet masks with large notepads attached - two for eyes and one for a mouth. They pull out fat magic markers and doodle eye and mouth expressions on individual sheets of the pads; wide eyes, smiles, then pouts, grimaces.
(SOUNDBITE OF A PERFORMANCE)
SHEA: They're engaging in a silent conversation by ripping off the pages to reveal each new expression.
(SOUNDBITE OF A PERFORMANCE)
FLORIANNA FRASSETTO: They're competing of who speaks best and who speaks biggest and who speaks greatest.
SHEA: Sixty-two-year-old Florianna Frassetto is one of the three performers who dreamed up Mummenschanz's Notepad People" in the early 1970s.
FRASSETTO: Finally, they just don't find the correct communication level and so they start tearing one another's faces off.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Ow.
FRASSETTO: Occasionally, it happens in life.
SHEA: This isn't your white-faced, Marcel Marceau mime. Mummenschanz's bizarre masks, costumes and choreography cloak the human form, to tell stories that convey messages about our lives. Frassetto describes a creature she calls The Blob. On stage, it struggles to get its amorphous figure up onto a platform.
FRASSETTO: It's trying to get on a higher level and it doesn't find the balance. It gets sucked down and it falls off. Everyone identifies with it. Let alone that a lot of people nowadays identify with it because they're so fat. But I won't be nasty, even though - change your food, nutrition values. I'm all for it, I'm going to start a political party.
SHEA: Mummenschanz began in Switzerland as three artists and hippies with counter-cultural ideas. Frassetto, Andres Bossard and Bernie Schurch also had an eye for trash. They recycled ventilation tubes into giant Slinkies they could crawl inside and animate on stage. They used toilet paper rolls, suitcases, masking tape, wads of clay - and they took their junk around the world. But Frassetto says when they landed on Broadway in 1977, they figured...
FRASSETTO: Well, we'll stay four weeks. We will write postcards to everybody and say, hey, we're on Broadway, kids. And then we started selling out for the next X-months and we stayed on three years.
SHEA: At the time the show was revolutionary. Kermit the Frog was ahead of the curve, hosting Mummenschanz on "The Muppet Show' in 1976.
(SOUNDBITE OF "THE MUPPET SHOW")
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHEA: A human-sized caterpillar's plump, plush body shimmies up a ramp. When it curls up into a ball, like a water bug does, it looks strong and graceful, offering a hint of the athletic performer inside. It was one of the creations that made Mummenschanz an international success. Then, in 1992, member Andres Bossard died of AIDS. The troupe carried on.
Bernie Schurch, the third performer and Frassetto's ex-husband, moved off the stage and into the director's chair for this tour. So Frassetto is working with three new members, including Philip Egli, a choreographer and dancer from Switzerland.
PHILIP EGLI: In Switzerland, it's a brand like the Swiss chocolate almost.
SHEA: The 46-year-old Egli grew up on Mummenschanz.
EGLI: As a child, one of my first theatre experiences was that I went to Zurich with my mother, with my brothers and sisters, and we went to see some strange theatre piece. And coming out of the theatre, I probably saw from then on the cars not as cars but faces with two eyes.
SHEA: Mummenschanz makes us see objects and ourselves differently, Egli says. Nothing is as it appears. The troupe took a lunchtime audience by surprise with a pop-up performance in Boston's Quincy Market.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Oh, look at that. Look at that.
SHEA: A huge gloved hand as big as a person, sits on top of legs in black tights. It sneaks up and grabs a passerby. The effect is surreal and funny.
Forty-two-year-old Brian Woods was in Boston for business with no idea what he was watching.
BRIAN WOODS: But this is a pretty cool act - innovative. I've seen things like Blue Man Group. But I've not seen anybody do anything quite like this, so this is pretty cool.
SHEA: The magazine Variety actually described Blue Man Group as Mummenschanz on acid. Performer Egli says the troupe's success lies in its simplicity.
The most beautiful pieces also in dance, they start from a black space. They don't start with the set and the costumes. They start with some people on stage. I like to talk about human beings, even if we are now in masks and we hide actually very much in Mummenschanz, but we talk about us. No?
Of course he's speaking figuratively. They never talk on stage. But in interviews, founder Florianna Frassetto is surprisingly chatty for mime.
FRASSETTO: Well, I guess I shut up the whole day, then I have to let it out. Right?
(LAUGHTER)
SHEA: For NPR News, I'm Andrea Shea.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)