Ralph Lee, the giant crustacean, lizard, skeleton, magician, and creator of one of New York’s traditions, the Village Halloween Parade, died Friday at his Manhattan home. he was 87 years old.
His wife, Casey Compton, was confirmed dead. She said his health had been deteriorating for several months.
Mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer, director, but above all, one of the most prolific and original designers in the field of puppetry. His evocative masks and figures were also found in his own work. Metwee River Theater Company She has performed with the Metropolitan Opera, 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 fantastical puppets towering above the audience and controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous dolls is Gilda He Ate Radnor, Laraine Newman, Jane He Ate Curtin and others. “Land shark” It appeared on the doorsteps of unsuspecting women in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, and has returned several times over the years.
The mask was also one of Lee’s hallmarks. His designs can be scary, sad or fantastical.
“There’s something mystical about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts was turned over to exhibit his work. “And the crux of the mystery is how inanimate objects come to life. Masks need to be able to breathe. Masks have a fixed facial expression, but if you manipulate it well, you can see how it changes.”
Mr. Lee put all his skills and interests into producing the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village. The parade was first performed in 1974 with George Barteniev and his production collaboration with Crystal Fields at the New City Theatre. A modest announcement in The Times promoted the event.
“At 5 p.m., the pageant parade begins at Fort Off-Off-Broadway, Theater for the New City on Jane and West Streets, meanders across Greenwich Village, and on Washington Square. There will be a round dance,” the announcement said. The parade was supposed to be “temporary entertainment” featuring musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to dress up and participate in the procession.
It was not an immediate success.
“There weren’t many other people around,” Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all with sparklers, and it was like we were looking at each other.”
But the following year, the parade was bigger, the crowds were bigger, and Mr. Lee won an Obie Award. Soon, the building became a glamorous staple of his October calendar in the city, growing so large that in 1985 it had to be moved from the Village’s narrow side street to America Street. Lee stepped down from running the show around that time, but the show continued for decades.
“Halloween is for the child in all of us. Halloween gives people, especially adults, permission to do as they please,” he told The Times in 1982. told the paper.
Ralph Minor Lee was born on July 9, 1935 in Middlebury, Vermont. His father, William, was the dean of Middlebury College, and his mother, Mary Louise (minor) Lee, taught dance there.
He grew up in Middlebury and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse for his first few years, where he appeared in his first plays. He painted a cat police officer, he said. 2016 interview When he participated in the Primary Stages Off Broadway Oral History project, he specifically remembers saying the feline line, “I’ve got Nice.”
“There was news that I was going to the theater,” he recalled. “Because I’m really into it.”
There was also an early interest in puppetry.
“When I was about 12, I started making puppets and developed my own little puppet show with all hand puppets,” he said in the paper. dictation history It was recorded for the Folklife Center at the Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, New York. “I used to play at school meetings and birthday parties.”
He graduated from Amherst College in 1957 and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study dance and drama in Europe before venturing into theater in New York.
He appeared in small parts in three Broadway shows beginning with 1960’s “Caligula” and began working with experimental Open Theater troupes in the late 1960s. After the group disbanded in 1973, he returned to Vermont and took a teaching position at Bennington College.
He staged a groundbreaking theatrical event called “Casserole” in Bennington in the spring of 1974, which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic work that confronts the audience with varying levels of reality and fantasy.” evaluated. The scene, which incorporated Mr. Lee’s puppet, was staged throughout the campus, with audiences moving from one hay wagon scene to the next.
“I’ve never done anything like that before in my life,” he told the Folklife Center’s Oral History. “And this was the first time I actually saw my dolls outdoors, and they seemed to acquire a kind of life outdoors that they didn’t have indoors.”
It was a bit of a leap from there to the Halloween parade, but for decades Lee continued to put on theater productions indoors as well as outdoors. He became artistic director of the Metwee River Company shortly after it was founded by alumni of the Bennington School of Drama. Mr. Compton) he put on a show in 1975, and in the decades that followed, he moved to Lake Morrow State Park in upstate New York, the lawn of Putney School in Vermont, Windsor in Massachusetts He Lake Park, Central Park, We had shows all over the place, including gardens. Such as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.
These and other works that Mr. Lee published were often based on the traditions and myths of various cultures. He has traveled to Mexico for many years to work with Suna Jibajom, a group of writers working to preserve Mayan culture, creating new theatrical productions with the group on each visit.
“Most of our shows are based on folklore material from different cultures, which is very inspiring,” he said at the Folklife Center’s Oral History. “It deals with the forces of nature and how they work, how they collide, and how things are resolved.”
Lee first married Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959 but divorced in 1973. In addition to Compton, whom he married in 1982, he has three children from his first marriage: Heather Lee, Jennifer Lee, and Joshua Lee. Daughter from second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee. She has 6 grandchildren. and great-granddaughter.
Mr. Lee’s dolls were generally meticulously crafted works of craftsmanship that bordered on art. But Lee’s creature that may have been seen by more people than anyone else, the “SNL” land shark, he said was made together from foam, cloth and rubber laminates that were lying around the house. said.
“People still know about that shark,” he told The Post Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For many, it’s my claim to fame.”
“When I was making it, I thought that once I used it, I would peel it,” he added.
In a 1998 interview with The Times, he admitted that his work can be temporary, but he wanted more than that when he carved wooden masks for dolls. said there was
“The sculptor in me wants my work to be immortal,” he said. “I think I’ve always had the urge to create something eternal.”
