Off Broadway

Disfarmer

 (St. Ann's Warehouse; 274 seats; $42 top)

By SAM THIELMAN

'Disfarmer'

A St. Ann's Warehouse presentation of a play in one act conceived, designed and directed by Dan Hurlin, created by the ensemble with text by Sally Oswald.
 
With: Matt Acheson, Eric B. Davis, Chris M. Green, Hurlin, Guy Klucevsek, Tom Lee, Darius Mannino, Eric Wright.
 

As beautiful and precise as a model railroad, Dan Hurlin's lush "Disfarmer" fills the stage with all the tiny, heartbreaking miracles that make up the lonely life of his puppet hero. Scale is just for fun here: A doll-sized hat blows through a four-inch-high forest, sticking in a miniature tree; a door large enough for a garden gnome flaps; and the first of Hurlin's many tornadoes blows life-sized detritus across the stage. The final result is much more than the sum of its carefully crafted parts. Moving, poignant and occasionally hilarious, "Disfarmer" is a wonder.

Given life by five talented puppeteers, Mike Disfarmer claims to be a foundling child blown onto his mother's doorstep by a tornado. He's now working as a portrait photographer while living alone -- very alone -- in Arkansas.

When we first meet him, Disfarmer is at about half scale: large enough to come up to the waists of the puppeteers. The Disfarmer puppet itself is dressed in Depression-era workday clothes, with glasses perched on a colorless, hairless, expressionless head.

Amazingly, we know what he's thinking nearly all the time simply by watching his body language. We see him get drunk, ponder the inevitability of change and cower in terror of further inclement weather. Either that or being alone.

There's never a moment in which Disfarmer isn't fascinating, but it's particularly interesting to watch him go to sleep: He takes off his shoes, lies under the covers, and while the other puppeteers move on to rearrange the set, one stays behind to make sure Disfarmer breathes, deeply and evenly.

Using the puppet as a guide, Hurlin (aided by Dan Moses Schreier's wonderful bluegrass underscoring) shows us around smalltown Arkansas as rendered atop a half-dozen rolling carts that unfold or roll together to form Disfarmer's house, his studio, his local grocery store and the roads he uses to get there.

All these are populated by furnishings that vary from Disfarmer-scale to wildly larger or smaller -- here a tiny countryside, there a life-size grocery store manned by a puppeteer (whose interactions with the cranky Disfarmer are a lot of fun to watch). The stagehands themselves are costumed in navy and black by Anna Thomford, doubling as townspeople when they're not providing our hero's arms and legs.

Hurlin's counterpoint to all this obsessive attention to detail -- his own and the subject's, as seen in Disfarmer's pictures -- is the tornado itself, which can and will destroy any object in its path. Each time it passes -- and sometimes it seems to be blowing by only in Disfarmer's mind -- it leaves our hero diminished, literally. By the end of the show, he's a tiny little thing, railing about the quickest and safest ways to escape the ravages of the weather.

In an odd and totally unexpected way, Hurlin is using his misanthropic, shrinking hero to illustrate transience, both in the character's slow miniaturization and in his portraits, regularly displayed on a scrim behind the main action. The people in the photos are mostly dead. And this man can't keep himself from fading away, not even with his work. By the time our 90 minutes with Disfarmer has ended, it's become more than a clever biography or a series of dazzling technical feats: It's shown us life, in miniature.

Costumes, Anna Thomford; lighting, Tyler Micoleau; original music, Dan Moses Schreier; video, David Soll; production stage manager, Aaron Rosenblum. Opened Jan. 27, 2009. Reviewed Jan. 29. Running time: 1 HOUR, 30 MIN.