‘The Billy Club Puppets’ @ Hip Pocket Theatre

Photos by Shannon Atkinson

—Ryan Maffei

I love coming out to Hip Pocket Theatre.

I love that their shows always start just late enough to ensure you’ll make it in time (for summer shows, generally 9 p.m.), or the way metropolitan Texas dissolves into big-sky open-field Texas (and back again) as you cruise the highways toward its twisted gravel entrance, marked by whimsical wooden signs (“almost there!”). I love how the path into the theatre feels designed to shock you with a sublime sunset as you round the corner, and I love the little bandstand and its spirited musicians, old-timers and up-and-comers you may never see again.

I don’t love the stories of raccoon’s nests in the restrooms, but I’ve never seen any. [Editor’s note: Me neither, I think it’s a legend.]

I love the sense of family you get from every corner, whether or not you know it’s baked into HPT’s almost 50-year history. I love how thrilled everyone in charge is to show you what’s on tonight, or the played-up part of the opening remarks where they ask you to turn off your phone and surrender to the outdoor magic. I love the stage, a palace of wooden beams extending out to the audience (bring a pillow; they’ve got you for bug spray). I love how, no matter how deep into summer it is, the weather is always bizarrely enchanting, all breezy tranquility. I love the heady rides home in pitch dark, marveling over how good what we just saw was.

And I love that no matter what you came all the way out there to see, dollars to donuts it’s something you’re not going to catch anywhere else—and even when it’s, oh, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a sublime production of which they mounted last July, there’ll be a loving, homegrown quality to the material. The Billy Club Puppets is the second production of a Federico GarciaLorca play that the company has hired Yvonne Duque-Guerrero to helm this decade; the last one, El Malefico de Mariposa, had a similar sense of both play and celebration. That one also had fabulous costumes, and the feel of honoring a culture undersung on stage.

Lorca was a victim of his country’s political unrest, one more passionately pulsing romantic heart straining against oppressive forces from above. His pen was wielded deftly enough to pierce through his historical moment, and his words—so beautiful on the ear (no translator is credited here)—survive, while the regime that took his life crumbled away long ago. The Billy Club Puppets is an unusual early work from Lorca, never premiered in its time, which draws from Guignol-esque farce and commedia dell’arte. The odd title may simply serve as a marquee-sized placeholder for the proper one: The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita.

I confess that there is a disappointment to the main title, for The Billy Club Puppets is not much of a puppet show. At certain stylized moments, puppets replace the humans on stage, who, to be fair, cavort around in exaggerated fashion to great delight, in (speaking of exaggerated fashion) to-die-for, over-the-top garb. Those out for a hard puppetry fix will not be satisfied. But it captures the sardonic silliness of an old-fashioned Punch and Judy show with charm and aplomb. (My companion opined that a scene where a woman is chased upstairs and billy-clubbed to death was still a bridge too far, even if puppets stood in for the moment.)

Hip Pocket darling Ron Fernandez, an inescapable staple of every season, serves as a sort of MC (“Mosquito”), as well as Rosita’s father. I have yet to see Fernandez do “realistic”—that isn’t Hip Pocket’s default style. But his utter lack of restraint, inexhaustibility, and penchant for choices that appear obtuse if not unhinged are his great virtues as an actor. As Rosita’s father he crudely barrels through her objections, insisting she submit to a man in whom she has no interest—and his pushy charmlessness hits just right. Onstage, Fernandez is also highly generous and supportive with his fellow actors.

I had a favorite in this production: my companion and I could not stop cracking up at Liam Markland’s choices as Cocoliche. In a marvelously fluid performance, Markland appears to have realized that he didn’t actually have to choose between subtlety and hyperbole to suit the tone of the play. As the romantic lead, he manages to win us all over in the conventional way, while deliciously unraveling his hero’s composure at every available turn. He also has a professional-class baritone voice he gets to show off at a choice early moment. Markland might’ve fit in a bit better by being a bit rougher-hewn, but excellent work is excellent work.

Rosita is played by Grace Hays (all the actors put on an accent, unplaceable enough to feel OK). Hays was a standout in the aforementioned Midsummer, playing Helena; she has both a strength and a girlish je ne sais quoi that make for a beguiling lead here. Treading the line between deadpan and sincere, what I found most affecting about her delivery and singing was what I’d describe as plainness: a matter-of-factness, a fragility, a way of hanging back from full commitment that makes the moments of full commitment weave wonderfully together. As the production’s “straight man,” Hays skillfully finds her place in this loopy contraption.

Paul Heyduck was also charming in Midsummer, but in a less prominent role; here his freak flag is allowed to unfurl. As somewhat extraneous but still welcome third suitor Currito, he is called on to cavort more than most, and has a grand old time with it. (I’d be interested to see the prequel where Rosita and Currito are trying to make it work.) Two more Hip Pocket staples, the always-game Kristi Ramos Toler and the always-likable Corina Sosa, round out the show’s “good guys.” I do wish Amanda Merrill, who mostly assisted the ensemble, had been given more featured business—the only actor not allowed to have way too much fun.

As the not-quite-titular villain Don Cristobita, who is guarding a secret (!!!), Coleman Hahn has to glower and growl under near-impenetrable layers of costume and makeup; at times, he struggles to match both his costars’ and costume’s distracting impact. Hahn’s work drives home something about the show’s tone that calls back to what I said about Hip Pocket’s work in general being “homegrown.” Often, Hip Pocket corrals enough airborne magic to transcend any sort of “let’s put on a show in an unusually elaborate barn” quality. There’s something even scrappier than that about Billy Club, a handful of candy stolen between meals.

This is reinforced by how Jeff Stanfield gently festoons the wooden space—the wondrous thing about the Hip Pocket stage is how reliably it fills in what you can’t see—but belied by Susan Austin’s magnificent costumes. HP’s shows often incorporate a live performance of an original soundtrack, this time by Darrin Kobetich. Masterful puppet designer Vermont Horner is behind what little puppetry there is, and while it can’t hold a candle to Mad Dog Blues’ blue ox head, it certainly does the job. Nikki DeShea Smith’s lighting flatters a tricky-to-light space. And is props designer Matthew Hicks to be thanked for that fish fountain?

Many others contributed: production manager Elizabeth Holmes, probably not the one in prison in Bryan; stage manager and Hip Pocket managing director Gianina Lambert, who did opening remarks; ass’t stage managers Tommy Buckner and K. Jasmine Cintora; tech director Lee Nesler; scenic, costume and lighting assistants Ezra Steward (who did the set painting), Abigale Hunt and Maddison Duncan; banner painter Carlos Guerrero; photographer Shannon Atkinson; and Bruce Balentine, who transcribed additional music by Manuel de Falla. Several of these artists are mentees if not mentors with the theatre’s Diane Simons Mentorship Program.

In The Billy Club Puppets, Yvonne Duque-Guerrero has pulled together a bevy of winsome elements that function as, perhaps, the ideal appetizer to what Hip Pocket is capable of. At a brisk intermissionless hour, a show that starts at 9PM still promises to get you home at a reasonable bedtime. I’ve seen many more spectacular and, perhaps, cohesive shows out at this splendidly singular theatre, though this is as poetically written as most of the rest. But every one of them is easy to root for, like the theatre itself. Go check it out, and expect to be drawn back by some of the innumerable other reasons to love Hip Pocket Theatre.

WHEN: June 20-July 13, 2025
WHERE: HPT, 1950 Silver Creek Road, Fort Worth
WEB: hippocket.org