In the early 1990s, children’s author Corinne Demas started writing “The Littlest Matryoshka,” a story about a small wooden nesting doll named Nina who becomes lost from a toy shop shelf. She originally wrote the tale for her then 10-year-old daughter, Artemis, as a Christmas present.
“It’s one little story that I wrote for my daughter and it took off,” Demas said during a recent interview at her home office in Amherst, where several matryoshka dolls nestled on a nearby bookshelf.
The story traces the journey of six Russian nesting dolls who are sent to America, after which Nina, the youngest “sister,” gets lost and survives all manner of danger — falling down a waterfall and a drainpipe, being buried in a snowdrift, nearly being plucked away by a great blue heron — to be reunited with the other dolls and the child who has bought the incomplete set, Jessie.
Now, almost two decades since the book was published in 1999, the Amherst string puppet ensemble Picture Book Theatre will bring the story of “The Littlest Matryoshka” to life through elaborate and colorful sets, puppets and props in an adaptation that debuts Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst.
Demas says this isn’t the first time one of her stories has been adapted for a live performance; last year, the New Bedford Ballet debuted a children’s ballet based on “The Littlest Matryoshka.” However, she said she’s excited to see Picture Book Theatre’s production because of the group’s previous work adapting a number of stories by Eric Carle, the Carle museum’s namesake.
“It’s magical to have all these very talented and different people involved with my stories,” Demas said. “I can’t imagine anything more wonderful for an author than to see other creative people who are in other mediums taking what I started and turning it into something new.”
On a recent Sunday, Therese Brady Donohue, director and founder of Picture Book Theatre, gave stage directions to four puppeteers working on “The Littlest Matryoshka.” During a scene in which a Great blue heron tries to eat the small Russian nesting doll, Nina, one member of the all-female string puppeteer team opened the bird’s jaw and made it trot onstage with a lifelike dance in its step.
This past winter, Donohue created all of the props, puppets and sets for the 20-minute production with a painstaking attention to detail. She worked directly with Demas and the book’s illustrator, artist Kathryn Brown of Florence, to match the art style of the children’s book and characters in the “The Littlest Matryoshka.”
For instance, Donahue said she created a puppet for a character named “the woman in the puffy coat,” who accidently knocks Nina off her toy shop shelf, separating her from her five other nesting doll sisters. In the original book, the woman is only partially illustrated.
“There was a key character in the story that there was no illustration for, so I had to get it created,” Donohue said. “So, then I had to get the illustrator, Kathryn, to come over to my studio and work on the [illustrated] blow up that I had. We worked together for a couple hours and were able to establish the character.”
The theatrical puppet adaptation also features narration by Demas and was digitally scored by composer and former University of Massachusetts Amherst music professor Karen Tarlow, Donohue said. In addition, photographer Mary Ellen Kelly has been documenting the entire process of creating the production from scratch during the past year.
Before the group’s rehearsal last week, Donohue pointed out props and puppets behind the stage. One of the behind-the-scenes stage tricks for making sure the other matryoshka dolls stayed on their shelf when Nina falls was solved by placing magnets on the shelf and underneath the dolls.
The littlest matryoshka doll’s journey to find her way home isn’t just a story for children. Demas, a longtime English professor at Mount Holyoke College, said her book has a universal theme — that of a journey to overcome trials and tribulations in life, which was partially inspired by the ancient Greek tale of Odysseus in Homer’s “Odyssey.”
“They’re really for the child spirit in all of us,” Demas said. “You don’t have to be a child to be able to be there and just take a moment and spend it in a really lovely imaginative place. More than ever, we need those kinds of moments … To be able to be there and to really just let yourself go, I think it’s actually more important for adults than children.”
Chris Goudreau can be reached at cgoudreau@gazettenet.com.
Picture Book Theatre’s premiere of “The Littlest Matryoshka” take places Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Eric Carle Museum. Additional performances are Nov. 23 at 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. and Nov. 24 at 11 a.m. A special presentation about the production, “From book to stage with author, illustrator, puppet maker and composer,” takes place this Sunday at 1:30 p.m. before the puppet show.
For more information about the production and to purchase tickets, visit carlemuseum.org/content/upcoming-events#event_3259.