After apartheid was abolished in South Africa, something called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed. Its intent was to listen to stories of human rights violations as a prerequisite for any reconciliation that might take place in the future—and these stories of blacks hurt, killed, neglected, and abused at the hands of whites and white racism were horrifying.

It was a kind of problematic national theater, the artist William Kentridge observed.

A full confession can bring amnesty and immunity from prosecution or civil procedures for the crimes committed. Therein lies the central irony of the Commission. As people give more and more evidence of the things they have done they get closer and closer to amnesty and it gets more and more intolerable that these people should be given amnesty.

He and the writer/literary historian Jane Taylor, along with the Handspring Puppet Company, created a puppet production called Ubu and the Truth Commission loosely based on the Human Rights Violations hearings and Alfred Jarry's absurdist 1896 production about the bad king Ubu.

One striking aspect of the hearings was that the stories often had to be interpreted, so that these terrible stories were passing through the mouths of others on their way to being part of the public record. The people translating them in the sessions were hearing them for the first time, just like everyone else, and yet they were also speaking them.

Taylor writes, in the catalog for The Puppet Show currently at the Frye, that you could see the interpreters feel the shock of the words as they translated. They added another emotional level to the hearings—the shock of the listener made visible at the moment of speech.

When we talk about puppetry in political terms, we're usually talking about a weak or corrupt politician. But Taylor writes about another function of puppetry in the catalog (for sale at the Frye bookstore):

Because of cultural biases, there are deeply negative constructions attached to the notion of being a puppet. It is instructive to recognize that puppets in some meaningful sense reassert the necessarily social and reciprocal exchange upon which language is founded.

A series of storyboarded scenes from Ubu and the Truth Commission are included in The Puppet Show.