Evanston’s Theatre Zarko performs at Steppenwolf Garage

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Michael Montenegro | Photo by Laura Montenegro

Updated: January 31, 2012 8:24PM

Birth is a good place to start.

That’s true in general and it’s true of “He Who,” a new puppet-theater piece from Michael Montenegro’s Theatre Zarko, which debuts Feb. 4 in Steppenwolf’s Garage Theatre.

It’s also true that the world isn’t necessarily better off when some things are born into it. Take the monster baby in “He Who,” who may actually be less a human infant than a big, troublesome Idea, and who makes life difficult for the four women who may or may not be his mother and the old, dying patriarch who may or may not have spawned him.

Got all that? No? Well, don’t feel bad. We are talking puppet symbolist theater, after all.

“It’s kind of hard to describe what this show is about,” said Montenegro, who has been doing puppet theater most of his life. For the past 25 years, he’s enriched Chicago theater with dazzling puppetry design for the likes of Mary Zimmerman in addition to his own, under-the-radar productions. “It’s been almost like designing a piece of jazz. It’s an abstract piece, kind of impressionistic, with lots of metaphor. Which, consequently, is driving the actors crazy.”

Just a suggestion

With very little expectation of success, Montenegro launched Theatre Zarko in 2009 at Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center. There, he often begins his production process with a set of images or ideas that suggest other images and ideas and so on until a show is, well, born.

And, contrary to Montenegro’s expectations, the reaction of audiences and critics to those shows has been highly receptive. In his review of Zarko’s 2009 production “The Sublime Beauty of Hands,” Reader critic Tony Adler decried the diffidence that had kept the longtime Evanston resident’s work out of the public eye and called him “as extraordinary a performer as he is a visual artist.”

All of which has led to Zarko’s big-time debut at the Steppenwolf, funded by nearly $13,000 raised on kickstarter.com, and beginning, as usual, with little more than a few fertile ideas. For Montenegro, creating a show is less about developing a storyline than “breaking down psychological barriers and moving into the uncanny.”

An idea is born

“I guess you could say ‘He Who’ is about the idea of birth,” Montenegro said. “The birth of ideas, as well as the birth of children. And the fact that birth is kind of neutral: It can bring good things into the world as well as bad. And my observation is that in society, people are often being ruled by individuals who are rather infantile — when they’re not being ruled by their egos, which are also infantile.

“I’m kind of discovering what it’s about as I’m creating it. It may be that other people will be able to say what it’s about more easily than me.”

One thing he is sure about, though, is the mood of the show.

“It’s dark,” he said with a laugh. “Dark, dark, dark. And sometimes darkly funny.”