Pointless Theatre Co., which will receive the John Aniello Award for Outstanding Emerging Theatre Company at the 30th Annual Helen Hayes Awards on April 21, got its provocative name because it, literally, was without a Point.

Co-Artistic Director Matt Reckeweg explains, “We were undergrads at University of Maryland and decided to do a puppet version of Harry Nilsson’s concept album from the 1970s, The Point. We planned the whole thing, and built a ton of puppets, and then it all got canceled because of copyright issues.” Co-Artistic Director Patti Kalil chimes in, “We were literally Point-less. We had spent months on it, so it also felt like a pointless time. The next year we applied to do a Capital Fringe show and had to come up with a company name, and it just sort of stuck.”

Far from being pointless in the traditional sense, the company draws on the collaborative strength and passion of 22 loyal company members. All are University of Maryland graduates, and some travel regularly from outside the area to work on specific productions. Kalil explains, “After our second Capital Fringe production, and after we decided to incorporate as a nonprofit, five of us dropped our jobs and moved back to DC. We realized later how ridiculous this was, but one person just followed another, and here we are.”

The Aniello Award, named for the late patron known for his particular support of young artists, provides encouragement and exposure for a fledgling theatre company. It also recognizes that company’s ability to persevere in a tough market. “That’s very important to us,” Reckeweg  says. “We’re constantly re-investing in our own ensemble. We are actors, painters, dancers. We thrive only if we keep pushing ourselves as a group.”  Kalil adds, “We know what we want to do. We know who we want to be. But it’s also about how we make the money back so we can pay people what they deserve, and so we can put on the next one.”

Kalil and Reckeweg name CulturalDC as one of the first organizations to recognize their ambitions, and to provide tangible support. “We needed space and we needed someone to partner with,” Kalil explains, “but we weren’t lost creatively—just the opposite. I think they appreciated that.” As part of CulturalDC’s Mead Theatre Lab Program, the Pointless company now performs regularly in the Lab’s 60-seat black box theatre.   

Unlike most puppet-based companies, Pointless is not focused on young audiences. “We’re experimental, even abstract sometimes,” Kalil says. “That’s a blessing and a curse. When it works, it’s amazing and the audience responds. But sometimes it doesn’t work, and we need to learn how to prevent that.”

The company’s roster of productions includes a rollicking Canterbury and Hugo Ball: A Super Spectacular Dada Adventure. Opening April 10 is Sleeping Beauty: A Puppet Ballet, based on the classic ballet and Tchaikovsky score. “It’s a completely different show than the Sleeping Beauty we did four years ago,” Reckeweg says, referring to the company’s debut at the 2010 Capital Fringe festival, “It’s the same basic concept, though, and it gives us a chance to look at how far we’ve come with puppetry and with dance. We have an eight week rehearsal period but the company started ballet classes a month before that. And they’re not just dancing, they’re dancing while being puppeteers.”

Both artists embrace the unique experience that puppetry creates for the audience. “There’s something alienating when the audience comes in and realizes we’re going to tell the story with these particular tools, with these things we made,” Reckeweg says. Kalil adds, “A puppet stabbing someone is very different from an actor stabbing someone. There’s something more real about it, precisely because we’re acknowledging that it can’t possibly be real.”

For Kalil and Reckeweg, the limitations of puppetry become the genre’s most freeing aspects. “The more that we do it, the more I see how expansive it is,” Reckeweg says. “There’s a tradition, but there’s no rule book.” Kalil adds, “There’s no one way to make a puppet, or direct a puppet show. Anytime you talk to an older puppeteer, they always say, ‘We just started doing it.’”

Sleeping Beauty: A Puppet Ballet plays at the Mead Theatre Lab, 916 G Street, NW, April 9 through May 3. 

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