Ralph Lee, a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses, as well as an enduring New York tradition, the Village Halloween Parade, died Friday at his Manhattan home. He turned 87.
His wife, Casey Compton, confirmed the death. She said his health had been deteriorating for several months.
mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer, and director, but above all, he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive creators. His evocative masks and figures were featured in his own productions Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York City Opera, Theater for the New City, and various dance and drama companies.
His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous dolls ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others – it was the “land shark” who showed up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” skit and returned several times over the years.
Masks were another Lee signature; his designs can be scary, sad or phantasmagorical.
“There’s something mysterious about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts was being used for an exhibition of his work, “and the crux of that mystery is that a inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if you manipulate it right, you would swear you can see the expression change.”
Mr. Lee brought all his skills and interests to create the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, which he first staged in 1974 with production assistance from George Bartenieff and Crystal Field of Theater for the New City. A modest announcement in The Times promoted the event.
“Starting at 5 p.m., a pageant parade will emerge from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, meandering through Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square,” the announcement said. The parade would be “a passing amusement” with musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to wear costumes and join the procession.
It was not an immediate success.
“There weren’t many people around except us – maybe bums,” Mr. Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all sparklers in hand, kind of looking at each other.”
But the following year, the parade grew, and so did the crowd, making Mr. Lee earned an Obie Award. Soon it was a flamboyant part of the city’s October calendar, so large that in 1985 it had to be moved from the narrow side streets of the village to Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Lee stopped running the show, but it has continued over the decades.
“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he told The Times in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to do whatever they want.”
Ralph Minor Lee was born on July 9, 1935 in Middlebury, Vt. His father, William, was a dean at Middlebury College, where his mother, Mary Louise (Minor) Lee, taught dance.
He grew up in Middlebury and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse for his early years, where he appeared in his first play. He portrayed a cat police officer, he said an interview from 2016 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, and in particular remembered felinely uttering one sentence: “I’ve got neews.”
“The news was I was going to be in the theater,” he recalls, “because I was really hooked.”
Puppetry was also an early interest.
“When I was about 12 years old I started making puppets and I developed my own little puppet theater with all hand puppets,” he said in a statement. oral history recorded for the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, NY “I used to perform for school assemblies and birthday parties, things like that.”
He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, then studied dance and theater in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship before trying theater in New York.
He had minor roles in three Broadway shows, beginning with “Caligula” in 1960, and later in the 1960s began working with the experimental Open Theater troupe. After that group disbanded in 1973, he went back to Vermont, where he took a teaching job at Bennington College.
It was at Bennington in the spring of 1974 that he staged an innovative theatrical event called “Casserole”, which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic piece that confronts the audience with different levels of reality and illusion”. The scenes, which incorporated Mr. Lee’s puppets, were staged all over campus, transporting spectators from one scene to the next in hay wagons.
“I had never done anything like this in my life,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “And it was the first time I saw one of my dolls outside, and it seemed like they were going to have a kind of life outside that they just didn’t have inside.”
From there it was a small jump to the Halloween parade, and for decades Mr. Lee continued to stage theater productions both indoors and outdoors. He became artistic director of the Mettawee River company shortly after it was founded by some of Bennington’s theater graduates (including Ms. Compton) in 1975, and it staged shows in a variety of places over the next several decades – Moreau Lake State Park in upstate New York , the lawn of the Putney School in Vermont, Windsor Lake Park in Massachusetts, Central Park and the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and many more.
Those works and others that Mr. Lee often drew on traditions and mythologies from a wide variety of cultures. For years he traveled to Mexico to work with Sna Jtz’ibajom, a group of writers that seeks to preserve Mayan culture, creating a new theatrical work with the group each time he visited.
“Most of our shows are based on folk material from one culture or another, and I find that very inspiring,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “You’re dealing with forces of nature and how they work and how they collide, and how things get resolved.”
Lee’s first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Mrs. Compton, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer, and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Mr. Lee’s dolls were generally carefully crafted works of art that bordered on art. But the Lee creature perhaps seen by more people than anyone else, the “SNL” land shark, was, he said, thrown together from foam, fabric and rubber laminate he had lying around the house.
“People still know that shark,” he told The Post-Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For a lot of people, it’s my claim to fame.”
“When I was making it,” he added, “I thought it would take some getting used to and be peeled.”
In his 1998 interview with The Times, he acknowledged that some of his work might be transient, but said that when he carved wooden masks for dolls, he hoped for something more.
“The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I’ve always had this urge to build things for eternity.”