El Paso artists make New York theater debut in ‘The Scarecrow’ (2025)

While unpacking his belongings in Chicago this summer, Anthony-Michael Stokes came across a “Muppet Christmas Carol” book published in the early 1990s. As a child, he wrote the names of every puppeteer in the picture book next to their corresponding Muppet.

Stokes is now 41, a graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso and until recently, a theater director in the El Paso Independent School District. He touched Frank Oz’s name next to Miss Piggy in the book – he was obsessed with Miss Piggy, Stokes recalled in a phone call from Chicago.

Stokes spent his childhood in El Paso watching “Sesame Street,” “Fraggle Rock” and “The Muppets.” Decades later, he’s bringing his own puppet characters to life with “The Scarecrow.” The hour-long musical is scheduled to debut Nov. 1 at the historic La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York.

Theater director and producer Ellen Stewart founded La MaMa in the 1960s in Manhattan’s East Village. She and La MaMa helped pioneer the Off-Off-Broadway movement, which focuses on avant-garde works in smaller, more intimate venues than Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters.

Several cast and crew members from El Paso will join Stokes in New York to tell the origin story of the Scarecrow from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” In Stokes’ imagining, the Scarecrow was a Black man who was lynched in early 1900s, Jim Crow-era Kansas before he ended up in Oz. The Scarecrow – played by Stokes – sets out to save the citizens of Winkie country from a growing horde of crows and discover who he is on the journey home.

“I love all these fantasy and sci-fi stories, but it’s weird that in these stories of goblins and witches and aliens there are not a lot of brown people,” Stokes said. “When I looked at the Scarecrow character, I looked at the time period and what’s always missing from these stories. … What’s his story? How did he come to be hanging in that corn field in the early 1900s?”

How puppetry connects the Scarecrow to Jim Crow

L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” has inspired various works of art over the years, from the famous 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland to the 1995 revisionist novel “Wicked,” which led to a Broadway musical adaptation and now a star-studded movie releasing later this year.

“The Scarecrow” fits more closely with “The Woodsman,” a 2012 play using a mix of puppets and live performers to tell the story of the Munchkin who would eventually become the Tin Man. Stokes’ musical also features a mix of live performers and puppets.

The handmade puppets are life-sized, with the Scarecrow standing the tallest at about 7 feet, Stokes estimated. Nine actors round out the cast with four, including Stokes, coming from El Paso. The El Paso cast members said they met Stokes through the performing arts community, such as performing together with UTEP theater, Shakespeare on-the-Rocks and in the Viva! El Paso musical.

Puppetry is physically exhausting, especially when maneuvering a puppet as big as theirs, Stokes described. It puts the body in strange positions, he said.

“People don’t know puppet theater,” Stokes said. “They just think hand puppets, Jim Henson-style, which is of course one way and why so many of us found love with this business. But there’s a vast array.”

Cast member Ashleigh Maddox, who plays a character called the Patchwork girl, said performing in “The Scarecrow” feels like being in two bodies and she has to channel her hand as if it’s a whole new brain. With Stokes adding additional materials to the Patchwork girl’s costume, her puppet is going to get even heavier, she added.

“As part of my side job I work at a gym and thank goodness I do,” Maddox said. “I’m literally making sure I’m working out to make sure I have that strength because you constantly have to be in character at all times. It can take some strain, but it’s practice.”

Stokes said his fascination with the characters of Oz started at an early age, when his grandmother would plop him in front of a television with “The Wizard of Oz” movie and a bowl of popcorn.

In “The Scarecrow,” Stokes connects what was happening in Oz with what was happening in the United States, when Jim Crow laws segregated Black people from white people and a five-mile stretch in rural northwestern Kansas became known as Noose Road. Historian Brent Campney confirmed white killers lynched 56 Black people in Kansas from 1861 to 1927, a likely undercount as other lynchings may not have been documented.

The United States is still reckoning with that history of white mob violence, Stokes said.

“For a lot of people art is supposed to be an escape from our life,” Stokes said. “Being in a space where stuff is happening that’s actually happened in our world maybe disturbs that fantasy of what they want their life to be.”

Bringing puppets to El Paso public schools

After Stokes graduated from UTEP in 2008 with a bachelor’s in musical theatre and dance performance, he left El Paso and acted for years in national tours and Off-Broadway productions. In 2012, he moved to Korea for a year to teach theater and dance at Gyeonggi English Village.

It was there, during his downtime, Stokes came across a plaid fabric and made his first puppet, Chromy, a half-chameleon, half-frilled-lizard character.

He transitioned into puppetry when he moved back to New York, training in a Sesame Street workshop and performing in puppet shows, including an adult puppet cabaret at the Metropolitan Room, a jazz club in Manhattan. But work dried up and Stokes, tired of bouncing around as a struggling artist, made his way back to El Paso where he got his master’s in education at UTEP.

Stokes taught theater for two years at Brown Middle School, then four-and-half years at his alma mater, Jefferson/Silva Magnet High School. Awarded Teacher of the Year at both campuses, Stokes brought along his enthusiasm for puppetry, teaching students how to build basic puppets and play with ping pong balls as eyes.

Anything can be a puppet depending how you manipulate it, he said.

Typically, he introduced puppetry toward the end of the school year, when students’ inhibitions are lower and they’re more open to expressing some silliness.

“The education system tends to drill the creativity out of you the further you go along,” Stokes said. “I told my classes, ‘I need you to use your imagination and find your inner child.’ They’re getting a ‘Mister Rogers’ show every day.”

El Paso actors hope musical sends a message

In 2022, the Jim Henson Foundation awarded him a grant to workshop a piece that would eventually become “The Scarecrow.” Then, in spring 2023, the foundation awarded him the O’Neill residency in Connecticut.

It was crazy for those two weeks, Stokes said. Maddox followed him from El Paso to Waterford where Stokes hunkered down in a two-week flurry of script rewriting, line reads, practice runs, puppet training and puppet refurbishing.

Stokes said he didn’t have a sewing machine and his team handsewed one of the puppets, Wogglebug, over the course of two weeks, chipping in a few hours of time each day. The show features six main puppets, as well as side puppets including a few crows, Stokes said.

By 2024, Stokes left EPISD to focus on his show. A barebones, shortened version of the show was performed in April 2024 at the Plaza Theatre in Downtown. It was the first public showing, a proof of concept to see if the play could work, Stokes said.

The first full production of “The Scarecrow” is now set to show Nov. 1-3 during the La MaMa Puppet Festival in New York, with showings in other theaters in the works. Stokes is still raising funds online via Indiegogo to pay for production expenses. He’s raised a little more than $4,000 of the $12,000 goal as of Oct. 25.

An El Paso company has yet to invite him to show “The Scarecrow” in town, but he hopes there will be an opportunity to bring the play back to where it all started.

El Paso has a talented and tight-knit theater community, but isn’t recognized as a hub like other major cities, said cast member Amanda Vasquez. For a production from El Paso to have a premiere off Broadway is a rare opportunity and for her, a life dream, she said.

Vasquez, who plays a Winkie, has been performing in El Paso for more than 20 years, including at El Paso Playhouse and the Plaza Theatre. She, Maddox and cast member Tony Romero discussed their involvement with “The Scarecrow” and Plaza Theatre performance on a recent afternoon at Coffee Box in Downtown El Paso.

“Who knew doing theater in El Paso would take me to New York?” Vasquez said. “Come on, that’s every actor’s dream. We all have that in the back of our heads.”

“When people think puppetry, they think, ‘Oh, children’s shows,’” Romero said.

“Right? But not necessarily,” Vasquez said. “I think it opens conversations though, because if you do bring your child, they do have questions afterwards. We got little itty bitties all the way to grandmas, and Ashleigh got one of her first fan arts from a 10-year-old little girl.”

“That is something I still think about,” Maddox said. “There’s a girl singing a song she heard from our one-time show about an important character, about an important message.”

Discrimination, a theme explored in Oz, matters in El Paso, too, they said. Anyone who denies the existence of racism or microaggressions in El Paso either isn’t from El Paso or never experienced it themselves, Vasquez said.

“Chuco is home, I love it and I have so much El Paso pride,” Romero said. “I also understand if you sprinkle a little magic dust and turn it around to see the ugly side, you will find it. I think the show does a good job of showing us we can recognize that, but we can also change that with love and compassion.”

Romero, who plays a Winkie, said it’s not lost on him that opening night occurs a few days before Election Day and that racial tension may be high because of the violent rhetoric that’s emerged in the leadup.

Stokes hopes “The Scarecrow” sends a message, not only in its story, but in its diverse representation both in front of and behind the stage.

“It’s about time,” Stokes said. “It’s a way of fighting back. I think of it as a peaceful protest. People want to say something with their art, not just art for art’s sake. For me personally, I just can’t create a puppet show if there’s nothing behind it. What kind of story do you want to tell? Or give out into the world in a positive way?”