How Basil Twist Created ‘Sisters’ Follies’ in Just Three Months

Watch your step—you might run into a clothing rack, or a ship carrying a crew of human-sized puppets, or ghost marionettes hanging from the rafters. Or a camel.

It is September 2015 and renowned puppeteer and director extraordinaire Basil Twist has turned the Abrons Arts Center, a presenting house in Lower Manhattan, into a puppet-maker’s paradise, with rehearsal studios, build shops, and a costume shop all working around the clock to bring Twist’s newest show, Sisters’ Follies: Between Two Worlds, to life.

“I know it’s still pretty loosey-goosey, but it’s gonna be shaped like that,” Twist says, as the rehearsal breaks for dinner at 6 p.m. It’s 16 days until the first public preview on Oct. 1 (the press opening is Oct. 7). Today was the first run-through with all of the big backdrops, set pieces, and larger—albeit half-finished—puppets.

When I first poke my head in, the company is in the middle of the show’s final scene, “The Dybbuk,” based on the Yiddish play by S. Ansky that ran here in 1925. The scene is set in a graveyard full of cardboard tombstones and flying ghost puppets made of silk, where a Jewish wedding is underway. Twist is calling out cues via a microphone.

“We’re a little behind the build,” confesses build master/puppeteer Jessica Scott. “My main push is to get everything up to basic functionality, and the last week will be dressing everything the fuck up.” Scott lists what’s left to do: Dress the camel and finish its head, replace some joints and handles on some puppets, make heads for the ghost puppets, and build some birds. The ghosts, she notes wryly, “may not have heads in previews, but we’ll see where we get.”

Twist isn’t worried; Sisters’ Follies is about 50 percent complete, and that’s “par for the course for a Basil Twist show,” he says with surprising calm. It helps that his team has been building the show inside Abrons since late July, instead of at a studio off-site, then reassembling it onstage. It’s a rare treat for...