Jewish puppeteer combines love of acting with puppets in ‘Life of Pi’
Betsy Rosen has the world on a string

Betsy Rosen won’t mind if you call it bashert.
The puppeteer and actor knew when she auditioned in 2022 to be a part of Broadway’s “Life of Pi” that fate was intervening.
“I had this feeling that this was meant for me,” she said. “I was meant to work on this show and eventually that happened.”
Rosen will be performing with the touring company of “Life of Pi” at the Benedum Center from Jan. 28 to Feb. 2.
The role is a chapter of a career that began when Rosen was a child growing up in Reisterstown, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb.
Her father, she said, noticed a theater, Open Space Arts, where people were “doing a lot of fun stuff on the porch.”
Some of the “fun stuff” offered by the community theater included making puppets and offering playwriting classes.
“I basically spent the next 10 years of my life, from 8 to 18, taking acting classes, and in the summer I spent my days learning how to sew costumes and build papier-mache masks. In the evening, the community would rehearse for the big summer show,” she remembered.
Rosen said she grew up on PBS favorites like “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” television programs that mixed live actors, puppets and a sense of community — something she also found at Open Space, and a life in the arts.
“I love being expressive with puppets and acting with puppets,” she said. “I loved the sense of community created there. That drew me in.”
Still, she thought her life’s work would primarily be acting — that is, until word started to spread around the University of Maryland, where she was a student, that she did some puppetry.
“A graduate design student found me and asked if I wanted to work together. I said sure and that started the second phase of my life with puppetry,” she said.
Rosen next made her way north, spending time at Sandglass Theater learning a Japanese form of puppetry called Bunraku, which she said opened a new world of possibilities.
Soon, she was creating her own puppets and working in theater and puppet theater companies around Washington, D.C.
Puppetry, she said, “had found me and taken me down a path I could have never imagined.”
That path has led to work on Broadway and in the national touring company of “Life of Pi,” work that she said combines both her passions: acting and puppetry.
“In order for puppetry to be effective, to really affect an audience and for them to feel something, the puppeteers have to be excellent actors,” she said. “If the puppets are not having all the thoughts, all the feelings and emotions, and filter them through this object, the audience won’t connect to the puppet in an emotional way.”
Rosen said she’s been lucky to combine her two passions and find success on stage.
The puppetry of “Life of Pi,” she said, is unlike any other that she’s experienced.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s the hardest show I’ve done, hands down and in a great way, the most challenging, which is why I love it and why I’ve been working on this show for over two years now,” she said. “There’s always something new to find.”
While audience members see a stunning visual performance that flows between actor and puppet, Rosen said the challenges onstage are both emotional and physical.
“The positions and the strength and the dexterity it takes to perform these puppets eight shows a week is unlike anything I’ve been asked to do before. We work together. It takes three people to bring Richard Parker, the tiger, to life,” she said.
Those performers, she said, work hard to make the tiger one entity, utilizing breath and listening and the slightest of cues because they are miked for the performance and, as a result, can’t talk to one another.
“You’re asking three people to make one thing come to life and look cohesive, and sort of recede into the background but be present enough that we understand the character,” she said.
Growing up, Rosen, who is Jewish, experienced the full gamut of Jewish lifecycle events. Her grandfather was a general manager at one of the larger Orthodox synagogues in Baltimore, and she attended Hebrew school three days a week, studying for her bat mitzvah.
Her Jewish heritage, she said, like puppetry and theater, is part of her DNA.
“I am very proud of being Jewish. That feels very special to me. My faith and culture are part of who I am,” she said. PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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