Ralph Lee, who brought wonderment to generations of audiences of all ages with masks and giant puppets he designed for his Mettawee River Theatre Company and other outlets including “Saturday Night Live,” died May 12 at his home in New York City, according to his wife, Casey Compton. He was 87 and had been in ill health in recent months, she said. Lee also founded the Greenwich Village Halloween parade in 1974, which grew to become the world’s largest such event, with an estimated 50,000 participants and 2 million spectators.
In February, Lee and Compton were recognized for lifetime achievement at the American Theater Wing’s Obie Awards. Lee was the Mettawee company’s artistic director; Compton, who married him in 1982, is managing director.
Based in Salem, Washington County, during the summer and New York City the rest of the year, Mettawee River Theatre Company was founded in 1975. Lee joined the following year and remained its chief designer and guiding spirit until his death. With its masks and puppets, Mettawee delivered monsters, gods and other fantastical creatures to mainly rural communities in the North Country, southern Vermont and western Massachusetts every summer, often to places with little homegrown theater. The company performed family-friendly folk stories from cultures around the world, tales of myth and legend, learning and wisdom. A representative tour in recent years went from Esperance in Schoharie County to Amherst, Mass., and from Essex south to Schuylerville. Almost all performances were free and were since the beginning.
The status of the company was not immediately clear on Wednesday. Its website does not list any productions for this year. An exhibit titled “Myths, Legends, and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee” is on view through May 28 at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in Storrs, Conn.
A native of Middlebury, Vt., where his father was a dean and his mother taught dance at Middlebury College, Lee graduated from Amherst College in 1957 and studied dance and theater in Europe for two years on a Fulbright Scholarship. After returning to the U.S., Lee acted on Broadway, off-Broadway, in regional theaters and with the experimental Open Theatre in New York City. He staged his first outdoor production in 1974 while teaching at Bennington College.
In 1975, he designed a costume for a recurring “Saturday Night Live” bit called “Land Shark,” inspired by the movie “Jaws,” in which Chevy Chase, wearing a shark outfit, devoured fellow cast members including Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner after knocking on their front doors.
Referring to the hamlets, villages and towns visited on Mettawee’s tours, “We’ve really developed a wonderful audience up here,” Lee told the Times Union in 2017. “After almost every performance people come up and say, ‘You’re coming back next year, right?’ That’s such a compliment.”
In addition to its tours, Mettawee presented Lee’s work at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, where he was artist-in-residence for almost 40 years, the New York Botanical Garden, Provincetown Playhouse, the Henson Foundation’s International Festival of Puppet Theater, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Central Park Summerstage and many other locations.
Beyond this year’s lifetime-achievement Obie, Lee’s many honors and awards include three more from the American Theatre Wing, a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, two citations for excellence from the international puppetry organization UNIMA, a 1996 Dance Theatre Workshop Bessie Award for “sustained achievement as a mask maker and theatre designer without equal” and a 1996 New York State Governor’s Arts Award in recognition of his contributions to the artistic and cultural life of New York. Other teaching appointments were Amherst College, Smith College, Hampshire College, Hamilton College, Colgate University, the University of Rio Grande, the University of North Carolina and, for more than 20 years, New York University.
According to an obituary of Lee in The New York Times, his first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Compton, 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.