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Jordan Barbour is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
Stoph Scheer gazes into the mirror and speaks: “I have to ignore you now.”
She goes silent, searching for poise as she preps to go onstage. She will play 35 characters, by herself, for nearly two hours.
Scheer sets her lashes in the glow of a makeup station, pulls every wayward hair into place. Sometimes she closes her eyes and hums or sips from a white mug with blue spots — inside it a concoction of throat-coat tea, a menthol-heavy cough drop and raw ginger. She walks to a break room and past a hodgepodge of paperwork, old china and the odd hole in the wall. She sits criss-crossed and meditates on a red couch with mismatched pillows.
Scheer, 39, is an actor, puppeteer, professional clown, aerial acrobat and writer. She has worked at the famed Jim Henson Company — home to Kermit the Frog — and with the renowned New York City street artist Banksy.
She is also, people tell her, one of the first openly trans women and nonbinary people to puppeteer in American television — a position that provides as much pride as it does responsibility.
It’s a Saturday in April, and Scheer is inside Lost Nation Theater in Montpelier, where in a few minutes she’ll perform her second night of the one-person show “I Am My Own Wife” by Doug Wright, set to end April 21.
The play tells the true story of the antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a trans woman who survived Nazi Germany.
Scheer is the only person who speaks or appears onstage during the performance. She plays many roles: the play’s writer, reporters, Charlotte’s mother, father, aunt, friends, colleagues, enemies — and Charlotte herself. She switches from a German to Texan to French accent, all while morphing genders and characters each with their own mannerisms.
At one point Scheer is a Nazi soldier who threatens to shoot Charlotte. In the same moment she becomes Charlotte, facing the gun.
How does it feel to interrogate herself? “Intense.”
In a restaurant three days later, a much different Stoph Scheer relaxed in a red polka dot dress with lipstick to match.
She was full of ideas to share — often with her hands. “I am a creature of chaos,” she said at one point. So were a pair of pals she had brought along.
Here was Giblet, a furry golden puppet with doe eyes and a wide smile, handmade from sheepskin by Scheer and her life partner, Kate Kenney.
Giblet, ever polite, said hello.
Then came a paper mache ghoul, buggish and winged and white. Scheer can make him soar — or land on your hand — with a pair of magnet sticks.
Growing up in Long Island in the 1980s, Scheer found a voice in puppetry.
“I had very delayed speech, and when I started to speak, it was very difficult to understand,” she said.
“I would feel understood when people would laugh during show-and-tell because I could act things out and show things with stuffed animals.”
“That’s how I knew that people understood me — because they were laughing,” she said.
Scheer went on to do a lot of community theater and graduated from Muhlenberg College in 2007 with degrees in theater and philosophy. She returned north to perform as a clown for kids’ birthdays, then joined a friend, Ora Fruchter, to launch a series of adult-only puppet shows. The pair once performed at Stonewall, the New York City tavern where protests against police in 1969 helped propel the modern LGBTQ+ movement. Later, for a brief time, she was a puppeteer at the Philadelphia Zoo — a job she loved so much she can’t help swearing when talking about it.
It was only during the pandemic, however, that Scheer was able to finally focus fully on her craft — and herself.
“It was the canceling of all live gigs that finally created the space for me to explore myself and express myself differently and come out, you know, without concern for how it would affect my livelihood,” she said.
And puppetry proved the perfect medium. She wasn’t limited to gender roles, and in the field she’s found mentors and colleagues who “get it.”
She sent videos of her puppetry to the Jim Henson Company, the place she had always wanted to work, and got invited to Los Angeles in 2021 for a three-week workshop. She never looked back.
Scheer performed on three of the company’s TV shows: “Slumberkins,” “Puppet Up! Uncensored,” “The Muppets Mayhem.” Applying to a random Craigslist ad ended with a gig in Banksy’s “Siren of the Lambs” — in which puppeteers controlled a flight of puppet heads hanging outside a moving truck.
During that latter show, someone caught a glimpse of Scheer in the truck, and The New York Post was momentarily convinced she was Banksy (which she denied).
Today, Scheer runs her own puppet show company, “The Amazing Story Machine,” with co-founder Fruchter and resident composer Toby Singer. Their shows “respect the intelligence of children and the whimsy of adults,” she said.
“The kids are reminding the adults how to laugh, and the adults are teaching the kids how to pay attention,” said Scheer.
Scheer, who spends time living in New York and California, plans to continue working on projects in Vermont.
She has a longstanding relationship with Lost Nation Theater, having acted in her first play there in 2009. She sees the Lost Nation Theater’s artistic directors, Kim Bent and Kathleen Keenan, as mentors, and has hosted workshops at the theater over the years. For that early April performance, one of Scheer’s former camp kids, now in their 20s, showed up to wrap her in a hug at the end of the performance.
Lost Nation Theater is also the place she met Kenney, her partner, another actor.
“I Am My Own Wife” is Scheer’s first traditional acting role since the pandemic, and she feels a close connection to the part. Both she and the person she plays are trans; Scheer is neurodiverse, and people debate whether von Mahlsdorf was.
One line from Charlotte’s autobiography stays stuck in Scheer’s mind, a refrain about how she likes to be surrounded by objects made with love.
“I can understand her connection to those because she loves those for the same reason that I love puppets,” Scheer said.
This summer Scheer will work with the Sandglass Theater in Putney on its upcoming play “Feral,” which has been in development for over a year. She also plans to head back there in September for the 12th edition of the Puppets in the Green Mountain international festival and work with the theater via “The Amazing Story Machine.”
Her current run in Montpelier will continue every Thursday through Sunday until April 21.
Scheer said Monteplier is her favorite city in the country because “it has everything” — a community mindset, a professional theater company, an art cinema and two bookstores.
“If I could, I would live here full time,” she said. “Yeah, that’s what my vision of luxury is — luxurious, decadent, unrealistic success would look like getting to live in Montpelier and just, you know, going only going to LA and New York when I was called in for work.”
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