Ferrum, VA, March 11, 2026—Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Rebecca Crocker ‘02 has been awarded a summer fellowship from the Appalachian College Association (ACA) for a project that builds on her work of the past several years studying and teaching puppetry. Crocker and her students will create a new adaptation of a Shakespeare play using Appalachian animals as characters. The next public presentation of their current puppet collection will be part of the Inquiring Minds series on campus April 1.
Crocker is writing an original adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale with Appalachian animal characters. The summer fellowship will support her work developing the adaptation, obtaining supplies, and creating new puppets, with stipends for students to assist. Applying some word play to Shakespeare’s title, the new production will be called The Winter’s Tail. Following a careful process of design, testing, workshops, and rehearsals that continue through the next academic year, The Winter’s Tail will be staged at Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre (BRDT) in spring 2027.
President Mirta Martin said, “At Ferrum College, we are deeply proud of faculty who invite students into the creative process and transform learning into something hands-on, imaginative, and rooted in our region. Professor Crocker’s work beautifully blends classical literature with Appalachian storytelling traditions, giving our students the opportunity to explore Shakespeare through creativity, craftsmanship, and performance. Projects like this not only enrich our academic programs, but they also strengthen the connection between our students, our culture, and our community.”
Since she joined the Ferrum College faculty in 2018, Crocker has directed three Shakespeare plays. She said, “With this fellowship, I combine my passions for puppetry and Shakespeare. The puppets will become a resident company, performing other Shakespearean plays in the future. Additionally, this fellowship would provide a foundation for applications to other grant opportunities, including the world-renowned Jim Henson Foundation.”
Crocker performed most recently in Grandma Gatewood Took a Walk at the BRDT. She is currently designing sets and costumes for the spring musical March 19-22, The Music Man. As she and her colleagues updated their academic programs last year to offer a B.F.A. in Music & Theatre: Professional Stage Performance, they chose to emphasize the history and culture of this region, as well as reinforcing the BRDT’s tradition of multigenerational casting that allows college students to collaborate with community members of all ages.
With help from students and volunteers, Crocker designed and constructed over thirty puppets for the BRDT’s productions of the musical Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas in 2023, 2024, and 2025. They were inspired by, but not direct imitations of puppets created by Jim Henson for the television adaptation of the same story in 1971 and his other productions. (In the 2025 photo, Crocker, in center, played Mayor Fox in the musical that blends human actors and puppets.)
Gage Shelton ’25, a financial aid counselor at the College, helped make the first cast of puppets and performed as both Doc Bullfrog (in the photograph) and the title character Emmet. “It was an opportunity to both learn new skills and have a ton of fun creating magic for the show,” said Shelton. “I had not learned to sew or work with fabric before joining the puppet crew for Emmet a couple of years ago. I learned how to stitch, how to follow fabric patterns, and how to make certain cuts that would allow us to manipulate the fabric in unique ways that let us make the fur stand out on different puppets, even when cut from the same roll.”
“People usually use ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ to describe a hard-working experience,” Shelton continued.” I would describe the puppets as more love and thought, but still with tears, due to the amount of puppet fur that made its way into my sinuses. It was an amazing experience to literally stitch together the magic for that show. I never thought I would fall in love with the process as much as I did.”
Crocker is working toward an online Graduate Certificate in Puppetry from the University of Connecticut in order to, as she put it, “deepen my skills so I may pass them on to my students who have worked on our various puppet productions.” In addition to incorporating puppets into several existing courses, she developed and taught a new course called Puppetry and Oral Interpretation, and she collects puppets from different parts of the world. Puppets made and collected at the College vary widely in size and include many different kinds, such as hand puppets, marionettes, and sock puppets, with innovative blending of types in some of Crocker’s designs. Crocker believes that Ferrum’s recent work in this field is distinctive, since courses and degree tracks in puppetry are being cut in academic programs across the nation.
Dr. Delia Heck, former provost at Ferrum College, wrote that Crocker’s new “project is perfectly aligned with the ACA’s mission to support high-quality scholarly and creative endeavors and addresses several of our highest institutional priorities,” including regional focus, specialized scholarly growth, and high-impact student engagement. Heck also noted that Crocker “has proven to be an outstanding teacher, mentor, and administrative leader… [with] her track record of successfully directing and producing complex theatrical works. Her creative vision for integrating puppetry and classical theatre with a strong regional identity is innovative.”
Crocker began performing with the BRDT and the Jack Tale Players as a Ferrum student in the late 1990s. She views her puppetry projects and the Emmet Otter productions as a natural progression of work begun by Dr. Rex Stephenson, the founder of these programs, who died in August 2025. When Stephenson taught drama in summer enrichment camps during his retirement years, for example, he would start the week teaching children how to retell folktales with paper-bag puppets, and by the end of the week they moved onstage themselves to perform his adaptations of Appalachian Jack Tales for the whole camp.
Crocker intends to adapt The Winter’s Tale in the style of a folktale, and infuse Appalachian music into the storyline. She participates in a long worldwide tradition of performing Shakespeare within different cultural settings and time periods, adapting his plays in different performance forms such as ballet, film, and opera, and also retelling Shakespeare for children. The Winter’s Tale has been called a fable, a tragicomedy, a fairy tale, a pastoral story, and a romance–with a king’s daughter exiled, raised by shepherds and eventually wooed by a prince, as well as a queen condemned and then brought back to life. Crocker is influenced by the Ballard Institute’s approach to the way adaptations with puppets “cast non-humans in roles to reveal metaphorical substrates of Shakespeare’s plays. Puppets cast new light on dramatic characters and situations.”
The Folger Shakespeare Library asks, in Stephen Orgel’s essay on modern views of The Winter’s Tale,” “Why does Shakespeare set up the tragic momentum of the first three acts, only to disarm it with fantasy and magic?” We will have to wait for Crocker’s adaptation to be staged in order to see how it answers this question.
The campus community and the public are invited to attend Pet-a-Puppet: Past, Present and Future on April 1 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It will be held outside Schoolfield Hall (weather permitting) as part of the Inquiring Minds discussion series. Attendees will be able to view and manipulate a variety of puppets, as well as discussing upcoming opportunities to build and perform puppets with Crocker and her students. In the 2025 photograph, Crocker at left and senior Hannah Dix on right show students some of their puppet collection.
Photographs from Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas in 2025 courtesy of Dr. Bob Pohlad.
Click here for more photos of puppets on campus.
Click here for Cardinal News article by Lindsey Hull on making of the puppets and 2023 production of Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.
