“Let’s have one more drink, maybe?” said the wooden dummy.
“Here you go, Ronnie,” said the dummy’s master.
Onstage at Night Club 101 in the East Village of Manhattan, the ventriloquist Sophie Becker lifted a martini glass. The doll took a sip, eyes widening.
A pianist and saxophonist started playing the moody opening bars of the Carpenters hit “Superstar.”
“I love when the music starts,” said Ronnie, a female dummy who wore a shirt with “Dumb Blonde” across the front.
“Ready?” Ms. Becker said, sweeping back Ronnie’s hair.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
They went into their duet. Between lines, Ronnie kept demanding more booze, to big laughs from the crowd. Many people in the room, born after 1990, seemed incredulous, having never seen a ventriloquist in person before.
Ms. Becker, 31, came to New York nearly a decade ago with dreams of becoming an actress. She got off to a strong start, earning praise for a leading role in an off-off-Broadway play. But then the work dried up.
Now she’s an unlikely practitioner of a lost vaudevillian art form, putting on her act at the downtown establishments Jean’s, Café Forgot and Roxy Cinema, as well as other venues that aren’t exactly known for putting ventriloquists on the bill.
During her performances, she educates her audience about the heyday of “vent,” when dummies like Charlie McCarthy and Danny O’Day, commanded by Edgar Bergen and Jimmy Nelson, were regulars on television variety shows.
“In that day and age,” Ms. Becker told the audience at Night Club 101, “ventriloquism was the hottest thing on the market. Ventriloquists ruled the stage and the entertainment industry.”
The room fell quiet as she took a pause.
“But Hollywood felt they were becoming too powerful,” she continued. “So Hollywood destroyed their reputation with an anti-dummy propaganda campaign.”
She blamed “Magic,” a 1978 film featuring Anthony Hopkins as a murderous ventriloquist, for defaming the trade. She also gave a history lesson, tracing ventriloquism’s trajectory from ancient Egypt to the 19th-century spiritualism movement. She was eventually interrupted by Ronnie, who let out a belch and asked, “Can I have another drink?”
After the show, audience members mingled by the bar. Ms. Becker, who stands over six feet tall and wore a checkered Jean Paul Gaultier jacket, greeted her converts. Ronnie was close by, stuffed in a black trunk.
“Sophie’s show makes me think: Why did we stop doing this?” said one fan, Mia Quinn, a 27-year-old casting director. “I love when they sing together.”
Ms. Becker’s parents were among the well-wishers. Her father, David, 75, remembered when ventriloquism was a staple of “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other variety programs. “But it was already dying out then,” he said. “It wasn’t a cool thing to watch on TV anymore.”
Between sips of a Negroni, Mr. Becker noted with some concern that his daughter had taken to addressing her dummy by name, as if it were a real person. And he remarked that she says, “We’re on our way,” when she’s going to visit her parents.
“Sometimes I wonder: Where does it stop and start for her? Where does Sophie end and where does the doll begin?”
‘Creepyville’
At her apartment in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, Ms. Becker sat with Ronnie on a couch. She took a sip from a can of kombucha soda and began manipulating the levers concealed in the dummy’s back.
Ronnie, a TikTok influencer whom Ms. Becker described as “a wannabe downtown icon,” wore a pink Juicy Couture hoodie, baby-size 7 For All Mankind jeans and tiny Adidas sneakers.
“Like, oh my god,” the doll said, awakening.
Ms. Becker’s other dummy, Jerry, sat rumpled on a little wooden chair beneath a window air-conditioner unit. He is an old show-business character who favors wide-lapel suits. He spends much of his time in a yellow trunk.
“They can’t be left out on the couch, because my roommates get scared,” Ms. Becker said. “I heard one of them yelp in the middle of the night when she saw Jerry.”
Jerry is a replica of Jerry Mahoney, a famed dummy created in the late 1930s by Paul Winchell, Ms. Becker’s ventriloquism idol. Mr. Winchell’s children’s television show, “Winchell-Mahoney Time,” was popular in the 1960s, and the duo appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
“In my act with Jerry, I talk about how he had this huge career but Hollywood destroyed it,” Ms. Becker said. “Because he was doing well — too well.”
“Jerry had it all,” she continued. “Houses. Women. Everything. Then it was gone, just like that.”
She lifted Jerry from his chair. Both dummies were now on her lap.
“Hi, I’m Jerry Mahoney, and this is my assistant,” he said, referring to Ms. Becker. “And — uh, wait. Who the hell is that?”
“Jerry, get out of the way,” Ronnie said. “This is my moment.”
“No, it’s mine,” Jerry shot back.
Ms. Becker suddenly dropped the bit to speak in her own voice.
“Ventriloquism has given me the gift of an artistic practice, so I feel like I can’t give up on it,” she said. “I hope there’s a future for me in it, but I don’t really know what will happen.”
Born in San Francisco and raised in Berkeley, Calif., Ms. Becker aspired to be an actress from an early age. Her first role was in a high school production of “The Vagina Monologues.” After studying performance art at Wesleyan University, she fell into the independent theater scene in New York, landing small parts in plays at The Flea and working as a lighting assistant for the Wooster Group.
To pay the rent, she modeled and worked as a receptionist at the Jack Hanley Gallery, an art gallery in the Lower East Side. In 2020, she appeared in a leading role in “Really Really Gorgeous,” a satirical off-off-Broadway play by Nick Mecikalski, which received a favorable review in The New York Times. But two months after opening night, the pandemic ensnared the city, and Ms. Becker’s acting career came to a halt.
“I felt lost, not being able to act,” she said. “I spent a lot of time alone.”
She gave up her apartment in Brooklyn and moved in with her parents at their farmhouse in Hudson, N.Y. She had roles in Zoom plays, but she worried that the city’s bright lights were getting farther away.
When she returned to New York, she struggled to find stage work. She got her old job back at Jack Hanley and was promoted to gallery director. She eventually settled for acting in movie shorts directed by New York University film students.
At a gallery opening, she ran into the filmmaker Nick Ventura, who mentioned a Jerry Mahoney dummy his father had given him that was now collecting dust in a closet. He suggested she try it out. They met in Tompkins Square Park for the handoff.
“When he pulled Jerry out of the trunk, I remember the energy shifting around us in the park,” Ms. Becker said. “Everyone couldn’t stop looking at him.”
Still, she found herself troubled by the dummy’s dead-eyed stare.
“When I got Jerry home, I was afraid of him,” Ms. Becker said. “But one night I got back from a party and decided to pick him up. I made his eyes move, and he came to life. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.”
On YouTube, she studied the routines of Mr. Winchell, Shari Lewis and Señor Wences. She steeped herself in books about vaudeville and puppetering. She practiced throwing her voice on long solo walks in Prospect Park. And she met others like herself at the Vent Haven International Ventriloquist Convention in Kentucky.
About two years ago, on her 29th birthday, Ms. Becker gave her first performance with Jerry to some friends at the William Barnacle Tavern in the East Village. She refined the act and put it on at Singers bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Russian Samovar in Midtown and on the air with Montez Press Radio.
She commissioned Austin Phillips, a dummy maker in Maine, to build Ronnie, so that she could develop an act around “the New York girl who is my id,” as she put it. Her bond with the dummies grew deeper.
“I was worried I was disappearing as an actress, but the dummy brought me out of that,” she said. “That’s what’s beautiful about them, because the dummy frees you to not doubt yourself. They remind you that being dumb is actually your greatest asset.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” she added. “They entered my life. Sometimes I wonder: Who is the dummy?”
Now committed to the bit, Ms. Becker has joined the long tradition of entertainers who found their voices while speaking as someone else, like Edgar Bergen with his monocled puppet Charlie McCarthy.
Reached by phone, Mr. Bergen’s daughter, the actress Candice Bergen, considered the connection between dummy and master. “In our house, Charlie had the room next to mine,” Ms. Bergen, 79, said. “He was never referred to as ‘the dummy.’ He was always Charlie. He was treated as something less than a god, but not by much. It was Charlie who was the breadwinner.”
“It gets into Creepyville quickly, because they’re an alter ego,” Ms. Bergen continued. “My father was a shy Swede, and he created the opposite of himself in Charlie. But Charlie gave him free rein. He could take people on. Take potshots at presidents.”
“My father left something for Charlie in his will — he didn’t leave anything for me,” she added. “It’s a very weird but real bond.”
Ms. Bergen approved of a young performer giving the old art a try.
“I wish her luck,” she said. “I hope her material is sharp.”
Road Trip
Ronnie needed a tuneup. And there was a loose string in Jerry’s mouth. So Ms. Becker got into her Subaru Forester with them one night and began the long drive from Brooklyn to Portland, Maine, where she had an appointment at the workshop of Mr. Phillips, the dummy maker.
As she followed I-95 into New England, her passengers were safe in their trunks. They spent the night at a Hampton Inn. In the morning, she drew stares when she brought Ronnie to breakfast. Then she drove the last stretch to Portland.
“I noticed this morning Ronnie has a squeak in her jaw, so I’m hoping Austin can oil her up,” she said in a phone call from the road. “We’re going to open up her head. Look at what’s going on in there.”
I asked what she thought was going on in there — you know, psychologically speaking.
“Honestly, probably not much,” Ms. Becker said. “That’s why she doesn’t think before she speaks. That’s why the world is always exciting and new. That’s why life is all just a joke to her.”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
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