In the backroom of a small, cluttered workshop in Portland, Maine, a figure lies facedown on a table. Its head has been cut open, exposing a delicate anatomy of brass rods, hinges and levers.
It is motionless, as though sleeping. But soon it will turn its head, blink, crack a wry smile and part its lips to speak. Each movement will be directed by an intricate network of hand-soldered mechanisms concealed inside its small, hollow body.
The figure is a recent creation of Austin Phillips, one of the last full-time professional makers of ventriloquist dummies in America.
A craftsman working in a tradition that stretches back to Victorian music halls and vaudeville theaters, Phillips, 33, creates custom figures for performers and collectors while preserving a disappearing art.
“To some people, these are just puppets,” Phillips said in a recent interview at his shop. “To me, there’s so much to them. It’s sculpture, casting, painting, sewing, mechanics, history, research, performance design — all at once. They are like kinetic art objects.”
Phillips’s fascination with puppets began early. When he was 5, his parents took him to a mall where he spotted in a shop window a toy Charlie McCarthy, the monocled dummy made famous by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
Phillips was transfixed. “There was something about it that really drew me in,” he said. “It looked mechanical and yet somehow alive.”
By 14, he was carving his own figures from wood and building simple machines, obsessed with anything that could be taken apart and fixed, like pinball machines and motorcycles. While studying technical theater at the University of Maine at Farmington, he built dummies in his dorm and began selling them on eBay, which snowballed into a career. He moved into his current studio in 2019.
Early on, Phillips pursued perfection obsessively. Over time, he learned to loosen up and leave more room for personality.
“You can go too far and lose the life in it,” he said. “I started realizing people responded more when things were a little more painterly, a little more playful.”
That balance between precision and imperfection is central to the appeal of the figures. One reason they are expressive is that they retain traces of the hand that made them.
The puppets vary in complexity. Some have simple designs with just a moving head and mouth, while others are elaborately mechanized with 10 or more finger-operated levers. These can have eyelids that blink and wink, eyebrows that rise and lower, lips that appear to spit, ears that wiggle and legs that kick — all in one figure.
Phillips is meticulous and considers every detail, especially when considering how to shape a smile or an eyebrow to give a puppet distinct personality. “It’s a feeling,” he said. “I just know when something’s right.” If it’s not right, he keeps working at it.
He carves the mouth and teeth from wood and cuts the eyebrows from brass “like jewelry,” he said. The eyes are particularly important. He shapes some from wood and makes others from modified table-tennis balls fitted with glass irises used in taxidermy.
For the more detailed dummies, Phillips uses painted leather to create eyelids and lips that move more naturally, as though they were live skin. The leather has to be set carefully into the face and painted to look seamless.
“It sounds crazy,” he said, laughing, “but it took me probably five years to perfect the eyelids alone.”
Most of his customers are collectors and hobbyists, but a few are professional ventriloquists. He recently repaired a talking-dog apparatus for a performer. Another customer, the comedian and ventriloquist Sophie Becker, has called him from the road for emergency repairs.
“We changed a string over FaceTime once,” he said.
He also makes theater props. In the past year, he said, he did work for “The Nutcracker,” an Off Broadway play and an NBC television show.
Phillips has had the opportunity to restore significant pieces of art. He was recently flown to Spain to work on a collection of theatrical puppets from 1910. For restorations, his goal is invisibility.
“My job is to make it look like I was never there,” he said. “I’m trying to match the original materials, the pigments, the artist’s intent.”
Phillips is a one-person shop. The workdays are long and, with only the puppets to keep him company, can be lonely. But business is good, he said, pointing to a small dry-erase board on his studio wall that was covered with orders. He has more work than he can keep up with.
Despite the demand, Phillips resists the temptation to speed up the process. A simple figure can take three weeks if he moves quickly. A custom job can take six months or longer.
“People are excited to work one on one with a craftsperson and have something bespoke made for them,” he said. “It’s an old-world thing. It isn’t Amazon. You don’t get it in two days. If you’re getting one of these, you’re also accepting what it means to have something made this way.”
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