The polar ice is melting, the economy’s in tatters, and a new pandemic looms: it’s the end of the world as we know it, and Ronnie Burkett feels fine.

In fact, things couldn’t be better for Canada’s reigning puppeteer, or so it seems when the Straight reaches him in a Calgary hotel. “It’s going great,” Burkett says of his new show, Penny Plain. “I’m always glad to be able to say that, rather than sobbing into the phone saying ‘Three people a night come, and they throw things.’ ”

He’s kidding, of course: it’s been quite some time since a Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes production was anything other than a critical and commercial success. But Penny Plain goes into deeper and darker waters than even his previous outing, Billy Twinkle, a semi-autobiographical investigation of a marionettist’s midlife crisis. The new work’s title character is blind, ill, and elderly; her best friend, a talking seeing-eye dog, is leaving; and the news broadcasts that fill her day have moved from gloom to doom.

It’s not exactly the stuff of comedy, and for that Burkett blames David Suzuki.

“I’ve been listening to him for many, many years—a few decades, now,” the puppeteer explains. “And a lot of stuff he says has really resonated with me. I’m going to paraphrase, but there was one interview where some reporter or journalist asked him, with all of this stuff going on with the planet, would the world be able to survive? And his answer was essentially ‘Well, the world will survive, but we may not.’

“That just got me thinking in terms of how many of us there are, wanting so much stuff,” Burkett adds. “And about the arrogance of mankind, and the loss of civility—all the things that curmudgeonly middle-aged people talk about.”

It took some time for his apocalyptic adventure to take shape. “I think how I got to Penny Plain was through all of these disjointed ideas that you have when you make any sort of art,” he says. “They float around in your head and they don’t seem that they’re going to land anywhere, and then they collide and become a story.”

In addition to exploring his Suzuki-inspired theme, Burkett wanted to step back from the very visible part he played in Billy Twinkle. “There was a lot of Ronnie in that show,” he says. “Which is what the script called for, so that’s why I did it.” In Penny Plain, however, he’s returned to what originally attracted him to puppetry: “letting them do all the work”. In practice, this means that he’s a shadowy figure on a catwalk, manipulating his marionettes by long, dangling strings.

“Long string” work is the most virtuosic form of puppetry, and it’s clear that Burkett relishes the challenge. He also underwent another test of character during the making of Penny Plain: crafting the score in conjunction with his partner, Toronto jazz singer John Alcorn.

“The first time John and I really collaborated was on Billy Twinkle, and there was almost a murder-suicide,” he reveals, laughing. “You know, you think ‘Oh, this is my partner, and we understand each other completely so, boom, we’ll be able to work together.’ But we’d never really worked together, so we didn’t have a vocabulary. Still, by the time Billy was done I said, ‘Oh, I’m up for more of that.’ ”

The collaborative process came more easily this time around, although Burkett notes that Alcorn had to talk him out of using a bleak, industrial sonic backdrop. “That was my first impulse, ’cause I’m a moron,” he says with another wicked cackle. “But in the end this is a very mature, beautiful score. We had a lot of singers who came in and recorded tracks at various times, and then John glued them into this choir. So it’s not an aggressive, techno end of the world: it’s a very human-voice path.”

Burkett adds that he’s taken pains to make Penny Plain’s end-times scenario a vehicle for hope as well as dread.

“You know, I’ve said for years I can’t say good night to an audience without kissing them on the forehead,” he explains. “And I always like a healthy dose of ambiguity at the end, which we have here. One man, in a talk-back last week, said ‘Oh, Ronnie, this one’s really bleak.’ And I said ‘But I’m not telling you anything we don’t know. I’m just talking about the elephants in the room.’

“My personal view is that life is finite, and that the earth is far more important and resilient than my individual little bag of bones,” he continues. “So I think there’s incredible beauty in this show. There certainly is in the design, and some of the interactions are very lovely, and John’s score is just crazy beautiful. So this rather bleak outlook on what could happen—and it is a fantasy, after all—is surrounded by so much beauty that I think it’s actually quite hopeful.”

Penny Plain plays at the Cultch tonight (November 17) to December 17.