If you've ever read a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel or story, you are aware of his penchant for describing fantastic--even miraculous--events in the everyday lives of simple, earthbound people. The term used to describe this leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary in Garcia Marquez's fiction, as well as the work of many other Latin American writers, is magic realism.

Curiously enough, Garcia Marquez himself always has denied that there is anything magical about the ghosts, spirits and inexplicable coincidences that continually show up in his work; he simply writes about life as he knows it. He is a realist, nothing more. The key to "getting" Garcia Marquez, is that "in [Garcia Marquez's] world, magic is not only possible, but necessary," writes Andrew Kim, director of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre's A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, which has been adapted from a Garcia Marquez short story. "But here's the joy," Kim continues in the show's program: "When you see that, in the end, miracles are familiar, then a part of you understands that the familiar is miraculous."

This is also a fairly accurate description of what happens whenever Heart of the Beast gets around to mounting a theater production. In the hands of HOTB's master puppeteers, a bed sheet becomes an ocean wave crashing onto shore; painted papier-mâché masks become people in your family and neighborhood. Given this ability to breathe robust life into inanimate objects, it makes absolute artistic sense for HOTB to bring us Garcia Marquez--which it does in this production with sparse but effective strokes of theatrical magic.

Garcia Marquez's original tale is just eight pages long, but, there is plenty to work with. The parable tells the story of a married couple who find a very old, sick man washed up on the beach in front of their house. Somewhat afraid of him (he has enormous wings), they lock him up in a chicken coop and consult with the village priest and an old medicine woman to determine whether he is an angel, albeit a pathetic, parasite-infested one. The couple then get the bright idea to charge people admission to see the "angel" in their chicken coop. So many people are willing to pay to see this freak of nature in their makeshift circus sideshow that the couple get rich. But when public interest fades, the angel is still with them, becoming more of a nuisance every day. By the end of the play, the couple's attitude towards the "miracle" of the "angel" has gone from amazement, to opportunism, to boredom, to annoyance. They are no longer able to appreciate the magic of his strange but undeniable existence; the miraculous has become mundane, even irritating.

HOTB's trademark giant puppets are not the order of the day here. In fact, this is about as close to realism as a puppet theater can get without actually having actors talk. A Very Old Man is presented as a "mask" play, with the actors wearing a variety of papier-mâché heads attached to regular or oversized bodies. Except for some grunts from the winged old man, there is no dialogue; all of the narration is provided by impish poet Roy McBride, who loves to throw in local references just for the fun of it. When listing the rash of ridiculous "miracles" that are said to have happened after the angel's arrival, McBride intones, "And in the Midwest, a family decided not to go to the Mall of America."

For the most part, however, the tone of the piece is rather solemn and matter-of-fact. Like Garcia Marquez's writing itself, HOTB's production is delivered almost entirely without flourish or ornamentation. Except for the interactive circus sideshow at intermission, there are no sets to speak of--just a largely empty stage bathed in blue and green light. The eye craves a bit more in the way of props, but the story doesn't need elaborate production values to do its magic. Besides, the sparsity forces you to focus on the masked puppet-people, whose quiet dignity becomes more forceful and engrossing as the play progresses.

Children accustomed to the helter-skelter pace of Sesame Street may find that A Very Old Man doesn't progress nearly as fast as they would like, however. Garcia Marquez subtitled his original story "A Tale for Children," but Kim's adaptation, though undeniably poetic, takes it's sweet time developing a number of scenes. Which isn't necessarily bad--it's just that those with short attention spans likely will find themselves reaching for the Life Savers every now and then.

Nevertheless, as millennium fever sweeps the globe, this simple fable makes numerous humorous and insightful points about human nature's regard (and disregard) for the strange and unaccountable forces that move our lives. It is a beautiful, haunting tale and, all in all, HOTB has done a commendable job of bringing Garcia Marquez's words to life on a shoestring budget, proving once again that magic in the theater is more a function of imagination than money, though the latter never hurts.