Peterson Toscano's A Musing

On one level, "Protagonist" intercuts the first-person narratives of four men who seem to have nothing in common except their charisma: a former German terrorist, a student of martial arts, a "formerly gay" evangelist and a serial bank robber. But this is only the beginning.

For Yu, who looks on editing as "weaving straw into gold," intercuts these stories not only with each other but with several different kinds of material. She has wooden rod puppets constructed by Janie Geiser doing brief scenes from the plays of Euripides, recited in ancient Greek. She has the same puppets performing scenes from the lives of these four men. And she has a dozen or so 15-second animated moments that go with single thematic words like "provocation," "certainty" and "doubt" that function as "little bits of breathing room."