I have a peculiar affinity for incomplete works. It leads me to prefer to look at a building when its facade is off, and prefer a painting while it's being painted to when it is done, and prefer rehearsals of plays to the finished product. I suppose I just don't like feeling left out, and a piece of art is discovered in its making; by the time it is completed, the discoveries are old news.

So it is that I always get excited by works in progress. There's one at the Walker Art Center, starting tonight and running through Saturday, called "The Devil and Mr. Punch." As of yesterday, the play's creators were still making props and painting the set, a Victorian-looking wooden stage centered around an upright piano and a puppet theater. The first time this group of creators gathered, headed by Julian Crouch of England's Improbable Theatre Company, was Tuesday of last week. Crouch had no script for this show, just an abundance of ideas and creative collaborators, as well as some sketches. Along with this he had a collection of puppets he had made and some costumes cast off from the Broadway production of "The Addam's Family," which Crouch co-directed, along with designing the costumes and scenery. "The production decided they wanted new costumes," Crouch told me, "so I rather cheekily asked if I could have the old ones, and they said yes." He pointed out a matador costume backstage. "That costume probably cost more than this whole show."

So this production is, at the moment, really more of a collage than a traditional play. All art is, to some extent, but this one is likely to feel like it, and is meant to. The conceit of the play is that we're watching a puppet show put on by a pair of rough-and-tumble theatrical producers from a previous era named Harvey and Hovey, who are the sorts who will put anything onstage in order to draw an audience, from medicine shows to dime-museum exhibits. They also happen to hate puppets, and are grudgingly producing a show that isn't really ready for public viewing. Crouch pointed out one of the actors to me. "If you see him pushed out on the stage and he just starts talking, you'll know something has gone wrong."

"Of course, that's my character anyway," the actor told me. "So it might just be part of the play."

Harvey and Hovey are a bit of assemblage too. Crouch et al. will continue rehearsing this at New York's Park Avenue Armory, where he is an artist-in-residence, before a more polished version officially opens in Philadelphia. As it turns out, the Armory used to have Punch and Judy shows, and the Armory's archivist showed Crouch an earlier example. Producers: Harvey and Hovey.

Crouch seems both worried by the ragtag state his play is in and proud of it. He started off in puppetry, and enjoys it precisely because it's existed on the fringes of legitimate theater; in the meanwhile, he was exhausted by Broadway, in which committees of producers conspire to create theater that is overproduced and lifeless. For Crouch, the key to the longevity of puppetry is its lack of status.

"I don't want puppets to become reputable," he told me. "There was a time in England when theater was outlawed, but you could still do puppet shows, because they weren't seen as being serious." He compares puppetry to punk rock, which deliberately affected an air of non-professionalism and disreputability. Because they weren't treated as serious forms, they could get away with saying things and doing things that mainstream arts wouldn't dare.

Case in point: Punch. He has long been one of puppetry's most anarchic characters, a force of near-total chaos masquerading as a beleaguered everyman, whose most common cure for his complaints is physical violence. I remember my mother dropping me off at a Punch and Judy show when I was a boy in Bath, England. She wanted to do some shopping, I think, and the puppet show was a sort of free child care. I didn't know it then, but what I saw was a rather traditional Punch show, in which the character murders his child, his wife, a police officer, an alligator, for some reason, and, eventually, the devil. Punch was as he always is, a moon-faced man with a hideous buzzing voice that could barely be understood (created by the puppeteer using something called a swazzle, which is like a duck call you keep in your mouth.) Punch's violence was knockabout and punctuated by extremely loud slaps, created, I learned later, by a hinged wooden device called a slapstick, which gave its name to a similarly violent genre of film comedy. The show had its adolescent audience screaming with laughter, but it was my first exposure to Punch and Judy, and I was startled by it. I still am. What sort of demented puppeteer presents a comical killing spree to children?

Of course, Punch wasn't originally meant for children — he dates back to at least to 1600, and is borrowed from a stock character from the Italian commedia dell'arte. Punch shows weren't mean for children — back then, people scarcely had an idea of what children were, as Crouch pointed out. "They were dressed like little adults and treated like little adults," he said, and later showed me a photo that was one of his inspirations in creating the show, a group of slaughterhouse employees posing at the entrance of an abattoir. Sure enough, several in the group are children.

So Crouch brings Punch back to an adult audience for this show — and, presumably, children who are dressed like little adults and have day jobs doing some sort of back-breaking physical labor. And he sends Punch to hell, "Where he probably belongs," Crouch says. Also, he gets rid of the swazzle, so Punch won't be speaking in his traditional shrill squeak. Why not? "Because it's [expletive] annoying," Crouch said. "And you can quote me on that."

I'll be seeing it tonight and will report back tomorrow. Alas, this means I won't be able to attend another Walker event — it's hard not to curse the institution for its abundance. It currently has a series going on called "Artists' Cinema 2011: Projected Images," consisting of a collection of films that explore the boundaries between art films and mainstream movies. The Walker has long made room in its galleries for experimental films, and has also screened significant mainstream films since, oh, at least the 1940s. This program's curators, Dean Otto and Eric Crosby, point out that there are an increasing number of artists who don't really make the distinction between art film and mainstream film, or are deliberately exploring the distinction.

Tonight, as an example, the Walker is offering up work by Michael Robinson and Nicolas Provost, along with talkbacks with the filmmakers. You can watch samples of Robinson's film on his website. They're rather ingenious acts of appropriation, lifting scenes from Hollywood movies, videogames, and music videos so that they seem to be interacting with each other to tell a new story. So, for example, "These Hammers Don't Hurt Us" has a scene in which Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, in a hidden alcove with Richard Burton, peers through some peepholes, and, in the next room, witnesses Michael Jackson in full Egyptian drag, from his "Remember the Time" video. It's a pairing of two moments of unexpectedly Egyptophilia kitsch, yes, but there are all sorts of hidden associations that the pairing. For one thing, Jackson's song tells of an idealized romance, but he repeatedly, and plaintively, asks, "So why did it end?" Meanwhile, Robins repeatedly cuts back to Elizabeth Taylor looking meaningfully at Richard Burton, and the question seems to be hers, too.

Additionally, as jarring as it is to see Cleopatra watching a Michael Jackson video, there's something inevitable about it. Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson were friends, after all — in fact, they fled New York together in a limo on 9/11, along with Marlon Brando, or so the story goes. Taylor's publicist denied it, saying she had gone to a church to pray, which is disappointing to those of us who remember Taylor's conversion to Judaism, which she seemed to have forgotten. Liz, you were such a good Jew! When Burton had mocked your faith, saying, "You're not Jewish at all," you responded with "I am Jewish, and you can [expletive] off!" So why did it end?

I know I seem to have spun off into some sort of camp reverie here, but remember that Taylor was barred from Egypt in 1962 because she had financially assisted Israel — a ban that was removed precisely because "Cleopatra" was seen as being such good publicity for Egypt. So it all connects.

So there we go. We've managed to talk about "The Addam's Family," punk rock, commedia dell'arte, 9/11, Jewish conversion, Welsh movie stars, dead rock and rollers, and children who work in slaughterhouses, all as a result of one night's worth of events at the Walker. It can be too much sometimes. Really it can.