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There was a theater on North Street. In the past, every new play depended on the manager running errands. The lyricist, the set builder, the lamp keeper, and the announcer all waited for him to relay messages. When the play was small, it worked. When the play grew complex, the manager had to knock on dozens of doors in one night.

The workshop owner brought in a set of puppets that could relay messages. One puppet asked about the plot, one checked props, one scheduled performances, and one specialized in recording arguments as a list. They could call out to each other, and not everything had to wait for the manager to speak.

At first everyone was excited. The puppets rehearsed a small play in no time, and whenever a lamp was missing or two lines clashed, they could find someone to confirm it themselves. The workshop owner thought that as long as he set out a few more puppets, a grand play would naturally take shape.

The misunderstanding surfaced when staging a court drama. The puppet checking props kept demanding set changes, the puppet writing lines rewrote dialogue according to the old plot, and the puppet arranging scenes separated two interdependent scenes. They were all diligent, but they had no shared boundaries.

The steward first gave each puppet a longer sheet of responsibilities. The more detailed the sheet became, the more arguments arose, because one puppet did not know when to wait for another, and the other did not know where an argument should end.

Later, the workshop owner arranged the puppets into a rehearsal chart: who opens the topic, who adds material, who challenges, who collects the draft, who calls in a human to decide when debate can't continue. Each puppet still handled only one part, but their dialogue was placed into fixed scenarios.

The steward also set a pause bell for the puppets. If two puppets argued over the same passage for more than three rounds, or the prop list and the plot contradicted each other, the bell would summon a human. Collaboration is not about letting them talk endlessly, but about knowing when to hand back judgment. The workshop owner also required each puppet to bring the materials it had seen before speaking. The prop checker could not demand scene changes based on imagination, the lyric writer could not ignore scene order, and the manuscript collector had to list unresolved disputes. In this way, the back-and-forth between puppets no longer seemed like quarreling, but like a rehearsal with evidence. The workshop owner also required a review after each rehearsal: which dialogue saved labor, and which arguments were just spinning wheels. The more puppets there are, the more necessary it is to see whether collaboration actually moves the play toward delivery.

When staging a new play, the chief steward no longer relayed every line, only checked whether the whole puppet set advanced according to the plan. Minor conflicts were resolved by the puppets among themselves, while key changes still required the workshop owner's nod. For the first time, the theater felt that collaboration among many helpers depended not on bustle, but on a clear way of meeting up.