In a packed theater on Broadway, Kate Monster, a fuzzy-faced puppet in a lavender top, laments her nonexistent love life.

"Why don't I have a boyfriend?" she sings, in one of the few lyrics that can be printed in this paper. As the song continues, she and the other characters cheerily belt out complaints about being dateless, jobless, and broke.

You're right. This isn't "Sesame Street." "Avenue Q" features Kate and other puppets making out, falling in love, and breaking up. The show, which had its official Broadway opening Thursday night, is just one example of the increasing prominence of puppets in the theater. Long relegated to children's birthday parties, puppets are no longer considered strictly kiddie fare.

Instead, they're becoming mainstream, hip, and sophisticated. And, yes, sometimes risqué.

"There's a lot of new and young blood and ideas," says Pam Arcerio, artistic director of the O'Neill Puppetry Conference, who also plays Grungetta Grouch, Oscar the Grouch's girlfriend, on "Sesame Street."

At venues like New York's P.S. 122, St. Ann's Warehouse, and HERE Arts Center, puppeteers are tackling Rossini operas, Shakespearean tragedies, and Ionesco tales. Earlier this year, Basil Twist's "Symphonie Fantastique," an underwater puppet spectacle set to Hector Berlioz's 19th-century classical composition, played at the Lincoln Center. And at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, there's currently an international exhibit of ancient and contemporary puppetry, called Puppetry of Shadow and Light. In downtown Manhattan, you can catch "puppet slams," modeled loosely after "poetry slams." There's even a dada rock puppet show: Dirty Jimmy's Basement.

Puppets are also a growing presence on Broadway. Besides "Avenue Q," there's Julie Taymor's "The Lion King." In its fifth year, the musical features stunning giraffe, elephant, and hyena puppets. It's still Broadway's biggest hit. This fall, "The Little Shop of Horrors" will debut on Broadway, starring Seymour, a life-sized talking and singing Venus flytrap puppet.

"The interest in puppet-art theater has been growing since the late '80s and early '90s, says John Bell, puppeteer of New York's Great Small Works and an assistant professor of performing arts at Boston's Emerson College.

The popularity of puppetry owes much to the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater, which Cheryl Henson, daughter of Muppets' creator Jim Henson started in 1992 to promote puppetry in the United States, says Mr. Bell. [Editor's note: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater to Jim Henson.]

More adults are accepting puppetry as a viable art form because more than a generation has grown up with Henson's puppets on "Sesame Street," Ms. Arcerio says. "It's that nostalgic aspect," she says. "Sometimes we want things that hark back to a more innocent time."

The popularity of puppets may also reflect a shift in our aesthetics. "The experience of watching puppets is close to watching animated films," says Lee Breuer, the writer and director of Mabou Mines, an avant-garde theater company in New York.

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