CHICAGO — A shop vacuum became a lover; suction was involved. Feet turned into faces. A great fanged creature appeared with a man inside. Ghostly villagers assembled, silent and wreathed with smoke as their buildings burned and burned.

It was a puppet invasion — all part of the 11-day Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival — and the latest proof that puppetry, a delicate and mysterious art so often restricted in this country to the children’s table, or relegated to fringe productions, has claimed a spot closer to the center. In an age when we seek relief from the relentless barrage of technology, this low-fi, handmade form provides it.

A city where the dominant stage aesthetic for years was a kind of red-meat realism — think Steppenwolf Theater Company, which unleashed John Malkovich on the world — might not seem to be a place where puppetry would flourish. Yet the very existence of last month’s festival, and the eagerness with which dozens of institutions across Chicago have embraced it since its start in 2015, is emblematic of a development long in the making on American stages.

It’s not so much that puppetry is having an evanescent moment as that it has reached critical mass and settled in, cherished by grown-up audiences raised on “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show” who have had their hunger stoked by landmark puppet productions on Broadway: “The Lion King,” “Avenue Q,” “War Horse,” with its magnificent steeds.

