ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

the Carp Stems the Rapids Toward the Dragon Gate, and the head-standing Hawk that
Circles Like a Top. 159 McPharlin’s puppets would reinforce the richness of the script.
As Bell writes, McPharlin committed his most considerable puppet designs to this
performance. In his words:
It is important to note that McPharlin’s approach to Chinese puppet theater was
quite novel-even revolutionary-especially in comparison to the nineteenth-century
European and American marionette traditions of presenting Chinese characters as
clownish circus oddities. McPharlin, benefiting from the increasing volume of
new scholarship on Asian theater, took a Chinese play and attempted to do it
justice, not by using traditional Chinese shadow puppets, but by building his own
in a manner that at once respected Chinese techniques and styles but also
translated them into a modern American idiom. 160
There is a complicated process of integration at work in McPharlin’s puppetry, indicative
of an attempt to move the field of puppetry forward by using the best of eastern and
western art. Though this has been a common technique in western puppet theatre of the
twentieth century, it is telling that McPharlin only chooses to commit these mature
artistic strokes to the exotic Chinese shadow play.
Lincoln and the Pig is a burlesque on Abraham Lincoln, “wherein Abe Lincoln is
altruistic and his horse Ned isn’t,” which McPharlin co-created from an apparently “well-
known legend.” 161 The satire manipulates minstrel-derived stereotyping to accord with
the new eidos. It occurs in a mud-hole. Abe Lincoln enters riding his horse, Ned,
Lincoln’s head “bent in thought” (3). He laments the injustice of the world to the equine
159 Ibid., 312.
160
John Bell, Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit: The Detroit Institute
of the Arts, 2000), 10.
161 Edgar Caper and Paul McPharlin, Lincoln and the Pig (Birmingham, MI: Puppet Plays, Inc.,
1931), 9. From this point forward, I will rely on parenthentical citations for lengthy selections from this
text.
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