ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

herself in need of independent economic support. She looked to puppetry once more.
After two decades, her financial needs outweighed her father’s anti-theatrical prejudices.
Beginning in 1922, she returned to the professional stage, writing one failed full-
length play. Mildly daunted, she enrolled in playwriting course. There, she heard of
Tony Sarg’s company, with whom she would later apprentice herself. At this time,
Hastings was generally rankled by her experience as a playwright, a failure she blamed
on “everyone and everything except her script;” She thus migrated toward puppetry for
reasons worthy of Edward Gordon Craig. 180 Without having seen a live puppet show:
She was intrigued at the prospect of having complete control over a theatrical
production. She facetiously speculated that the marionettes suited her needs in
that she could be a playwright, designer, director, actor, and producer. Then, if
her production failed, she theorized, she would have no one but herself to
blame. 181
Her biographer supposes that Hastings may have investigated puppetry through the many
books and articles that were then available. 182 Similarities between her perspective, as
quoted above, and Craig’s essay on the ubermarionette, further suggest that Hastings
made use of the written puppetry texts available in the 1920s.
She either read voraciously or had an extraordinary natural aptitude for the form,
for she produced her first puppet show before she ever saw another’s. That show, a
burlesque on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a surprising success for a beginner. The audience
at Columbia University’s McMillan Theatre responded enthusiastically. She gave a
180 Ibid., 24.
181 Ibid., 24.
182 Tony Sarg’s articles and McIsaac’s book on the artist, as well as Edward Gordon Craig’s “The
Actor and the Ubermarionette” (1908) and Helen Haimon Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920) were in
print and available to Hasting.
142