ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Inescapable similarities exist between the Piccoli style and that adopted by Sue
Hastings for her company […] First, Sue’s marionettes reflected the Piccoli
design, a delicate verisimilitude for which the Piccoli figures were famous.
Second [she adopted the Piccoli combination of] interchangeable short plays and
numerous variety acts. 191
Podrecca formed his company in 1913 and achieved international recognition by the
middle of the following decade. His marionette shows emphasized dancing objects and
puppet tricks in programs that included such characters as “Geisha,” from the Sydney
Jones work of the same name.
Podrecca himself explained the marionette aesthetic as a slippery balance of
reality and fantasy. “There is something in the actor that aspires to the status of
marionette; there is something in the puppet that aspires to the status of actor.” 192 Indeed,
Podrecca saw the marionette as an opportunity to explore the power of deep feeling, in
his words, to be “an instrument […] of music, of pleasure, of color, rhythm, poetry,
technic [sic], and of passion. Above all, of passion.” 193 Hastings adopted both the
techniques of the Piccoli and Podrecca’s romantic essence of the marionette.
The twenty-first century scholar cannot help but note similarities between
Podrecca and Craig’s notions of the marionette’s essence. Both embed it with a self-
consious fantasy of volition. Podrecca rationally acknowledges that the puppet is not
capable of striving for anything. Yet, he confounds rationality by imagining a Pinocchio
spirit in the puppet, one that would break free of its dead wood to become a living,
breathing actor. When Craig dubbed the marionette an “echo of a noble and beautiful
191 Ibid., 29.
192 Issac Goldberg, “For Interview: Mr. Podrecca’s Own Monologue,” In collected documents of
The Paul McPharlin Puppetry Collection (Detroit: DIA Library, ca 1945).
193 Ibid.
147