ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

ead, his mother chastises him and gives him explicit instructions as to how to correctly
deliver the item. But when the foolish boy melts the butter trying to keep it in his hat,
drowns the dog trying to keep it cool in the river, and loses the bread to scavengers trying
to pull it on a leash, “Mammy” despairs and goes to see Auntie herself. He leaves the
boy in charge of a series of pies, telling him to be very careful how he steps on them.
Epaminondas “carefully” steps in the middle of each one. The story ends with the
narrator affirming that “no one knows what happened next.” 237 It has the same simple
moral lessons of Sambo, and Bryant’s text contained the same style of bold, exaggerated
illustrations made popular by Bannerman’s tale.
The significance of this particular minstrel show is difficult to determine without
extant puppets or descriptions. Clearly, it was not a standard adaptation of Bryant’s
work, but was a performance that integrated variety acts or included satirical envocations
of Bryant’s characters. Yet, it demonstrates how blackface puppetry had changed by the
1940s. The eidos of blackface puppetry, which had been innaugurated with Jim Crow
clowns and Lambert D’Arc’s grotesque images of minstrelsy actors, would no longer
tolerate the simplist golliwogs of blackface.
The Stellar Marionettes only played for two seasons in Philadelphia. Their
proprieter, Sidney Friedman, produced two productions, suggestive of his interest in
using puppetry to recapture nineteenth-century musical theatre. In addition to Minstrel
Show, the company made the impressive choice to produce the W. S. Gilbert and Arthur
Sullivan operetta Trial by Jury (1940). It seems likely, then, that their Minstrel Show was
a combination of the traditional Interlocutor/Tambo/Bones/band format established by
237 Ibid., 11.
187