ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Chapter VII: The Federal Theatre Project
The herein-considered complex and contradictory historical process of developing
blackface representation comes to an end with this study of the Federal Theatre Project’s
puppetry and marionette units. 1935-1939, America’s four glorious years of state-
sponsored theatrical performance, marked the largest aggregate of puppetry activity in the
United States since the founding of the Republic. The FTP sponsored more than twenty
marionette units, hundreds of productions playing an average of a hundred shows per
week, and as many as a thousand individual puppeteers and assistants. 257 New York
City’s marionette unit alone employed more puppeteers than the non-relief job market. 258
Over two dozen productions featured blackface characters, from some of the last
recorded original puppet minstrel shows, the All Colored Review (1936), to Ralph
Chesse’s The Emperor Jones (1937-38). 259 More detailed records and photographs exist
for these four years, than any other in puppet theatre history.
While the FTP marionette units provided a forum for the tiny actors as none that
had exited before, it is especially significant to this history for providing what was, in
many ways, the final nail in the coffin of puppet minstrelsy. Though racialized
257 John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown, eds. “Free, Adult, Uncensored,” The Living History of
the Federal Theatre Project (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 24; It is difficult to determine the actual
number of workers involved in the FTP’s puppetry units. While twenty were on the official hiring list for
the first unit (formed San Francisco, January 1936), many puppeteers were unofficially employed
(especially if they were underage or did not qualify for relief) and never recorded in any program or report.
See Bob Baker’s comments in: Bonnie Nelson Schwartz and the Educational Film Center, Voices from the
Federal Theatre (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2003), 155-59.
258 Ibid., 24.
259 The Detroit Institute of the Arts reproduced a minstrel show in 1957, using the puppets of
Daniel Meader. I found no records of original, traditional, puppet minstrel shows after 1936. The scenes
of Minstrel Show: Epaminondas (1939) were likely too inimately blended with the children’s story to be a
traditional minstrel show.
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