ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

used them in plays where puppets celebrate biracial families, assert the supremacy of
imagined Africa culture over western capitalism, and criticize great authors for equating
skin color with moral purity.
Puppeteers like Lano, Hastings, the members of The Stellar Marionettes, Hayes,
and Hetrick adopted the more grotesque exaggerations of minstrelsy consistently to
produce comic plays. Granted, Lano was the only puppeteer of this group to leave
writings explaining his intentions. As Lano articulated it, he was a “showman,” a
traveling mountebank. The goal of puppetry, as Lano understood it, was to impress
audiences with clever, entertaining tricks. Thus, the comedy of exaggeration would serve
both the need to catch a frontier audience’s attention, and the comic goals of the John
Payne Collier Punch text. If other puppeteers felt similarly, than it may be that the
demands of comedy are as important a factor in defining the level of exaggeration
executed by puppeteers as their particular ideas about blackface characterization.
Of course, realism is not an absolute artistic good. It does seem that puppeteers
during the early twentieth century, especially Brown, Paris, and Chesse’, rendered
puppets with more photographically realistic details. One could argue, intentions
notwithstanding, that the longterm result of experiments with increased realism, including
Chesse’s Emperor Jones and Paris’s Josephine Baker, was the end of the extreme
exaggerations of marionette minstrelsy, when such experiments made those
exaggerations appear too ridiculous. Certainly, the steady decrease in puppet minstrel
shows suggests that a field of puppet theatre dominated by more realistic images would
no longer tolerate the grotesque clowns of minstrelsy. Ultimately, this investigation
238