ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

The Meader Uncle Tom suggests the eidos of blackface puppetry for the coming
decades. As puppeteers branched into plays and showcases that depicted human beings
in less clownlike ways, and the decreased need for humorous exaggeration logically
required less exaggerated representations of human beings, the puppeteers constructed
frontalities for their characters through an integration of the present narratives and the co-
presence of minstrelsy, the form that had produced blackface puppetry. Thus, black
characters on the largely white-created puppet stage would continue to be, whether being
manipulated during a minstrel show or not, a kind of blackface, constructed fictions of
black Americans based only vaguely on the realities of black life.
In the following chapter, the work of David Lano will serve to deepen
understanding of these conflicting essences. This puppeteer never enjoyed the visibility
of playing at the major houses occupied by the Royal Marionettes. However, as Paul
McPharlin notes:
The Lano family might have been typical of those scores of puppeteers whose
names were allowed to vanish because they were not committed to the print of
playbills or newspapers […] but they were far from unimportant. Like other
small shows on the frontier, their value as an entertainment in remote places was
implicit in the delight of the audiences who saw them. In the theatre-hungry
backwoods they were the theatre. 90
Thus, a discussion of his family’s puppetry will serve to articulate the influence of
blackface puppetry in the frontier, and the differences between its interpretation by
traveling showpeople who have no resources but their own industry, and the well-
financed companies of the Bullock Royal Marionettes and their comrades. At the same
time, Lano’s eighty-year career will carry the essay into the twentieth century, when the
90
Paul McPharlin, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History, 1524-1948 (New York: Plays Inc,
1949), 201; 220.
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