ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

“continually transforms necessity into virtue.” 110 It is possible, and likely, that his
material circumstances, both economic and artistic, became translated into the essence of
the nineteenth-century puppeteer. Whatever its foundations, Lano’s belief that a true
puppeteer protects his secrets led him to build his career around a body of carefully
guarded puppet tricks.
Thus, both Lano and McPharlin note how, in the first two decades of the twentieth
century, several puppeteers published books and articles revealing the “tricks of the
trade” to American consumers. This process culminated in the shows of Tony Sarg, who
often showed audiences the construction techniques he used to make the puppets and the
strategies he used to manipulate them in performance. A few American puppet theatre
historians (McPharlin, Batchelder) have identified this shift as generating a change in the
popular attitudes toward puppetry. After the 1920s, puppetry circulated far more widely
in schools and community fairs, and traveling companies could no longer depend on the
novelty of their work for financial reward. Given Lano’s place in this history, as one of
the old cabal, he would wish to protect his simple, unrefined tricks.
Lano’s habitual simplicity and desire for innovation combined with his exoticized
portrait of African Americans, and generated his own essence for blackface puppetry. In
the next section, close examination of Lano’s single extant blackface puppet and the
records of his plays will reveal his contribution to the eidos of blackface puppetry.
Lano’s quasi-folklorist perspective encourages him to break with the textual practices
that resulted from minstrelsy’s influence on puppet theatre. It also produced a much
110
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Translated by R. Nice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 410.
88