New York Puppet Modernism: Remo Bufano and Jane Heap

Abstract

Ellen Van Volkenburg’s embrace of puppetry as an art form had effects both direct and indirect on American theatre in the first three decades of the twentieth century. An important part of this is the delicate symbiotic relationship between art theatre as a not-for-profit (and often distinctly unprofitable) enterprise focused on larger and indistinct cultural and social goals, and commercial theatre as a public, profitmaking venture which serves communities by providing familiar and affirming entertainment. The Manhattan-based puppeteer Tony Sarg, the most successful of the early-twentieth-century puppeteers, was definitely of the latter camp. When Helen Haiman Joseph asked Sarg “why he does not attempt poetic drama with his marionettes” she already knew part of the answer. “He is faced, of course,” she wrote, “with the problem which confronts all the puppet showmen here in America of finding material suitable for a given type of doll and also acceptable to local audiences, hitherto unacquainted with the characteristics and traditions” of the puppet theatre.¹ But in his response to Joseph, Sarg sidestepped her question by citing the “exaggerated walk of the dolls, which always brings laughter from the audience” as the main reason he didn’t perform Maeterlinck plays. But the real reason had to be that Jack and the Beanstalk, Rip Van Winkle, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and other popular tales in Sarg’s repertoire were far more able to meet the expectations of a wider audience than Maeterlinck’s obscure symbolist tragedy The Death of Tintagiles or a poetic drama by Yeats.