February 22, 2018-July 1, 2018

American Puppet Modernism:  The Early 20th Century 

New energies, ideas, technologies, and cultural contexts marked United States puppetry in the first half of the 20th century. European marionette and hand puppet traditions had proliferated across the country for four centuries, and by the early 1900s, two new ideas emerged: that puppetry was an ideal form for children’s education and entertainment; and that puppetry could be an ideal way to represent modern questions of culture, identity, and politics.  This combination produced American puppet modernism. 

The early 20th-century world considered the United States a dynamic engine of progress. American puppeteers embraced this dynamism in a variety of ways, taking advantage of new technologies of transportation, engineering,  and communication as they toured across the country, invented such wonders as giant inflatable puppets, and figured out how puppets worked best with film and television.  

In addition to European forms, American puppet modernists began to recognize and utilize Asian rod-puppet and shadow-puppet traditions, and developed an understanding of puppetry as a global tradition. Daring puppet experiments of the European avant-garde inspired expatriate artists such as Gertrude  Stein and Alexander Calder to pursue similar projects when they returned home. 

Modernist puppeteers also realized puppetry as a strong and clear way to share political, social, and cultural ideas. Immigrant artists in New York  City represented Yiddish culture and contemporary politics; and as union struggles and the threat of fascism emerged in the 1920s and 30s, giant puppets in the streets and hand puppets in booth stages sounded alarms.

Political Puppetry 

Wherever they emerge in societies around the globe, puppets have played a  central role as commentators—most often satirical!—on social and political life. Modern political developments in the early 20th century inspired artists in the United States to use puppets to convey political ideas—an active counterpart to the equally effective use of puppets in advertising. Puppets were employed by activist puppeteers to support unionizing efforts and, as  20th-century politics evolved, to oppose fascism. Activist puppeteers used a  variety of forms ranging from agit-prop hand-puppet shows to cantastorias (picture performances) and giant puppets for street demonstrations in the  1920s and 30s. In New York City, the Modicut Puppet Theater combined its sharp political satire with comic visions of Jewish life on the Lower East  Side, all in Yiddish.

The Depression-era Federal Theatre Project was created to put America’s theater community back to work, and it included hundreds of puppeteers across the country. Federal Theatre Project puppet units were created across the country, and included many of the artists whose work is here on display.  Ralph Chessé, who was state director of the California FTP puppetry division,  wrote that “Federal Theatre gave me a chance to show that marionettes can  be very high-class adult entertainment.”

Old Woman
Dancing Rabbi
Mahatma Gandhi
Herbert Hoover
Hitler
Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, Modicut Puppet Theatre
1925-1933
From the Collection of David and Audrey Buchholz

 Zuni Maud (1891-1956) and Yosl Cutler (1896-1934), immigrated to New York City from eastern Europe in time to be part of the city's 1920s and 30s puppet renaissance. Both graphic artists and political satirists, Maud and Cutler created Modicut Puppet Theater in 1925, performing such shows as Der Magid (The Itinerant Preacher) and Akhashveyrush (a Purim shpil) based on Jewish folklore. With onset of the Depression they produced more political work, such as a hand-puppet satire of The Dybbuk, making them popular with intellectuals and general audiences alike, and winng critical acclaim from the Yiddish press.

 Modicut also performed in Jewish schools and workers’ clubs around New York and in 1929 toured Europe, where they were seen as exciting examples of American Yiddish modernism. They disbanded in 1933 for reasons that are not clear, and Cutler died in a car crash en route to Hollywood. Maud continued to perform live and on television.

Travelling Shows: Puppets on the Road

Entrepreneur, puppeteer, and visual artist Tony Sarg created the template for the 20th-century travelling puppet theater. Basing his techniques on the classic marionette shows of Thomas Holden’s London-based company, Sarg brought puppet theater of high artistry to New York City and then to venues across the U.S. While he was well aware of the Little Theater Movement’s experiments, Sarg stuck to such shows as Jack and the Beanstalk, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and other popular fare. Sarg soon employed multiple companies which traversed the country performing his productions, and many of Sarg’s puppeteers, including Lilian Owen Thompson, Sue Hastings, Bil Baird, Hazelle Rollins, and Rufus and Margo Rose, eventually struck out on their own.

Two, three, or four puppeteers could make a living by touring and performing marionette or hand-puppet shows regionally or across the U.S. Such couples as Rufus and Margo Rose, Frank and Elizabeth Haines, Martin and Olga Stevens created shows with collapsible stages that could fit into a truck or automobile trailer and, taking advantage of the growing highway system, develop their own touring circuit.

Huntsman
The Queen
Magic Mirror
Snow White
Three Dwarfs
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Rufus and Margo Rose
1937

Puppeteers Rufus and Margo Rose were the leading husband-and-wife puppeteer team in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s. They met in 1928 while members of Tony Sarg’s puppet company, where they learned the design and performance traditions of European-style string puppet. They married in 1930 and a year later formed the Rufus Rose Marionettes. The couple toured across the United States for nearly two decades, booking shows despite the hardships of the Great Depression. The Roses' national touring productions included The Variety Show (1931), Pinocchio (1934), Snow White (1937), Treasure Island (1937), and Rip Van Winkle (1941). Difficulties brought on by the Second World War caused the Roses to put their marionette touring on hold in 1942.

The Roses began working in film in 1938 with Jerry Pulls the Strings, and in the 1950s performed marionettes for the NBC children’s show Howdy Doody and produced their own television productions such as The Blue Fairy (1958).

Art as Object Performance: Socrate

Avant-garde puppetry flourished in early 20th-century Europe, but did not enjoy a similar notoriety in the U.S. Despite Little Theater Movement inspirations, radical experiments were rare. In 1931 Remo Bufano designed giant marionettes for Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Five years later sculptor Alexander Calder designed simple geometric moving sculptures to complement Erik Satie’s 1919 symphonic drama Socrate, for performances in Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

 The Atheneum’s director, Arthur “Chick” Austin, had long labored to make Hartford a center of modern art, and in 1934 presented the groundbreaking Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. And Alexander Calder had spent the late 1920s and early 30s in Paris soaking up the rich variety of avant-garde art and performance being produced by such artists, dancers, musicians and writers as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Satie, and the Ballets Suédois. To produce Socrate--”a ballet danced by shapes and colors” (as historian Eugene R. Gaddis put it)--made total sense to Austin and Calder. But for Hartford and the rest of the country, it was an entirely new conception of how music and objects could combine. In 1976 conductor Joel Thome, with Calder’s blessing, re-created the artist’s moving sculptures for Socrate, which was performed the following year, after Calder’s sudden death, in sold-out shows at the Beacon Theatre.

White Rectangle
Red Disc
Steel Hoops
Socrate, by Erik Satie
Alexander Calder
Reconstructed in 1976 after 1936 originals
From the collection of Joel Thome

Erik Satie’s 1919 “symphonic drama in three parts” is based on three texts by Plato about the great Greek philosopher Socrates, and is written for two voices and a small orchestra. Inspired by the radical puppet and performing object experiments he had witnessed in Paris, and by the possibilities of object performance he had explored with the wire puppets of his miniature Cirque Calder (1926) Alexander Calder designed these three geometric sculptures to be the central performers in his 1936 production for The First Hartford Festival at the Wadsworth Atheneum. “Why not plastic forms in motion?” Calder asked in an essay from the 1920s. “Not simple translatory or rotary motion, but several motions of different types, speeds and amplitudes composing to make a resultant whole. Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.” These inspirations led Calder to invent his famous mobiles, but also to create stage productions with performing objects such as the ground-breaking Socrate. These reconstructions were recreated with Calder’s approval for a 1977 performance of Socrate produced by Joel Thome, Director of the Orchestra of Our Time, as part of the National Tribute to Alexander Calder at the Beacon Theatre in New York.

Puppetry as Modern Theater: Marjorie Batchelder

Marjorie Batchelder (1903-1997) stands out as a particularly strong and prescient modern puppeteer. An Illinois native, she studied teaching at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in the 1920s, and then pursued puppetry for her M.A. (1934) and Ph.D. (1942) degrees from Ohio State University. Batchelder’s puppetry interests were deep and wide-ranging. Influenced by the Little Theater Movement, she created puppet plays for adults such as Doctor Faust (1932) and Aristophanes’ The Birds (1934) as well as Maurice Maeterlinck’s Death of Tintagiles (1937), and Edward Gordon Craig’s Mr. Fish and Mrs. Bones (1939). Entirely adventuresome, she experimented with all forms of puppetry, including rod puppets, whose roots she found in Indonesian wayang golek as well as in European forms. Together with the equally visionary puppeteer Paul McPharlin, she co-organized the first puppetry festival in the United States, an essential nationwide gathering of puppeteers in 1936 that soon led to the founding of the Puppeteers of America. Batchelder married McPharlin shortly before he died in 1949. She was a prolific writer, producing Rod-Puppets and the Human Theatre and The Puppet Theatre Handbook (both in 1947), the latter of which Jim Henson turned to when he wanted to teach himself how to become a puppeteer. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 1950s, and in  the 1960s traveled widely, researching socialist puppet trends in eastern Europe, and teaching puppetry in India. In 1969 she published a revised and updated version of her husband’s Puppet Theatre in America, which to this day is the most comprehensive history of the form as it has developed in the United States.

Chorus of Birds
Hoopoe, King of the Birds
Sacrificial Goat
Euelpides
Iris
Poseidon
Meton
Prometheus
Hercules
Pisthetaerus
The Birds, by Aristophanes
Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin
1934

Marjorie Batchelder created her version of Aristophanes’ classic comedy for her M.A. degree at Ohio State University. The story features a flock of birds who create a utopian city in the sky which soon out-rivals the power of the Greek gods, but also satirizes the political and social life of Athens.

In describing the production Batchelder wrote “[t]he bodies and hands were carved from cypress wood; the costumes followed Greek fashions of the period, and the faces were made as masks. A special stage, with a double bridge was constructed, and music was arranged by Beatrice Perham, then on the OSU staff.”

Character Renderings
The Birds, by AristophanesMarjorie Batchelder McPharlin
1934

Marjorie Batchelder painted these character sketches for The Birds as she designed the show in 1934 at Ohio State University. Her bold sense of puppet characterization is fully evident in her imagery.

Puppets and the Little Theater Movement

As a conscious alternative to the large-scale professional theaters across the U.S. featuring melodrama, musicals, vaudeville, and other spectacle, the Little Theater Movement wanted to develop drama as art, not commerce. Inspired by European innovators of dramatic Realism (Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen) and Symbolism (W. B. Yeats, Maurice Maeterlinck), American Little Theater makers were also enamored of the possibilities of puppetry as a sophisticated art form, particularly as those ideas were articulated by English designer and director Edward Gordon Craig. Chicagoan Ellen Van Volkenburg and her British partner Maurice Browne initiated the movement when they founded the Chicago Little Theatre in 1911, and this soon inspired groups across the country, including the Provincetown Playhouse and the Neighborhood Playhouse (both in New York City), and the Cleveland Playhouse; and the nurturing of new voices in American drama, including Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. Puppets, masks, and performing objects were regular features of Little Theater productions. Puppeteers Ralph Chessé (in San Francisco) and Lou Bunin (in New York) each produced marionette versions of O’Neill’s expressionist tragedy about African American experience, The Emperor Jones, and puppet versions of Shakespeare and Greek drama were common. The movement inspired our own Frank Ballard to perform many of his marionette dramas in the Alton Little Theater in the early 1940s.

Hamlet
Gravedigger
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Ralph Chessé
1928 

Puppeteer, painter, and actor Ralph Chessé (1900-1991) was born to a French-Creole family in New Orleans, and was largely self-taught as an artist. He moved to San Francisco in 1924, where he was introduced to puppetry by Blanding Sloan, who created his a marionette theater in 1928. At Sloan’s theater Chessé created such adult dramas as Hamlet, The Emperor Jones and Macbeth, all in 1928. Over the next eight years Chessé created over 11 more productions, including Don Juan (1929), Romeo and Juliet (1931), The Mikado (1933), H.M.S. Pinafore (1933), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1933), Alice in Wonderland (1934), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1934). In 1936 he was appointed head of the Federal Theatre Project’s California Marionette Unit, with whom he directed Meyer Levin’s The Crock of Gold, and produced Pinocchio, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White.

After World War Two, Chessé began to teach puppetry for adult education at San Francisco State College, and produced commercials for television. In 1953 he created the award-winning television program Brother Buzz, which was broadcast for the next 16 years, becoming the longest-running children’s program in San Francisco history. 

Mark Anthony
Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare
Martin Stevens
1940

Martin and Olga Stevens, of Middlebury, Indiana began performing in 1934, and soon developed a repertoire of “really haunting, naturalistic marionette shows, primarily for adults” (as puppeteer Ronnie Burkett put it) which toured both locally and nationwide. At one point in their career, they had eight traveling companies on the road performing such serious dramas as Joan of Arc (1937) and Cleopatra (1940), as well as shows with Christian religious themes including The Passion Play and The Nativity (both 1935).  The Stevens were frequent collaborators with Rufus and Margo Rose, with whom they toured across the country and collaborated on the film Jerry Pulls the Strings (1938). The Stevens were charter members and active participants in the Puppeteers of America, which began in 1937. After World War Two, the Stevens created a rod-puppet version of Macbeth and hand-puppet Taming of the Shrew. Their classic hand-puppet allegory about Cold War politics, The Toymaker, was filmed in 1949. In 1960 Martin Stevens created a puppet correspondence course, which was popular for over two decades.

The General
(Marionette)
The Rose and the Ring, after Thackeray, by Hettie Louis Mick 
Tony Sarg
1919 

Tony Sarg (1880-1942) was most successful puppeteer of his time. Born in  Guatemala to German parents, he learned marionette performance from the famous  Thomas Holden company in London. Coming to the United States in 1915, he created puppet company which trained scores of young puppeteers for his shows.  Sarg was also a graphic designer for Macy’s department store, and in 1924  designed the first giant inflatable puppets for their Thanksgiving Day Parade. 

Ellen Van Volkenburg and Hettie Louise Mick of the Chicago Little Theatre helped  Sarg transform William Makepeace Thackeray’s satirical pantomime The Rose and the Ring into a play for marionettes for New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse in 1919. Paul McPharlin wrote that the production “set up an ideal for American puppetry: a good play, as a rule based on a familiar tale, with all the production details carefully worked out and integrated. Puppets, scenery, lights, properties,  and even the printed program, exhibited artistically.”

Yank
Two Stokers
The Hairy Ape, by Eugene O’Neill
Lou Bunin
1930
From the Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin Collection at the Ballard Institute

Born in Russia, puppeteer and stop-motion animator Lou Bunin (1904-1994) was inspired by puppets, political activism, and film animation, and in 1926 created the Marionette Studio with puppeteer Meyer Levin. Soon after, while apprenticing with muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico City, Bunin began to built a puppet version of Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 expressionist critique of American capitalism, The Hairy Ape, which he and Levin ultimately brought to the stage in New York City in 1930.  Yank, a working-class stoker in the hold of an ocean liner, tells the other stokers that he, himself, is the human engine of modern society: “[D]at’s me!--de new dat’s moiderin’ de old!,” he tells the others. But in the course of O’Neill’s play, Yank is rejected by all aspects of American society, and is finally crushed by a gorilla in the Central Park Zoo. A New York Times reviewer, according to historian Alisa Solomon, wrote “that is was a shocking revelation to him that puppets could express tragedy perhaps more powerfully than people.”

Advertising and Commercial Puppets

Advertising in the U.S. began to flourish in the 19th century, and by the early 20th, the birth of the modern advertising agency professionalized the trade. Advertisers recognized that the visceral power of puppetry could be an effective medium, and began to employ puppets, especially in film and television. The 1938 film Jerry Pulls the Strings brought together some of America’s most talented puppeteers to create a half-hour infomercial about coffee for the American Can Company. Bil Baird, Frank and Elizabeth Haines, and other puppeteers of the 30s and 40s created advertisements for gasoline, beer, cereal, and other products, beginning a tradition that came to include Jim Henson’s 1950s work for Wilkins Coffee and La Choy Chow Mein.

Educators in the early 20th century also realized that puppets could also be powerful tools for children’s development. Various teachers and school systems began to devise curriculum involving puppetry, and entrepreneurs such as Hazelle Rollins realized that well-designed, mass-produced puppets could be a valuable addition to childhood development in the home. Rollins initiated the business of puppets as toys, but maintained an essential focus on education as the ultimate goal of the form.

Little Lubie
Gretz Beer Bicyclist
Frank and Elizabeth Haines
1940-1941

Although noted for their exquisitely designed and performed live marionette shows in the 1930s and 40s, Philadelphia’s Frank and Elizabeth Haines were at the same time pioneers in the new medium of television, for which they created a variety of commercials.  Their marionettes were used some of the first television experiments conducted by Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in 1939, and their commercial for Atlantic White Flash Gasoline (with Little Lubie) was the first publicly broadcast television advertisement to use marionettes, and seen on Philadelphia’s WPTZ in 1941.  The Haines created the television mascot for Philadelphia’s Gretz Beer Company, with a variety of different outfits and props, including the penny farthing bicycle he is riding here.

Papa Goat
Mama Goat
Baby Goat
Donkey
Jerry Pulls the Strings
Bil Baird
1938

In 1934 a puppeteer dream team--Bil and Evelyn Baird, Rufus and Margo Rose, and Martin and Olga Stevens--created Jerry Pulls the Strings, a promotional film for the American Can Company portraying the history of coffee and, as puppeteer Fred Thompson put it, “the virtues of tin-can packaging and the vacuum process. The film is considered by many to be the first full-length commercial film using puppets. Jerry Pulls the Strings was filmed in a converted church in Hempstead, Long Island.  The builders and puppeteers on the project, according to Thompson, were Rufus and Margo Rose, Martin and Olga Stevens, Bil and Evelyn Baird, Frank and Fania Sullivan, and Sylvia Meredith. “Margo sculpted all of the heads,” Thompson writes, “and Rufus and Martin took charge of building. Olga, along with Margo, did the sewing of the costumes. Bil Baird built Kaldi the shepherd and the goat puppets used in the Kaldi scene, in which caffeine is discovered in coffee beans.” Baird’s donkey appeared in the film’s South American plantation scene, reluctantly pulling a cart laden with coffee beans, and then characteristically sitting down on the job.

Fireman
Chorus Girl
Nellie Bly
Bil Baird
1945-46 

Baird’s puppets regularly appeared in Broadway productions of the 1940s and  50s, including the Fireman and Chorus Girl from Nellie Bly, a 1945 Broadway musical about the globe-trotting 19th-century female reporter.  

Nebraskan-born Bil Baird became smitten with puppetry after seeing a Tony Sarg touring production in 1921. Seven years later he was working with Sarg in New  York City, and in 1934 started his own company, the Baird Marionettes, which first performed at the Chicago World’s Fair the same year. Baird’s hand puppets performed the Seven Deadly Sins in Orson Welles’ 1937 Federal Theatre Project production of Doctor Faustus, and his marionettes performed in such Broadway shows Flahooley (1951) and Baker Street (1965), as well as Nellie Bly. Baird worked extensively in film and on television in the 50s and 60s, and performed around the world on State Department-sponsored tours in the 1950s.