Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 22:40:47 -0500 (EST)
From: John Bell <bellj-AT-is3.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: Remo Bufano


I am also interested in Remo Bufano and would be interested in hearing any
information.  Stephen Kaplin and I just catalogued 38 puppets and masks by
Bufano in a private collection on Long Island.

See the mentions of Bufano in Bil Baird's _The Art of the Puppet_ and in
Paul McPharlin's history of American puppet theater.

Bufano wrote _The Show Book of Remo Bufano_ (New York: Macmillan, 1929).

He also wrote "The Marionette in the Theatre" for _The Little Review_,
Winter 1926, which talks about the contemporary spread of puppets into
mainstream theater.

There is a caricature of Bufano in a recent book of illustrations from
_The New Yorker_.

Bufano was associated with the radical 1920s theater group called The New
Playwrights' Theater.  A program from one of their shows lists Bufano as a
member of a cooperative woodworking shop connected with NPT.

Bufano later directed the Federal Theater Project's Marionette Theater,
designed puppets for Eva La Gallienne's 1932 _Alice in Wonderland_, and a
35-foot-tall clown for the 1935 Broadway production _Jumbo_.
He built the over-life-size marionettes for Robert Edmond Jones's
1931 production of Stravinsky's _Oedipus Rex_ at the Metropolitan Opera
house in New York. Bil Baird, I believe, mentions operating one of the
arms of these puppets.

One interesting aspect of Bufano's work is that he was exposed to the
Sicilian marionette theater on New York's Lower East Side in his youth.

The Oedipus puppets are split up: some are in the Detroit Institute for
the Arts, the others are in Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript
Library (along with a marionette dragon and an Orlando Furioso-style
knight).

I know that Bufano was helpful to the 1920s New York Yiddish handpuppet
theater named Modicut.

I would appreciate hearing of other sources on Bufano.

John Bell



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