Anthony Michael Stokes: The Scarecrow

Scarecrow: The Breath of Life

An Essay by Paulette Richards

Claudia Orenstein asserts that  “the act of becoming animate, being alive, is the story that is always being told or enacted by the puppet within or alongside any other plot of a puppet show” (2024: 19). A 2020 New York Times article reported that the last words of more than seventy people who died in police custody over the previous ten years were “I can’t breathe” (Baker et al, 2020). More than half of them were Black. While Jones concludes that the micro-drama of keeping the puppet alive can be at odds with the larger story, Anthony Michael Stokes’s Scarecrow seeks to dramatize the history of racial-terror lynching that has snuffed out thousands of African-American lives through the struggle to endow the puppet with breath. Unfortunately, the puppeteers for the Chicago Puppet Theater Festival  performance of this work-in-progress could not fully breathe life into the show.

The theater in the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center has a central ramp that extends into the first section of seats. Rather than scaling the set to puppet size or rendering the puppeteers less visible, Stokes made use of this feature to open the show with a processional entrance as the Scarecrow, who is now King of Oz, and his courtiers assemble at his palace. Processional spectacles with performing objects are a feature of traditional African masquerade and Caribbean Carnival. Processionals and recessionals are also common in the Black church, and Tau Bennett gave the audience the sense of wonderment at material coming to life through his animation of the Sawhorse puppet. Other puppeteers, however, treated the puppets more like props and did not consistently maintain a sense of floor (the real or imagined surface the puppet is standing on) and focus (the direction the puppet is looking).

As a musical theater piece, Stokes’s Scarecrow stands in a venerable lineage. L. Frank Baum was a savvy marketer who had already learned how to effectively promote his earlier children’s books by the time he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. When it proved successful, he was quick to develop a stage adaptation of the story. The Wizard of Oz, therefore, became one of the first American musical comedy productions. Though Stokes’s cast is full of strong singers, the sound system in the theater made it difficult to appreciate the songs. Still Stokes’s background in musical theater contributes the strongest elements to the show. The traditional spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was a poignant moment because the singers are powerful, not just as individual voices but also in their ability to blend well as an ensemble.  

Stokes describes his story as a prequel and a sequel to the original Wizard of Oz novel. He reimagines how the Scarecrow ended up hanging from the post where Dorothy found him and his life as the ruler of Oz after the end of the original book. Inverting the palette of the iconic 1939 MGM film adaptation, which evokes the bleak landscape of Dust Bowl Kansas in black-and-white, Stokes begins his story at the court of Oz using projections to evoke the brightly colored splendor of the Emerald City without having to construct large, elaborate sets. Subjects come from all over the country to lay their problems before the Scarecrow, the new ruler of the land. One of the most vexing problems is a terrible infestation of crows in Winkie country. Against the advice of his counselor, the Wogglebug (a character from one of the later books), the Scarecrow decides to go to Winkie country himself to try to put things right. The procession travels not only through space but also through time, arriving in a sepia-toned town where dueling speakers appear as silhouettes. Ida B. Wells, noted anti-lynching activist, denounces the barbarity of the practice, but a white suffragette argues that white women should have the vote to counter those of Black males. The shift from three dimensions to two and from vivid color to a monochromatic palette is not sufficient to cue viewers unfamiliar with post-Reconstruction history that we’re not in the familiar terrain of Oz/Kansas anymore.

Frank L. Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an allegory, but the fantasy and enchantment are so well-developed that readers can be drawn into the story and never even notice there is a moral lesson. In The Scarecrow Stokes is much more heavy-handed with his message. He casts a white actor as Mombi (the deposed Wicked Witch of the North in the second book of the Oz series) and a Black actor as Locasta (the Good Witch of the North) with the premise that these two behaved badly in Oz world and have been sent to Kansas to atone for their mischief by spreading peace and harmony. When the Scarecrow and his party accidentally bump into local citizens, it turns out the “crow” problem is really Jim Crow. The cast splits along racial lines, parading back and forth across the stage with placards promoting white supremacy or asserting “We are human too.” Mombi, the White witch, reverts to her old ways and falsely accuses Black characters to get them in trouble.  

Stokes’s solo, “The Awakening,” advantageously exploits the physical characteristics of the puppet to show how the Scarecrow was transmuted from being a lynching victim in Kansas to being a scarecrow in Oz. He builds the puppet’s movements on contraction-and-release sequences common in Modern dance. The puppet executes these movements with boneless fluidity, intensifying the waves of grief. The material—straw—adds a rustling sound but also gives the movement a fragmented or disjointed quality, since the individual pieces of straw all tend to move in their own direction. In this way, the straw puppet amplifies the emotion of grief, which people often describe as “shattering.” In the depths of grief, it can feel like there is nothing to hold the person together. The material and manipulation of the Scarecrow puppet express this sense of disintegration effectively. Rather than minimize the intake of breath that supports the puppet’s singing voice, Stokes takes audible gulps of air between phrases and ends with the puppet, like generations of objectified Black bodies, literally gasping for life. May Stokes’s tenure as a 2024-25 member of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s Puppet Lab provide the means for him to fully realize his recontextualization of the first American fairy tale.