To help ensure the entertainment value, I did include the typical elements of a Brewery Troupe production, including sight gags, a variety of puppet types, lots of evocative music, and striking visuals in the sets and costumes. Indeed, I intended to—and did—incorporate many comedic aspects, such as the puppet character Bobby Bird—Latimer’s pet bird—who talked in a folksy, funny voice and became a vehicle for telling the story in a way that would not go over the heads of the children we knew would make up a good percentage of our audiences. (Bobby Bird, in a nod to Black culture, was named after one of the background singers for the legendary James Brown). The Brewery Troupe’s famous quartet of puppets, the Crowtations, played hapless scientists wearing white lab coats, who arrived in a beat-up truck at the beginning of the show, and whose disastrous experiments got the audience laughing from the outset. Young Junior, one of the Crows, took his failed experiments the hardest, but it was Otis, the eldest and wisest of the group, who used the story of Lewis Latimer to show how, through study and persistence, success can be achieved.
Music
As in many of our productions, jazz played a key role in telling the story. Throughout the performance, a musician playing an upright bass provided a score that highlighted various episodes, some of which expressed the joy of freedom and the pain of slavery. A jazz version of the national anthem accompanied a bloodstained American flag slowly unrolling down in front of Supreme Court Justice Taney as he read the infamous Dred Scott case. Using a bow, the bass produced a sound of anger and rebellion and a thirst for freedom.
Visuals/Sets/Puppet Variety To create this period piece, we had the challenge of researching and then creating 19th century offices, labs, homes, and costumes. We built an endless variety of puppets to carry the message and emotions we wanted to convey. For example, we used soft sculpture, which allowed us to show the aging of the principal characters. The papier-mâché and Celastic heads were painted to show a variety of skin tones, particularly Lewis Latimer’s light-skinned father and dark-skinned mother. I built two eight-foot-tall kite puppets of Latimer and Edison to illustrate their importance to the world of science and invention.
Conclusion
All in all, this project gave me the opportunity to both showcase a historical Black achiever and explore some of the hard realities of the Black experience in America, using a great soundtrack, dozens of puppets, and the professional expertise of the Lemelson Center. Ironically, our project reflected the more traditional characteristics of European puppet theater that often tackle dark subjects, such as Communist oppression, political issues, social unrest, and the plight of the working class. This
Development of the Lewis Latimer puppet, from photo, to drawing, to puppet. Photo courtesy of Brad Brewer and the Smithsonian National Museum of History
approach is in contrast to a lot of American puppetry, which has tended to highlight make-believe worlds and happy-ending fairy tales free of controversy. Our production drew on both traditions, as a result of our unique place in American society. In the end, we produced a full-scale puppet play that presented the life of an African American scientist who was conceived in slavery but born in freedom, and who rose to work side by side with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. While the Smithsonian staff looked at Lewis Latimer from one perspective, I looked at his story from the perspective of how it affected me as a Black man. The Smithsonian saw his value as an inventor, rather than how his life was more fundamental to Black American history and American history more broadly. If it had been a white puppeteer, the relationship between Latimer and Thomas Edison might have been the crux of the story. However, for me, the fact that his mother refused to have her child born into slavery, which led to his opportunity to become an inventor, was more important, more central to his story.
The Black contribution to puppetry is consistent with our contribution to all American art forms. Sometimes that perspective is uncomfortable, may lack a feel- good aura, and might defy what people believe a puppet show is supposed to be. But I believe that in this case, we found a way to present some of the harsh realities of Black history while incorporating the usual Brewery Troupe elements of visual impact, lively and evocative music, and silly wisecracking characters to tell the story. Indeed, our production demonstrated how the universal language of puppetry, using an African American perspective, could tackle a serious subject like slavery with music and humor, without minimizing its impact.
Nearly two years of working with the Lemelson Center allowed me
to grow as a storyteller and take the Brewery Troupe to another level. It gave me an opportunity to use the art of puppetry to produce a show that highlighted African American values of freedom, family, education, hard work, persistence, and creativity. We are more than proud to have told the story of people lifting themselves up, in spite of great odds, to achieve excellence and make real contributions to American progress.
Brad Brewer founded the Brewery Troupe in 1973. The troupe’s Legendary Crowtations credits include: Late Night at the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater (1992), National Puppetry Festival (1993 and 2001), on Broadway with the Boys Choir of Harlem (1993), and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1996). Their puppet biography of Lewis Latimer, was commissioned by the Lemelson Center of the Smithsonian Institutio. A VHS tape, Lewis Latimer: Renaissance Man, was released in 2000. Puppets of Lewis Latimer, Thomas Edison, and Frederick Douglass are part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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