The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America

Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 6pm

The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America
Jo Ann Cavallo, Columbia University

Sicilian puppet theater (opera dei pupi) was a predominant form of cultural expression for working-class people on the island from the early 1800s until the proliferation of television in the 1950s. This form of dramatic prose theater also flourished in diasporic Italian urban communities in Argentina and the United States. Agrippino Manteo’s scripts, examined for the first time in this study, exemplify the rich narratives of the Paladins of France as dramatized on the traditional opera dei pupi stage. The alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare invite us to relive the emotions of knights and damsels who share the stage with wizards, fairies, and giants. The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947) (Anthem Press, 2023) reconstructs the history of the Manteo family marionette theater in New York City across seven decades and three generations, provides translations of eight selected plays and 270 summaries, and offers comparative analyses uncovering the creative adaptation—from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry, to nineteenth-century prose compilations, to these opera dei pupi dramatizations.