For the 38th year, Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater will return to Theater for the New City December 2-13 with two new works, one for adults and one for children.
The adults' show will be "To Tear Open the Door of Heaven." The polychrome puppet show with over life-size puppets is in ten acts and offers a puppeteer's glance at the absurd human condition in the Year of the Lord 2009, governed by that Lord's equally absurd authority. The play features God, his daughter and stepdaughter, a US president and his war-waging office, mountaintop removal protesters, money printing artists and stargazers of the North East Kingdom of Vermont.
The kids' show is "Dirt Cheap Money Circus." It features the billionaire bonus celebration dance, the logic of the US Healthcare System, the history of humanity and the removal of a mountaintop, interspersed with appearances by Karl Marx, who confronts the 2009 economic situation with his existential thoughts about money and our relationship to it. As always, there is a live band.
Both shows will be performed by the Bread & Puppet Company and a large number of local volunteers, who will also be part of The Brass Band. The theater will be decorated with the unique Bread and Puppet collection of powerful black-line posters, banners, masks, curtains, programs and set-props. Once again, all pieces will be created by Schumann with input from the company. Both plays will be accompanied by a brass band, singing and miscellaneous gongs and horns. Schumann will sculpt and paint all of the major masks and puppets.
Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally recognized company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art that filled with music, dance and slapstick. Its shows are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper maché and cardboard; a brass band for accompaniment, and anti-elitist dance. Most are morality plays--about how people act toward each other--whose prototype is "Everyman." There are puppets of all kinds and sizes, masks, sculptural costumes, paintings, buildings and landscapes that seemingly breathe with Schumann's distinctive visual style of dance, expressionism, dark humor and low-culture simplicity.
A SHORT HISTORY OF BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER
The Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self- supporting theatrical companies in this country. It was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City's Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand-puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police and other problems of that neighborhood. More complex theater pieces, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners, followed. The puppets grew bigger and bigger. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street.
During the Vietnam War, Bread and Puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people. In 1970 Bread & Puppet moved to Vermont as theater-in- residence at Goddard College, combining puppetry with gardening and bread baking in a serious way, learning to live in the countryside and letting itself be influenced by the experience. In 1974 the Theater moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year-old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. "Our Domestic Resurrection Circus," a two-day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.
Through invitations by Grace Paley, Bread and Puppet Theater became a frequent attraction at anti-Vietnam War events in the '60s and '70s. By the '80s, the puppets had become emblematic of activist pacifism and a sine qua non of American political theater, as exemplified by the massive, ascending figures that are burned into the memory of anyone who marched with or saw the haunting, massive June 12, 1982 Disarmament Parade in New York City.
Since its move to Glover, VT, Theater for the New City has been the company's New York home. It has performed one or more productions at TNC each year since 1981. Last summer, the company also appeared at Lincoln Center Out of Doors.
The company makes its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad and from sales of Bread & Puppet Press's posters and publications. Internationally, Bread and Puppet Theater performs massive spectacles with hundreds of participants, sometimes devoted to social, political and environmental issues and sometimes simply to the trials of everyday life. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers. At most performances, the company distributes bread and aioli (garlic sauce) to the audience.
