Bread and Puppet from headier, more creative days.
Good agit-prop theater is clever, thought-provoking, and confrontational. For many decades, Bread and Puppet Theater was the gold standard by which political street theater was judged. Peter Schumann’s giant papier-mâché assemblages began whipping up opposition to American adventurism back in 1962, before there was a significant peace movement. When Schumann moved his operation from New York City to Glover, Vermont, in 1970, that tiny northeastern village became a progressive epicenter. We recall attending several of B & P’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses in the 1980s and reveling in their tight scripts and well-orchestrated pageants that were unabashed celebrations of countercultural values and devastating critiques of American excess and hubris. By then, no protest anywhere was complete without an imported flotilla of Schumann’s towering puppets leading the good fight.
That was then; this is now. It pains us to say that the 2009 version of Bread and Puppet is a wreck, not Berthold Brecht. Let’s not mince words: the troupe’s September 18 visit to Amherst was one of the most excruciatingly awful performances we have ever witnessed. Seven young performers cavorted about stage with amateurish, aimless, humorless, and witless artifice that would have shamed a junior high school production.
The evening began with an off-key brass band procession onto the stage, where actors clad in Salvation Army cast-offs mugged their way through a 1930s-meets-the-1970s cabaret routine in which histrionic gestures, strike-a-pose smugness, and stop/start instrumentals gave way to cacophony. Sound dreadful? It was the first half highlight.
This was followed by three “plays”—their label, not our judgment—in which crudely executed paper cutouts were manipulated behind a flimsy cardboard frame. B & P brags of producing “cheap art,” but these forays into Popsicle-stick puppetry fell beneath even that low standard. The figures and frame looked like something a group of six-year-olds might have created, but without the charm of childrens’ art. Ditto the scripts. One play was called “Wind” and consisted mostly of a young man unfurling his long hair and whipping it around in a circle while another actor pretended to be battered by a gale. Marcel Marceau spinning in his grave would be more convincing. Another consisted of a single phrase—Do you have it?—repeated by various beings (animals? humans? who would tell?) to no apparent purpose.
You know you’re dealing with weak material when the cast has to sing a refrain cueing the baffled audience that the “play” has ended. Another exit strategy was to have the cast inexplicably collapse to the floor. I suppose some of the endless prancing about the stage could have been goofy fun if the cast was up to snuff, but most of them lacked the physical props necessary to be convincing clowns.
Was the rest of the performance an improvement? We can’t tell you—we bolted after twenty-five minutes of torture. We did not flee alone. One man, who said he’d seen and enjoyed them dozens of times before, cried “Awful! Simply awful!” as he stormed out. We beg to disagree; the show wasn’t nearly good enough to be merely awful. How did incisive agit-prop become agit- malaprop?
If Peter Schumann has any fresh ideas, now would be the time to debut them because from where we sit, Bread and Puppet is trapped in a package that’s several decades past its sell-by date. At a time in history in which America desperately needs a new New Left to agitate and provoke, Bread and Puppet agitated only the audience that came to adore them, and provoked only the fear that the progressive movement has become halt and lame. This is one circus in desperate need of resurrection.
Good agit-prop theater is clever, thought-provoking, and confrontational. For many decades, Bread and Puppet Theater was the gold standard by which political street theater was judged. Peter Schumann’s giant papier-mâché assemblages began whipping up opposition to American adventurism back in 1962, before there was a significant peace movement. When Schumann moved his operation from New York City to Glover, Vermont, in 1970, that tiny northeastern village became a progressive epicenter. We recall attending several of B & P’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses in the 1980s and reveling in their tight scripts and well-orchestrated pageants that were unabashed celebrations of countercultural values and devastating critiques of American excess and hubris. By then, no protest anywhere was complete without an imported flotilla of Schumann’s towering puppets leading the good fight.
That was then; this is now. It pains us to say that the 2009 version of Bread and Puppet is a wreck, not Berthold Brecht. Let’s not mince words: the troupe’s September 18 visit to Amherst was one of the most excruciatingly awful performances we have ever witnessed. Seven young performers cavorted about stage with amateurish, aimless, humorless, and witless artifice that would have shamed a junior high school production.
The evening began with an off-key brass band procession onto the stage, where actors clad in Salvation Army cast-offs mugged their way through a 1930s-meets-the-1970s cabaret routine in which histrionic gestures, strike-a-pose smugness, and stop/start instrumentals gave way to cacophony. Sound dreadful? It was the first half highlight.
This was followed by three “plays”—their label, not our judgment—in which crudely executed paper cutouts were manipulated behind a flimsy cardboard frame. B & P brags of producing “cheap art,” but these forays into Popsicle-stick puppetry fell beneath even that low standard. The figures and frame looked like something a group of six-year-olds might have created, but without the charm of childrens’ art. Ditto the scripts. One play was called “Wind” and consisted mostly of a young man unfurling his long hair and whipping it around in a circle while another actor pretended to be battered by a gale. Marcel Marceau spinning in his grave would be more convincing. Another consisted of a single phrase—Do you have it?—repeated by various beings (animals? humans? who would tell?) to no apparent purpose.
You know you’re dealing with weak material when the cast has to sing a refrain cueing the baffled audience that the “play” has ended. Another exit strategy was to have the cast inexplicably collapse to the floor. I suppose some of the endless prancing about the stage could have been goofy fun if the cast was up to snuff, but most of them lacked the physical props necessary to be convincing clowns.
Was the rest of the performance an improvement? We can’t tell you—we bolted after twenty-five minutes of torture. We did not flee alone. One man, who said he’d seen and enjoyed them dozens of times before, cried “Awful! Simply awful!” as he stormed out. We beg to disagree; the show wasn’t nearly good enough to be merely awful. How did incisive agit-prop become agit- malaprop?
If Peter Schumann has any fresh ideas, now would be the time to debut them because from where we sit, Bread and Puppet is trapped in a package that’s several decades past its sell-by date. At a time in history in which America desperately needs a new New Left to agitate and provoke, Bread and Puppet agitated only the audience that came to adore them, and provoked only the fear that the progressive movement has become halt and lame. This is one circus in desperate need of resurrection.
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