Bread & Puppet's political theater going strong for 59 years

MIDDLEBURY - Where in Vermont can you see a giant puppet that looks like Uncle Sam get chased off the stage by actors in a cow costume protesting the labor conditions of migrant dairy workers? Or paper maché “fossil fuel tycoons” pleading for forgiveness as a 10-foot-tall grim reaper puppet descends on the stage to bring about the climate apocalypse?

This could only be one show: Bread & Puppet Theater.

Bread & Puppet is a politically radical puppet theater troupe based in the rural Vermont town of Glover. The troupe was founded in the hippie activist age of the 60’s, but has managed to stay strong 59 years later — making it one of the longest running theater companies in U.S. history, according to the City University of New York’s Gotham Center for New York City History.

“Many of the puppets that we’re using today we used back in the 80’s and back in the 70s,” said Allen Hark, who has been volunteering with the theater since 1982.

Hark said it’s the community the theater has built that has kept him volunteering for 40 years.

“It's a very accepting community and open community, and it's a very creative and artistic community, and it's a joy to be of help,” Hark said.

Hark donned overalls, a bucket, and big paper maché mask to play a garbage man in the theater’s “Apocalypse Defiance Circus” on Aug. 18.

The garbage man is “sort of this iconic figure of the worker man,” said Alexis Smith, who also plays a garbage man, and has been involved in the show for 35 years. Smith showed off a patch knitted onto her outfit, which read “Local #802 Essential Worker: International Brotherhood of Garbage Men.”

The struggles of the working class are a central theme of the show.

“Some of the messages of Bread & Puppet, I would say, are definitely anti-capitalist,” said Lilith Smith, who plays the recorder, among other roles in the troupe.

A major act of the “Apocalypse Defiance Circus” is about the 1500 migrant workers who sustain Vermont’s dairy industry. These workers labor an average of 64 and a half hours per week at $7.75 an hour, according to 2016 figures cited by a 2021 University of Vermont study.

In the play, a large puppet of a supermarket businessman attempts to teach a life-size cow puppet (with several actors huddled inside) to milk itself. The cow falls over, and an actor hidden in the audience stands up to cry out “las vacas no se ordeña solas!” (“cows don’t milk themselves!''). A crowd of actors then chase the businessman off the stage, demanding he sign on to the nonprofit Migrant Justice’s Milk With Dignity program.

Humor and Politics

“The inherent ridiculousness of puppetry gives a levity that allows us to talk about serious issues without seeming preachy or heavy-handed,” said Joshua Krugman, who plays trumpet in the live band that accompanies the shows.

The show’s tone is mostly lighthearted and silly. Family-friendly stunts include water guns squirting at the audience when an actor playing meteorologist Steve Maleski announces a forecast of rain in an act about the climate crisis.

Occasionally, the show dips into a more somber tone. The concluding act features a brief history of abortion in the U.S., from Indigenous abortion practices to the criminalization of enslaved Black women’s access to abortion. While the history is recounted, actors move in a synchronized dance with large objects that look like stone fragments.

The history lesson concludes with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, at which point the speaker cries out, “enough of this bullsh*t!” Actors rush the stage with cathartic yells, and stage hands assemble the stone-like fragments into a towering puppet of a woman. The mood shifts from solemn to triumphant.

History: puppets for peace

According to Bread & Puppet’s website, the project began in 1963 as an operation out of the New York City apartment of sculptor and baker Peter Schumann. Schumann would bake up fresh sourdough for his audiences to chew on as they took in avante-garde puppet performances — a tradition that continues to this day.

“Bread and Puppet is based on bread baking and the not-for-sale distribution of bread at moments created by art, and these moments are created in opposition to capitalist culture and habit,” Schumann said in a 2012 statement on the theater’s website.

The theater made a name for itself in 1968 with “Fire,” a theatrical performance depicting the destruction of a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam War.

While protesting war abroad, the troupe also called attention to conditions at home in the tenement aparts of New York. They debuted longstanding characters such as “Uncle Fatso,” who Schumann described in a 2013 interviewed with Democracy Now as a “big landlord,” with a top-hat, suit, and cigar.

In 1970, Bread & Puppet moved to Vermont for a residency at Goddard College. Five years later, the troupe found their home at an old dairy barn in Glover, where their theater and museum are still based today.

Over the course of the next five decades, Bread & Puppet’s shows have tackled topics including U.S. wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq; oil pipelines crossing Vermont; and the corporate heads of the richest 1%, according to a 2013 article by WBUR.

In 1982, the troupe led its largest performance to-date: a New York City parade of 1,500 puppeteers (according to Schumann’s estimates cited by Seven Days) and half a million anti-nuclear protestors (according to police estimates cited by NPR).

“Our playwright is the daily news. It’s all this horror that happens. It’s not so much that we want to do it, but we continually get obliged to do it. Because the goddamn media don’t say it,” Schumann said to Democracy Now.

Bread & Puppet’s fall tour dates can be found here: https://breadandpuppet.org/tour-schedule

Contact April Fisher at amfisher@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter: @AMFisherMedia

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Bread & Puppet: Vermont's politically radical theater stays on message