Bread and Puppet is on the march again. The world-renowned political theater troupe ended its string of performances at its home farm in Glover, Vermont and has hit the road for a month with its traveling “Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress Circus” show.
Of the 37 performances Bread and Puppet will give at 34 locations this fall on tour, three are in Connecticut: Sept. 16 at 7 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Hartford; Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. at Open Farmhouse in Redding; and Sept. 18 at 5:30 p.m. in a new location for the company, Edgerton Park, on the New Haven/Hamden border where the Elm Shakespeare Company recently ended its run of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Admission to each of the shows is $20 though the company insists that “no one will be turned away for lack of funds. We’ll find a way for you to see us.”
Both of the key words in the troupe’s name are to be taken literally. Sourdough bread is made in kitchens along the tour route and served at shows. A variety of puppetry techniques can be used in a show, from hand puppets to masks to towering larger-than-life figures for parades and pageants.
A scene from Bread and Puppet’s current tour of “Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress Circus,” which has three performances in Connecticut in September. (Paul Bedard/Bread and Puppet)
In past years, Bread and Puppet has been found on the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs (with an adaptation of the Greek drama “The Persians” in 2022), on New Haven Green (for the first year of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 1996) and multiple times in Middletown. Last year, there was a performance outside the Stowe Center for Literary Activism on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, but that couldn’t happen this year because the tour dates coincided with the center’s Stowe Prize ceremony. Luckily, the First Presbyterian Church offered to host a performance.
The “Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress Circus” tour is a variation of the series of political circus shows Bread and Puppet stages at its farm all summer. These variety shows feature sketches about current world events, original songs played on an assortment of real and toy instruments by the performers, rituals, movement, orations, surprises and, of course, puppets. The company’s performance style, as well as its bold design style of block prints and stencils, date back to Bread and Puppets street theater origins in New York City in the mid-1960s. The company was founded by, and is still led by, Peter Schumann, now 91 and still active in the writing and staging of the shows though he seldom if ever tours.
Paul Bedard, who performs in the shows and also serves as Bread and Puppet’s press liaison on tour, is a Glastonbury native and a Wesleyan grad who moved to New York City for school and then for a theater career. When he saw Schumann upbraid the stuffed shirts at a theater conference in the city, preaching revolution and criticizing the class system inherent in the theater industry, “it changed my life,” Bedard said. “I’d never seen that level of raw authenticity before. I’ve been with Bread and Puppet ever since.”
Bedard has been on around a dozen tours since 2018, including in 2020 when most other theater companies in the country had to sit out the COVID months. “We were the only ones set up to tour during the pandemic,” he said.
Bread and Puppet tours in a converted school bus. The shows can be inspired by current events or long-held political realities. (Paul Bedard/Bread and Puppet)
About 10 members of the company live and work at the farm in Glover year-round. (Bedard, who has other theater projects in New York to occupy him, is not one of them.) In the summer, the number of people on the farm swells to 60 or 80. The farm has indoor and outdoor performance spaces, work spaces, lots of areas to gather in plus a Museum of Anti-Modern Art.
“We tour when it gets too cold to work in Vermont,” Bedard said. “We had the last big circus on the farm a couple of weeks ago. Then we shrunk the cast and figured out which puppets could fit on the bus.”
Fifteen people are on this tour, Bedard said. “It’s a younger group this time, but I have toured with septuagenarians before.” He’s seen as many as 40 people on tour. “It kind of depends on our vehicle situation,” he said. They purchase used school buses, paint them colorfully, rip out the seats in the back half to store puppets and props and fit the cast on the seats in the front. A bus can last only a few years due to wear and tear on the road. When it stops working, it becomes a housing or storage unit at the Vermont farm.
Connecticut is a particularly welcoming space for Bread and Puppet. The company’s political views are not rare in the state. Small and experimental theater troupes abound here due to the all the colleges, art and theater schools and culturally charged cities. Connecticut is also one of the most puppet-aware states in the U.S., with revered institutions such as the graduate puppetry program at the University of Connecticut, its affiliated Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and, every summer, the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.
Given all the schools, political theater groups, puppet theaters, small theaters, school programs and arts patrons in Connecticut, Bread and Puppet is seldom lacking for invitations to play here. Audiences also tend to already know about the troupe. There are cities, perhaps in the Southern states, Bedard said, where “a little extra barking” is needed to draw a crowd, but that’s never the case in Connecticut.
In some cities, “it’s puppet companies that host us,” Bedard said. Many puppet theater companies around the Connecticut were started by people who’ve worked with Bread and Puppet. Acclaimed director Julie Taymor (“The Lion King”) did a college apprenticeship with the company and later worked a Bread and Puppet-style routine into her movie “Across the Universe.” The director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UConn, John Bell, has a long history with Bread and Puppet.
Bread and Puppet works year-round on their Vermont farm, creates a new show each summer and tours it in the fall. (Paul Bedard/Bread and Puppet)
Bread and Puppet needs a fair bit of room to perform its circus shows. If it’s outdoors, the space needs to about the size of a ball field to accommodate the performers and the audience. Indoors, the dimension of a school gymnasium is optimal. The indoor performance at Presbyterian Church of Hartford will work out because its pews can easily be moved. The performances in Redding and New Haven are outdoors in large parks or fields.
Each circus, Bedard said, is “both familiar and totally different. Some of the same things you see each time are the brass band, flags and animal imagery. But the show is completely remade every year. This country and this world need this spirit.”
Sometimes a show can be based on current events — Bedard remembers the troupe crafting a brand new routine in the bus on the way to a Washington D.C. performance when the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was announced. Sometimes there is a timeless theme like war or inhumanity or the environmental crisis. Sometimes history or folklore is used to frame a modern political argument, like using World War II era philosophers to explain the situation in Gaza today.
The current show, Bedard said, “has a beautiful scene about grass, with grass people, about how grass teaches us to go on. Another scene is a jokey public service announcement, with an annoyingly catchy song, for an era when we need to fear masked agents.
“Sometimes it’s something brand new and sometimes we say ‘Let’s do something ancient,’” Bedard added. “It’s a pretty international company, so folks are bringing stuff to it all the time, like from the hometown papers in their countries.”
The official description of “Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress Circus” from Bread and Puppet founder Peter Schumann is “Anti-Empire Art that acknowledges our beloved Mother Dirt, who makes us and unmakes us, and who presents urgently needed domestic resurrection services for the victims of this latest genocide. We are joined by Palestinian cranes on their way to Washington to replace the excrement in the White House with organic bird droppings, green frogs who teach the art of hopping over seemingly insurmountable problems and gaggles of kindergarten butterflies who frolic to their hearts’ desire.”
Due to the political content in all the Bread and Puppet shows, “we get hecklers sometimes,” Bedard said, “but that’s the fun of political theater. I always say that our shows are guaranteed to delight you and enrage you.”
