“Shatterer of Worlds,” Bread and Puppet Theater’s Friday night summer show in Glover, Vermont, begins in silence and darkness. A gang of six, naked, brown papier-mâché giants, perhaps 20-feet-tall, stand on the dirt floor, matching the color of the wood theater barn, decorated with hundreds of low-relief papier-mâché figures. Founder and artistic director Peter Schumann, an old man with a white beard and long hair, dressed in peasant work clothes, lights a candle from a large wooden cylinder supported by a wood stand at the center of the stage, and announces the show: “Shatter-of-Worlds Chapel with nationalization services for applicants requesting citizenship in the shattered world.”
He replaces the candle on the cylinder device. A man turns a crank on the back and the cylinder spins and makes a noise like wind. Behind this device, a brown papier-mâché screen, covered in a low relief depicting writhing people, is carried off stage, revealing three wooden wheels built into the back wall. A performer sets these “metronomes,” driven by old window sash weights, spinning and clicking and thudding.
Schumann sits in a chair at the front of the stage sawing upon a violin combined with a horn. The cast of dozens, dressed in brown peasant attire, files in from the back. A clamp light dangles lower and lower, down from the ceiling over Schumann. He announces, “The overt and extrajudicial capabilities of the society system allow the Shatterer of Worlds to function legally and to cultivate destructions so minute and gigantic, the eye cannot perceive and the wind cannot behold them. No politician, no hazardous substance, but a well-established tradition and demon strengthened by endless practices of devastation, the Shatterer continues to plot the assassination of existence-as-it-is, while disguising his activities as benevolent maneuvers meant to cure the two ailing adversaries: the planet and humanity.”
When the cast is all assembled in loose rows amidst the giants, one by one they lay hands on each other’s shoulders, only to have the others shake them off. A performer in a bulging-eye mask stands up at the left and lifts an accordion into the air. It has wooden wings, and seems to be symbolically flying as it’s played. The dangling light begins to sway right and left, and the cast sways with it. Then they stop and most of the performers fall to the floor. Some walk or crawl amidst the others.
Nearly the only illumination for the show is a woman in a long white dress on the dirt floor and some white-masked figures on the balcony above holding clamp lights that they slowly wave about and click on and off—directing your attention and then, just as quickly, abandoning it. Everything seems to be in movement on the main stage, on the balcony. It’s hard to take it in. The actions don’t seem necessarily coordinated. Your focus is pulled about seemingly randomly, fostering frustration.
A woman at a desk on a small elevated platform at left shouts, “Next.” Half a dozen people line up at the front of the stage waiting as she reads questions from an immigration application—“Family name,” “Name and address of petitioner,” so on. She shouts “Next” again and they fall to the ground.
What to take from the two main texts—an immigration questioneer and riffs inspired by the Hindu Bhagavad Gita scripture, in particular the section that Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who lead the American effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II, quoted upon witnessing the world’s first nuclear test: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”? The Shatterer seems to refer to nuclear war as well as to be a sort of catchall symbol for all that is wrong with the world, from politics to the environment. Perhaps the immigration part addresses the people still trying to join the Western world, despite its troubles. Perhaps the connection between the two themes is also autobiographical—reflecting Schumann’s lifelong theme of bombing, stemming from witnessing air assaults as a boy growing up in Germany during World War II, as well as his subsequent immigration to the United States?
A few performers come to the front right and haul on the squeaky ropes that support the giants, pulling them up and then letting them lean forward. As various machines clank and howl, performers wearing large white face masks wander slowly through the crowd and also appear on the balcony at the back of the stage, like ghosts. The woman appears at the desk again to shout “Next” and ask the half dozen people who line up immigration questions. “Next,” she hollers again, and they fall to the ground.
The brown papier-mâché giants slowly bob up and down, sort of seasick. Performers raise their arms toward these puppets as if simultaneously praying to them and trying to keep them from toppling over.
Someone runs a power drill on the left. Three wooden “metronomes” click and bang. The wind machine howls. Ropes holding the giant puppets squeak through pulleys. A white masked performer dumps rocks—or something—into a wooden chute attached to the right wall, and they bang and clang down to the stage below. The cycling movements and noises suggest an oppressive factory, or being trapped inside an old, rusty, interminable machine.
Slowly the giants lean over, on their sides, shuffled, onto the dirt stage floor. Schumann sits in a chair in front of them and saws away on his violin-horn as a clamp light dangles down from the ceiling. White masked performers watch from the balcony, like witnesses.
“There is no worship in this chapel but an awe and a realization of the need for battle cries against the Shatterer,” Schumann announces. “Battle cries based on the analysis of Shatterer characteristics, stripping the human figure of its disguise and civilization, rewriting it with its prehistoric self, a bird and beast-like co-inhabitant and Possibilitarian.”
Schumann plays the violin and throat sings. The performer in the bulging-eye mask plays the flying accordion.
A light goes on at the left backstage, revealing performers slowly wandering among black, flat cardboard trees as if lost in a maze. Guys at backstage right pluck piano strings for a horror movie soundtrack. Schumann exits. White faces fitfully illuminate on the balcony. The noise of the metronome, the wind machine, the squeaking pulleys continues.
Flashes, like from a searchlight, reveal a brown papier-mâché person dangling upside-down from a hole in the ceiling. Dangling lower and lower. Shaking. The body seems skinned, maybe.
White mask faces appear among the backstage walkers. Some of the walkers get down on their hands and knees and begin to crawl through the fallen giants, back onto the dirt main stage. Some stand up amidst the puppets, writhing and waving their arms. It feels like being trapped in an anxiety dream, claustrophobic.
The wind machine accelerates and the giants stand up again. The performers raise their arms toward the puppets. Schumann sits in a chair in front, plays his violin-horn under the descending dangling light. “Unstoppable bodies amidst giant stops which occur in the electric world in the center of the electricity, in the failing bird universe, in the museum of extinctions,” he pronounces. “Only those of no particular calling in the particular world, only the no-defenders and military non-elites, only the battle criers in their savage pursuit of the whole and the all, only those with the essential battle cries in their brain, only those who can within the cannot.”
The masked performer plays the flying accordion. Schumann exits. The woman in the long dress stands on his chair and shines a clamp light on the chest of one of the giants. A brown flower bud on its breast opens into white petals. She repeats this with each of the giants. A flower blossoms on each chest. The theater has gone quiet except for the accordion and Schumann breathing loudly through a horn.
Schumann sits back down in the chair at front as the cast exits and the stage falls dark. He throat sings as the wind machine slowly howls. Schumann lights a candle on the wind machine and brings it to his music stand. He says, “Death, the Shatterer of worlds, is become life, the splendor of thousands of suns blazing all at once, receiving the exulted soul.”
Silence. Schumann blows out the candle and the stage falls into darkness. The end.
Bread and Puppet Theater’s “Shatterer of Worlds,” 753 Heights Road, Glover, Vermont, Fridays at 7:30 from July 6 to Aug. 24, 2012.
Photos copyright by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.
Anthony Montuori’s ‘80s-style video games in the group show “Start Over” at 17 Cox invite you to take on impossible challenges. In one, you’re the legendary Sisyphus trying and failing to lift a boulder to the top of a hill. In “Ragz” (pictured above), you get to dress your character for a “Mario Bros.”-type game of running and leaping along ledges. Mostly my guys, dressed in just socks and underpants (like me, of course), repeatedly fall to their death.
Montuori’s piece de resistance is “Debtris,” a version of “Tetris” in which your goal is to pay off crushing student loan debt while earning something like minimum wage for as long as you can keep the game going. With graveyard humor and retro panache, his games send up the air of futility that hovers over Great Recession America. (Play some of them here.)
As part of “Start Over,” Fish McGill and Dave Tolmie have also put up a playful mural (above) and, as Dispatchers Worldwide, the duo invite visitors to join them in patching cracks and fissures in Beverly buildings with Lego bricks this Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
Inside Evans’s installation, which he called “TV Dinner” (above), a vintage bikini babe poster was pinned to the wood panel wall above a brown striped couch. Clothing lay balled up in a corner. A 1990 copy of People magazine jammed into the cushions touted Paula Abdul as the “Most Wanted Woman.” A TV tray was folded against the wall. An end table offered an ashtray overflowing with cigarette buts, a bottle of Budweiser, receipts from the 1990s, and a bottle of hand lotion. Crumpled tissues were stuck between the couch cushions nearby. Pictures on another wall suggested a separated couple. A television facing the couch looped the scene in “Casablanca” of Rick’s memories of romancing his ex Ilsa in Paris.
Above: Anthony Montuori’s “Ragz.”
Above and two below: Anthony Montuori’s “The Adventures of Sisyphus.”
Above and following: Benjamin Benson Evans’ “TV Dinner,” photo by Elizabeth Woodward.
