When “The Basic Bye-bye Show,” which Bread and Puppet Theater performs at Boston’s Spontaneous Celebrations from April 19 to 22, was developed in performances at the troupe’s Glover, Vermont, farm last summer, it was composed around a series of poetic vignettes saying goodbye to the depredations of capitalism and other failings of our society.
“What are the things we need to say bye-bye to as a culture?” puppeteer Josh Krugman says. “How do we bury them and get rid of them?”
But after 17 people were murdered in mass shooting at a Florida high school on Valentine’s Day, the company revised the script to focus on getting rid of guns.
“We were rehearsing the show just after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. And we were really inspired by the students at that school and then all over the country who created the #NeverAgain movement,” Krugman says. “We wanted to create a show that could compliment and speak to that movement and help amplify that movement and help envision the possibility of saying bye-bye to the gun for good.”
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Bread and Puppet Theater, which was founded by Peter Schumann in New York in 1963, is known for its tradition of distributing fresh baked bread free to audiences at the end of performances; its monumental, mythic papier-mâché puppets; and its participation in street protests against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and American torture. The company was also one of the landmark New York experimental theaters of the 1960s—and continues to elaborate its signature blend of vanguard performance, expressionist dance and folk pageantry.
“The Basic Bye-bye” is a chamber puppet show performed in a stage within the stage blockprinted with emphatic texts: “Yes,” “Life,” “Rain,” “Birth,” “This,” Water,” “World.” At the top corners is a pair of giant papier-mâché wings.
“The theme is the birth of the gun by the 2nd Amendment Holy Cow, presided over by James Madison, which leads to the routine occurrence of horror and ends with the funeralization of that ill-conceived symbol of a free people,” Schumann has said.
The show unfolds as a series of dreamlike vignettes or symbolic dances featuring papier-mâché clouds and people and hands; cardboard suns and horses and skeletons and chairs and guns; performers in masks as mothers or goons; pantomiming actors; and musicians playing stringed instruments and crashing cymbals.
“The show is a sort of ritual,” Krugman says, “a bye-bye ritual for the gun, a sort of funeral for the gun.” Goodbye, he says, to the gun as a tool to perpetrate massacres, “as an instrument of political influence and economic dependency,” and “as a symbol of freedom.”
“Implicit in the proposal that the show is making is in order to get rid of something you need an appropriate ritual to do so,” Krugman says. “Sometimes you need to create a ritual apparatus that allows people to really digest something, in this case the end of the gun.”
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