“When a legally purchased gun, symbol of the free, turns on a school and takes 17 lives, are the free still free? Or are they irresponsible and stupid?”
The performer, clad all in white, reads the text from a little book near the end of Bread and Puppet Theater’s “The Basic Bye-bye Show.” The Vermont-based company has been performing the show at Spontaneous Celebrations in Boston this week and the final performance of its run is at 7:30 tonight, April 22.
The inspiration of the show is the anti-gun movement that has arisen in response to 17 people being murdered in mass shooting on Valentine’s Day.
“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,” puppeteer Josh Krugman told me last week. “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.
Seeing the company 55 years on is a chance to be in the presence of a master artist late in life (Schumann is now in his 80s), working and reworking his storehouse of motifs with young collaborators (most in their 20s) to continue to sharply address the politics of today. Great political artists (often) require great political subjects—and the company finds one in the current American protests against guns. Bread and Puppet shows have often condemned the horrors of the violence America perpetrates abroad. The subject of school shootings and gun violence here in the States brings the company’s attention to violence here at home.
Bread and Puppet shows are generally not narrative. Instead, they’re often a series of vignettes—like movements in classical music—or dance. Feeling and meaning accrue through repetition and variation of motifs.
This hour-long performance is a series of folk songs and curious symbolic dances, alternating between live performers and puppets in a stage within the stage blockprinted with emphatic texts: “Yes,” “Life,” “Rain,” “Birth,” “This,” Water,” “World.” At the top corners rest a pair of giant white papier-mâché wings.
The show is framed as series of announced goodbyes—“to the big bad thunderstorm,” “to the big bad apocalypse,” “to the obvious which isn’t obvious enough,” “to the woe that is upon us.”
Grumbling blobby people puppets shuffle about. Puppets fight over a sign reading “our.” Cardboard horses and cardboard skeleton horses gallop at each other. String musicians seem almost to battle musicians on a toy piano, bass drum and harmonica. A giant puppet of Founding Father James Madison drafts the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A masked goon feeds the document to a puppet cow, which gives birth to a black cardboard automatic rifle. Masked goons march with rifles, throw their arms up and fall down. Repeat. Skeletons pop up among gray buildings and then are hurled into the air. Dancers put their hands up and open their mouths in slow-motion agony.
“Basic bye-byes represent our need for abandoning and leaving,” says a performer seated in front of the puppet stage as gray cardboard people stand next to her and shuffle across the puppet stage. “Basic bye-byes allow us to be because they cast out the intolerable.”
A car crashes into a chair—that somehow comes to seem like a person—and crashes into the chair again and crashes into the chair. A crowd of cardboard chairs—that somehow feels like a crowd of people—flees from a gun, and flees from another gun, and another gun. The atmosphere grows increasingly ominous and anxious.
The live performers stand up in the puppet stage, hold the cardboard chairs up as their faces are frozen in a rictus of agony. Then they hurl the chairs onto the floor at the front of the stage.
“I am a gun and nothing else,” a chorus sings. “What is its need? What does it eat? It lives on freshly furnished meat.”
Three performers masked as women tenderly cradle cardboard chairs in their arms like babies. A giant gray head emerges from the puppet stage with its hands over its eyes and its mouth open like a deity of agony. Performers reach into its mouth, pull out little books and read them aloud.
“When a legally purchased gun, symbol of the free, turns on a school and takes 17 lives, are the free still free? Or are they irresponsible and stupid?” one performer reads.
Another performer pulls out another little book and reads aloud, “The never again of the kids who have not been killed is the only political party of the only possible future.”
Hands appear from the puppet stage holding handkerchiefs. Silence as the masked mothers take them to dab their mask eyes, then place their chair-babies onto the pile of chairs on the floor—as if they are dead.
A group of black-clad performers place a garbage can right on top of the pile of cardboard chairs. It feels like a desecration.
But then they hold one of the black cardboard rifles over the trash barrel.
“The last basic bye-bye is to the gun,” a performer announces. They drop the gun into the garbage and carry it off. The audience applauds.
The giant gray sad face leans right and left and right and left as giant white wings at the top of the puppet stage flap. It feels like a storm. Then the face departs. And the wings stop.
The puppet stage opens to reveal cardboard horses galloping across carrying a banner reading “Never again.”
Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.