Bread and Puppet Theater’s “Or Else” is a show about dark times in the land, channeling a national sense of things gone dangerously wrong, of wicked people in charge who dictate cruel punishments and arrests and violence. It’s a show full of forebodings of the forces of fascism and torture coming awake.
The show is one of the troupe’s most experimental with no spoken lines and practically the only sound being the shuffling of performers’ feet, the scratching of rakes, the dripping of melting ice on a drum, the cranking of ratchets. Practically the only lights are hand-held bulbs held close to the floor that dramatically spotlight scenes from below. Bread and Puppet debuted “Or Else” on July 13 and the final performance of this run is scheduled for tomorrow night, Aug. 24, at 7:30 in the troupe’s Paper Mache Cathedral in Glover, Vermont.
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Bread and Puppet is generally classified as a theater troupe, but “Or Else” reminds that dance is deep in its DNA. Peter Schumann, who founded the company in New York in 1963 and continues to lead it, toured his native Germany as a dancer before coming to the United States a half century ago. He trained for a bit in Merce Cunningham’s New York studio with the modernist, minimalist dancers that would come to be known as Judson Dance Theater (named for New York’s Judson Memorial Church where they danced and Bread and Puppet performed in the 1960s). One of their defining characteristics was having trained dancers adopt everyday “pedestrian” gestures. Schumann instead worked with performers not trained in dance, with casts of volunteers, with “pedestrians,” with everyday folks—and all the artistic and political resonances that carries with it.
“Or Else” begins with the stage set with a group of brown papier-mâché puppets—each single puppet is a crowd of people—suspended from the ceiling by ropes at the left. A group of simple flat cardboard buildings stand on the floor to the right, and among them are tall lion-like “beasts” painted with scenes of people, flowers, villages, suns. A laundry line runs in front of the beasts and buildings and from it hangs a pair of translucent plastic banners with the words “Or Else” painted across them.
At right, a woman sets a curious machine on the wall in motion. She balances ice cubes onto a row of spoons. The melting water drips down from them onto a cloth and drum below, with a thump, thump, thump that becomes the pulse of the show. When the cubes have melted enough, the spoons swing up and strum a zither. Here and there during the performance, the woman reloads the spoons with ice.
A flat cardboard circle of sun rolls behind everything, then the beasts move off, with a rocking motion, behind the group of people puppets as performers dressed in simple earthy browns and grays loudly shuffle across a second-floor balcony at the back of the stage before exiting. More performers come to the stage floor and drag the cardboard buildings off with ropes connected to spools that they wind with a loud ratchet clacking sound.
Into the open space left behind, dancers walk around in snaking lines. Slowly they link up, pushing and pulling against each other, faster and faster. They come together in a clump, swaying, hands raised toward a light dangling from the ceiling by a cord, lowering toward them. A woman hands them a sign reading “Or else” and they pass it from hand to hand toward the light, then drop it, and disperse.
The groups of brown puppet people at left, swing left and right from ropes on ceiling as something (rocks?) bang down a wooden chute from the balcony and clang into a metal bucket at the bottom. Meanwhile, clothes and shoes are tossed across the stage.
A group of human-sized brown people-puppets are brought out and other performers come in carrying rakes. They pair up and rake the clothes off the stage.
Next performers walk in a circle around four brown people-puppets that they’ve suspended from ropes at the right. They pair up these puppets into a vague shape of a boat hull and crowd inside. The performers sway dramatically, as if in storm tossed seas, as clothes are thrown over them and a dangling light bulb swings above them. The ice-cube woman sets up a folding ladder in front of them, climbs up, holds a sign reading “Or else,” then drops it to the floor as the boat shatters apart and the performers all fall to the dirt floor, then crawl off stage with the people-puppets laying on their backs.
People-puppets paired with performers rake the clothes off the stage.
The groups of brown people puppets at left swing back and forth, toward the audience. Then the horrible, haunting sound of something crashing onto them. You slowly realize buckets suspended from the ceiling are dumping dirt onto the puppets, these “people.” It’s viscerally affecting—ooof—a terrible rain bombarding the community.
Performers masked as women (Bread and Puppet’s signature “washerwomen”) and men pantomime cleaning the puppets with scrub brushes and buckets of swishing water, standing on ladders to reach high parts. Then they do a brief country dance accompanied by a fiddler.
A line of performers comes out behind a single brown papier-mâché puppet of a group of people, including children, perhaps babies. Two performers plainly dressed as all the rest, escort a third performer in, holding the one person’s arms behind their back, as if a prisoner. They push the person’s head against the puppet, where a sign reading “Or else” has been placed. The one person falls to the floor.
The two hold their arms out horizontally over the fallen one, as if casting a spell over the one person, then pull the one person to their feet, walk them a few steps to the left of the line of performers and leave the one person standing as they exit. The person pantomimes a slow motion collapse to the floor. The line of performers behind the puppet saves the one, pulling the fallen person into their group.
Twice this all is repeated. But the third time, the line of performers can’t pull the woman into their group, can’t rescue her, and she falls to the ground with a terrible thud that you feel in your belly. They exit and the puppet rakers come in again and rake the fallen woman off the stage. Ooof.
In near darkness, a group of large papier-mâché puppets of single people and groups of people, one two-stories-tall, are placed one by one on the floor. Performers crawl underneath them, then flutter them up and down, until they’ve stood them all up.
The puppets shuffle around, then all exit except for a two-story-tall puppet of a naked brown man. He’s left standing in the back right corner, against the balcony. Performers appear on the balcony behind his head and horrifyingly pull a sack over his head—then slip it off and throw it down to the floor. Though the puppet is giant, in his nakedness, he seems terrifyingly vulnerable to the gang of people.
Next the performers wrap a noose around the puppet’s neck—before slipping it off and throwing it to the floor. Who knows why they change their mind each time? (It’s not apparent in the staging of the show, but Schumann intends for the performers on the balcony to be seen as two groups, one torturing the giant puppet and the second intervening to stop them.)
A woman climbs a folding ladder in front of the puppet and staples, bang, bang, a sign reading “Or else” to the puppet’s chest. A white flower blooms on the puppet’s chest.
The show wraps up with the beginning repeating in reverse order, with the city buildings being pulled back onto stage and the “beasts” returning, and the woman pulling the plastic banners painted with the words “or else” back across the stage.
In the end, title “Or Else” seems to read as the threats afoot in the land, as what will happen if we don’t do something to stop them, and, maybe, maybe, as a plea to consider other paths, to seek something else.
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