“Reality is either horizontal or vertical or both,” a woman explains early in Bread and Puppet Theater’s “Diagonal Life: Theory and Praxis,” which the Vermont troupe performed at First Church in Cambridge on Nov. 7 as part of a Northeast tour. “The horizontal produces us and eventually takes us back … back into its giant arms embrace. The vertical is the exceptional human predicament … that manufactures history and warfare. … The diagonal results from the hurt the vertical suffers in the process.”
A group of performers appear wearing white masks with holes for eyes and then “teeth” written where mouths would be. They scrub their hands with sanitizer, put on rubber gloves, and use a rope to drag giant brown puppets, one by one, onto the stage for a sort of immigration interrogation. “Take a seat,” a woman tapping at a typewriter orders. “Is what you produce here your real identity?” “What qualifies you to apply to this office?” “What exactly is your motivation for seeking entry?”
A star puppet sprinkles stars on the brown puppet heads. And each time one of the performers wearing a “teeth” mask takes a puppet baby from the giant head puppet and puts it into a stroller labeled with a sign reading “tender age facility”—the Trump administration’s euphemism for jails they imprison migrant babies and children in after kidnapping them from their parents. Each time the head is pushed off stage to clear room for another head to be pulled on. Until the “teeth” mask perfomers dump a bucket of dirt over the last head.
The show celebrates the uses of paper and cardboard. The astrologer Nostradamus appears to make pronouncements, such as: “How can the ferment achieve our high falutin’ goals with out state of mind so alien to its animal?” In between, “Anti-Depression Dances” are performed by performers masked as a white bear, a blue horse, a green frog.
A man says, “As our suns fly above us, without speaking to us, we must learn the language of unpolitics. The unpolitics of the unsystematic against. Unpolitics are uncivilization’s body and soul ready to rejoin naked humanity…”
Five white caribou with blue trees painted on their flanks slowly bob and dance to violins as if slowly trotting. A performer appears above the back curtain and shouts through a cone: “Attention! The diagonal court summons you. You have been designated to be extinguished. We will provide the appropriate services for your departure.”
The last sections of the show are a series of absurdly comic lessons from the “University of Tricks.” A woman explains: “Our university aims directly at the universe.” It offers ways to deal with all the stuff people accumulate, to escape problems that hit you over the head, to escape seasonal depression.
A puppet Greta Thunberg sings to big cardboard man in a suit: “For too long the politicians and the people in power have got away with doing nothing to fight the climate crisis. Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
A woman says: “When normality accepts the unthinkable as a possible future it legitimizes it. … The unthinkable was never unthinkable enough.”
Puppet cars travel over green hills, painted with rows of legs. Performers wearing bloody red face masks point at a cardboard fire that blazes in from right side and drag the landscape off as the cardboard fire spreads across the stage.
The final trick, they say, is to eat bread and garlic “and immediately gain the strength to confront these rotten politics.”
The cast sings as a chorus: “If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then we should change the system itself. We’re running out of time. And what’s the point of learning facts when the most important facts clearly mean nothing to our society. Our house is on fire.”
Then a tiny angel puppet appears atop the back curtain and sounds its trumpet.
All photos copyright 2019 Greg Cook.
Previously: May 18, 2019: Bread and Puppet Theater’s ‘Diagonal Life’ Addresses Politics, Migration, Global Warming
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