Bread and Puppet Theater performed its “Apocalypse Defiance Circus” on Cambridge Common on Sept. 4 as part of its national tour. The performance was supported by Cambridge Arts.
The show offers dancing horses and rats and trees, slapstick comedy, singing, a live band, satire, and the theater’s iconic giant puppets. It calls for police reform and reparations for Haiti. It accuses Hannaford of being unfair to farm workers. It objects to Israeli bombing of Palestinians in Gaza. It honors Archbishop Oscar Romero who was murderd in 1980 in El Salvador. Nurses battle grim reapers in an act critiquing lack of safety in hospitals during covid. In one satirical act, after the U.S. Supreme Court bars circuses (by a 6 to 3 vote), the Bread and Puppet Circus responds with ferocious tigers that devour the radical right-wing justices.
As part of its fall cross country tour, Bread and Puppet is scheduled to perform the Circus at the Emery Community Arts Center at the University of Maine at Farmington on Friday, Sept. 9, at 8 p.m.; at Fort Allen Park in Portland, Maine, on Saturday, Sept. 10, at 4 p.m.; and at Park Hill Orchard in Easthampton, Massachusetts, on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 6 p.m. The tour travels all the way to Oregon and back through December 2022.
