Our friends Bread and Puppet Theater performed its “The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus” on Cambridge Common on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. The show is part of a tour from Sept. 1 to Oct. 14 from New England to Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Philadelphia and back.
Bread and Puppet co-founder and director Peter Schumann has said the show features: “tigers teaching the congress of cowards how to jump over billionaires and acquire the courage to not pay for the atrocities of the latest genocide; the proverbial sheep of the system refusing to be sheep and committing revolution against the system; and the blue horses of the peace and harmony terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population and then galloping over the ruins of the truth industry.”
• A clown labeled “Empire,” supported by various big American business clowns, is felled by stilters costumed as skeleton death with scythes to reap them.
• Humanity defeats death.
• Pink ladies who value silliness are chased off by a rampaging pink elephant.
• An ode to the tent of protesters and refugees.
• A song to get (costumed) goats to return the garlic.
• A song saying “war is murder of the masses. …. war is the death wages of the • A performer masked as a woman with a baby emerges from banners printed with black-and-white “screaming trees against our inhumanity government,” a narrator says. The woman and child are described to be in a shelter and a wooden plane flies over her and bombs them.
• The “blue god of health care workers” watches over a dance of blue and white (puppet) horses and a woman with a big blue flag “in honor of courageous, death-defying doctors, nurses and ambulance teams in Gaza” who are “targeted, tortured and killed.”
• A hand-puppet performance about a Texas woman harassed by authorities with charges of voter fraud for casting a provisional ballot as a poll worker had advised her.
• Performers costumed as birds dance for “migration season.”
• Kids are invited onstage to participate in a comedy primer on how to run for president: build your platform, get to know your constituents, run—with the kids literally running around.
• A performance about Mohammad Bihar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down syndrome and autism, who was killed in July 2024 by an Israeli military dog during a raid on his house in Gaza. The performance indicts the Israeli military and Israeli and American political leaders for their culpability in the war.
• “Three anti-abyss calisthenic workouts.”
• A dance around a giant mother and baby puppet “in honor of mothers—refugee mothers and caregivers—working with, raising and feeding children all around the world.”
• A pantomimed comedy trapeze act: “They should go to the Harvard School of Circus and teach there,” an announcer proclaims.
• A celebration of Haitian independence.
• A giant puppet billionaire puppet who is eaten by (puppet) circus tigers, who then turn on the tiger tamer and eat her too.
• A giant puppet body formed when many separate piece come together as a sort of dance with narration about the destruction of Palestinian cultural sites by the Israeli military.
