Bread and Puppet Theater describes its new performance, “Gray Lady Cantata #9,” as a “meditation on grief, war, and resistance.” It’s touring the show—along with “The Possibilitarian Everything Imperatives Show”—from New England to Georgia in November, concluding with a run in New York from Dec. 12 to 15.
Peter Schumann, the company’s founder, who turned 90 on June 11, rose to introduce the premiere of “Gray Lady Cantata #9” back on Oct. 6 in their Papier-mâché Cathedral as part of their annual “Political Leaf Peeping” day at the company’s home in Glover, Vermont. He explained to the packed house that the company first staged “Gray Lady Cantatas” in 1967 as part of the Week of Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam. The Gray Ladies were embodied by puppets with spare, sober gray faces, sometimes with mop-like string hair, and a body/gown seemingly made from sack cloth. The Gray Lady is “a woman who suffers history but doesn’t organize herself against the effects of history,” Schumann said in a 1982 interview quoted in Stefan Brecht’s two-volume history “The Bread and Puppet Theatre” from 1988.
I first saw a “Gray Lady” performance on a stage in the pine forest at the Glover property before one of the big Domestic Resurrection Circuses during the summer of 1996. I think it was the first Bread and Puppet performance I ever saw. It struck me then as very slow and quiet and strange.
The Gray Lady was recently revived as the “Gaza Grey Lady Cantata” during the company’s performances last summer. Co-directed by father-daughter team, Peter and Maria Schumann, it was a harrowing and heartbreaking show of mothers and babies, skeletons, stabbing squadrons of warplanes, and texts from Palestinians enduring the war in Gaza: “We wait for our death every minute,” “We are still here. Don’t forget us.”
The “Gray Lady Cantata #9” performed in Glover in early October was a series of dances, mainly with puppeteers operating a single Gray Lady puppet—plus some of the writings of Palestinians that were included in the summer show. The version now on tour, which I saw at Friends Meeting at Cambridge on Nov. 15, has removed the texts to become a series of tableaus and pantomime dances, mostly silent, but occasionally punctuated with clacking, a contraption that makes a windy noise, cymbal clashes, violin, and, at the end, singing (I think Bach’s Cantata 140, which Schumann has called the “Wake Up” cantata).
The show opens with performers humming to accompany a procession of black banners each painted with a white arm reaching upward. A Gray Lady puppet meanders among them.
Puppeteers clad all in white raise their clasped hands in a prayerful gesture mimicking giant white hands on a tall pole trailing white sheets.
As a cymbal clashes and a contraption clacks, giant silver legs swing back and forth, as if walking or kicking. Performers wearing white masks—that are blank save for eye holes and the lettering “teeth” as mouths—come out one by one and drop Gray Lady puppets in a pile atop the giant clasped hands that have now been laid on the floor.
Puppeteers carefully pile Gray Lady puppets at the front of the stage as one Gray Lady observes.
Giant flat cardboard faces roll left and right across the stage, then rise up around a crowd of Gray Ladies, and press them to the floor.
A Gray Lady holds a drawing of a reclining woman and puppeteers in teeth masks take it from her, tear it up, and give it back to her. She lets the pieces fall to the floor.
A puppeteer takes a tear (a glass crystal from a chandelier) from a spinning, gray papier-mâché earth and attaches it to a Gray Lady’s head. It slowly descends from her eye on a string as puppeteers in teeth masks with giant white cardboard hands watch or point at her.
Banners printed with skeltons cooking (labeled “Soup”), riding a woman (“Byby”), floating over factories (“City and Smoke”), running a lever on a series of pipes (“Today”) are whipped about around a Gray Lady. The performers holding the banners form into a line that parades across the stage.
A pair of giant white hands bring gray hands holding an infant to the Gray Lady, and the gray hands become hers, she holding the infant. The big white hands turn up and out becoming like angel wings off her shoulders. A performer sings (Bach, I assume). Then the big hands are joined to giant arms that reach out from the Gray Lady in a giant embrace that feels wider, bigger than the stage.
A group of black banners painted with white arms reaching up fill the stage around a performer in the middle holding a wooden board painted to read: “A Vigil For Gaza.”
“Gray Lady Cantata #9” was followed by a performance of “The Possibilitarian Everything Imperatives Show,” a raucous, clowning lecture. Schumann began deploying the term “Possibilitarian” in shows, artworks and books in the early 2000s, Bread and Puppet’s Press has written, “to evoke outside-the-box thinking and action … [to] call for an exuberant rebellion to save humanity and the planet from the ravages of the capitalist empire.” This particular show was a raspberry against “the unbearable dilemmas of the world.”
“At a time when Freedom and Democracy slaughter babies and moms by the dozen every day and don’t even seem to have any understanding of what they are doing to the world or to themselves,” Schumann has said, “we Possibilitarians, operating on the Principle of Hope, put on our boots to kick aside impossibility and declare new possibility in response to this obviously despaired situation.”
“Goons” arrive—tall, flat cardboard puppets of white guys in suits and across their eyes words: “Normality,” “Compliance,” “Humdrum,” “Innocence,” “N.Y. Times,” “Truth.” They’re served pumpernickel bread and “anti-outrage soup for outrage relief.”
A giant puppet—a white guy in an American flag top hat—stomps onto stage brandishing a cigar, menacing the puppeteers. They try to fight him but he easily blows them over, until they tickle him into collapse.
“Puppeteers and nonsense providers,” the narrator says, join with frogs and dancing horses to “battle the congress of cowards” who use citizens money to bomb hospitals, assassinate reporters, and other “atrocities.”
A giant demon head dances to a clashing cymbal. Performers wearing simple white masks with lurid grins emerge from behind it, and point red arrows at the demon. Then performers clad as fire—with cardboard flame hats and hands—surround the demon head—“Cardboard flame immolation of capitalist empire,” the narrator explains—until the head and flames are all thrown to the floor. “To declare solidarity with the deep down totality of resistance. This is the end of our show and the beginning of the Possibilitarian take over of society.”
The narrator plays a fiddle, a green (cardboard) door dances onto the stage, and members of the audience are invited to pass through it to receive bread slathered with garlic aioli and join the “new Possibilitarian state.”
Previous Bread and Puppet coverage: https://gregcookland.com/wonderland/tag/bread-and-puppet/
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