Bread & Puppet Theater’s “Upside Down World Circus” is a circus of stilters and dancing puppet horses and clowning puppet bears and giant sacred puppets towering over the circus ring. It’s the circus they’ll be bringing to Cambridge Common on Sunday, Sept. 6, and to Lawrence, Massachusetts, on Monday, Sept, 7, before heading out to Wisconsin and Arkansas and Georgia and New York. (Full tour schedule: https://breadandpuppet.org/tour.)
It’s circus that has changed, acts added, acts cut, as they performed it at the Bread & Puppet Farm in Glover, Vermont, each Sunday afternoon in July and August. When I saw it at the end of July, it was a circus that mocked AI oligarch Sam Altman. It mocked Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House and self-destructing repairs of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It criticized the Trump administration’s murderous attacks on boats in the Caribbean, Trump’s attack on Venezuela, Trump’s war on Iran, Trump’s blockade of Cuba. It highlighted the plight of people imprisoned in ICE gulags and the severe sentences given to protesters of the Prairieland ICE gulag in Texas: “This case is a warning. Whatever is taken from me is taken from you. It might be these 23 strangers now, but it will be you tomorrow.”
It’s a circus of poems and jokes and temptations and curses. “You cannot erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day,” one act quoted the Palestinian-American writer and activist Susan Abulhawa. “We are not rocks you can clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories. … One day your impunity and your arrogance will end … and Palestine will be free.”
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