On Bread and Puppet Theater and a living vision of success
Cheap art, healthy grains, and appreciating beauty amidst tragedy
For most of my adult life, I’ve marked achievements by giving into my most status-conscious acquisitive urges. I rewarded my first real promotion with a “buy-it-for-life” leather jacket that I had coveted for months, but never fit right. Then there was the vintage Omega watch commemorating the sale of the startup I worked at—lost at a TSA checkpoint less than a year later. And then there’s the Leica film camera that I bought to celebrate another promotion, which I seldom use because I’m too self-conscious to carry it in public. Even if none of these items are of much use to me, I joke that I’ll know I’ve lived a good life when fistfights break out among the shoppers of my estate sale. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking more about what a life well-lived and devoid of ironic detachment might look like amidst living it. I’ve caught fleeting glimpses of insight, but it wasn’t until I visited Bread and Puppet Theater that I understood what it might feel like to experience it for oneself.
Bread and Puppet is a leftist puppetry company based in Glover, Vermont that hosts donation-based performances on their farm during summer months and tours the country at other times of the year in eclectically-painted school buses. True to their name, they serve fresh-baked whole-grain bread with every performance. Their unique, hand-hewn, folkloric aesthetic is propagated across Vermont and beyond by a prolific woodblock printing operation. Once you recognize their work, you begin to see it — and its imitations — everywhere.
Eventually, you think you might want to get over there and see what all the fuss is about. Then The New York Times publishes a profile reminding you that the company’s founder and artistic director is turning 90, so you’d better go and see it sooner than later. Which is exactly how we found ourselves driving towards the Northeast Kingdom a few weekends ago.
The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus had already started by the time we pulled into the meadow that served as the fairgrounds parking lot. The brilliant summer sun shone unobstructed on the sizable crowd dotting the hillsides of the natural amphitheater. At the focal point of the parabolic mound was a painted school bus serving as the backdrop to the performance stage. We grabbed our picnic blankets out of the car and walked through the field, past the white big-top tent where harried performers searched for the next skit’s relevant accouterments through myriad stacks of puppets, props, and tapestries piled high like rugs in an antique store. Finally, we passed the orchestra’s canopy tent off to stage right, before setting our picnic blankets down just a few feet up the slope of the amphitheater.
For the next hour, performers dressed in muddied hiking shoes and once-white workwear, sun-faded and soiled to a nostalgic ecru wore, carried, or operated oversized papier mâché masks, props, and puppets representing laborers, fascists, children, mothers, soldiers, animals, skeletons, and myriad sprites and spirits — all painted in a manner evoking European folk art. They danced in haphazard unison, singing songs with echoes of socialist hymns and pantomiming circus-inspired acts—such as the flying trapeze. The whole production had the free-flowing, unpredictable feel of a campfire showcase and to be perfectly honest, it was a bit lost on me in the dizzying heat of the late-July sun. But what I will never forget is the image of 90-year-old artistic director Peter Schumann watching his creative vision unfold onstage.
Without realizing it, we had sat almost directly behind Schumann. He too was dressed in ecru, leaning back in a white plastic folding chair while puffing on the chewed-up remains of a large cigar resembling the tattered, wide-brimmed leather hat atop his shockingly full head of long, white hair. He sat there for the entire hour, save for one sketch about two-thirds of the way through when he stood up in his worn-down Birkenstock clogs to lead the entire troupe in a thespian seventh-inning stretch of sorts, barking calisthenic commands in an emphatically brusque German accent.
After the circus concluded, we picked up our blankets to take to the car, making a pit stop to browse the most functional-looking of the painted school bus, which had transformed into a pop-up retail operation for prints, tapestries, zines, and other purchasable ephemera. The prices were low, almost questionably so. $2 cards, $3 zines, $20 poster-sized prints, $90 fabric hangings the size of a window sash. I resisted the temptation.
After stashing our stuff, we turned around and followed a mowed path up the hill, just to the right of where we’d been sitting. Cresting the climb, we were greeted by a wooden shack as an overwhelming garlic scent with yeasty undertones permeated the air. This was the service area for the eponymous bread: As brown as the stained wood of the shack, densely crumbed, packed with seeds, served thinly sliced with a generous smear of garlic aioli that was more garlic than aioli. The very picture of health food. As we accepted our portions, Schumann flanked us from behind and entered the shed, drinking from a blue can of Harpoon IPA as he inspected the slices. Finding them to his liking, he joined our procession as we followed signs pointing towards the museum and “cathedral” on the other side of the road.
We all watched as an older woman stiffly carrying a beach chair wandered off to the right when she should have gone left. Schumann turned to us, muttering, “She has gone the wrong way, but soon she will realize.” Indeed, she reached the end of the mowed area and, rather than turn around, cut through the unmowed field of tall, yellowing grass punctuated by stalks of chalky-green milkweed that had just finished blooming. As we all prepared to cross the road together, troupe members hollered to each other from both sides of the road: “Schumann crossing!”
He peeled away on the other side of the road as we continued into the museum, which was housed across multiple floors of an old dairy barn. Inside, the ceilings are as low as the exhibits are dense. The exhibition hall consists of a series of cow pens that have been converted into oversized dioramas stuffed with puppets and props from past performances. Every surface housed a sculpture or painting — or was itself painted with some inscription, pattern, or scene. It was dizzying being surrounded from all sides by such pure and earnest creative expression. From this state of overstimulation emerged an understanding of what was going on here.
The overwhelming abundance of works packed so densely begs one to question their existing definitions of art. Is this “outsider art”? If so, what is it outside of? What is the purpose of art, if not to make an observer feel something? Around the time I started becoming aware of these thoughts, I wandered out of the exhibit, landing back in the attached gift shop, where I encountered the cheap art manifesto.
Taken as a whole, Bread and Puppet is a priceless expression of the importance of human life and the joy of living in a world where wonder is possible. Yet any individual piece of the project is priced at more or less its cost of production. If a clumsy museum visitor’s overstuffed backpack were to take out a part of a sculpture, any member of the company could have it fixed within hours using a few cents worth of glue, paper, and paint. There is no reason why it can’t go on forever, regardless of who is at the helm. And yet, as the Times profile from last summer explains, it is hard to imagine that being anyone but Schumann. Every aspect of the performance, the art, and the property itself reflects his unique personality and creativity. Conversely, his experience of it all is one of visible joy — despite the often tragic themes and stories he addresses in his art.
After we finished at the museum, the second performance began in front of the adjacent “Paper Maché Cathedral,” which from the outside, looks like any old barn, save for the solar panels and roughly hand-painted signage on its standing seam roof. The first two musical performances took place outside with the audience gathered around the performers singing in front of the building’s closed main entrance. The whole scene had the feeling of a spontaneous street busking. We were then led into the building, which was as shocking an experience as any part of the actual performance.
While the interior of the museum was still architecturally recognizable as a dairy barn, the Cathedral was not. True to its name, every visible aboveground surface was decorated as ornately as any baroque chapel. The dim lighting only added to the intrigue as sculptures and frescoes materialized out of the shadows in any direction you looked.
After we took our seats, Schumann stood up from his seat near the back of the bleachers and gave a brief introduction explaining the cantata’s origin. It was originally written in the 1970s in response to the war in Vietnam, but recently updated to reflect our current times. Mysterious figures moped in the shadows as dancers and puppeteers swayed to the sounds of nontraditional percussion and atonal wails emanating from stringed instruments and woodwinds, occasionally accompanied by operatic singing. Each act was introduced by the somber reading of a different Palestinian civilian’s firsthand account of the ongoing war in Gaza. Many of these civilians were killed before their words could ever be translated into English. It was, to put it lightly, a monumental bummer.
But there was an undercurrent of hopefulness running throughout the whole thing. Bombs and soldiers kill, but it is in our nature to survive. It’s hard to say for certain, but I think the message from the final scene depicted below is that people can overcome as surely as green plants grow. Or maybe something less saccharine. Despite the dour tone of the performance on the whole, upon its conclusion, the audience erupted in an emotive standing ovation lasting several minutes.
As we filed out of the Cathedral and back across the street towards the parking area, the late afternoon sun was dulled by previously invisible Californian wildfire haze hanging over the horizon. The previously verdant meadow was recast in nostalgic sepia tones as if anticipating a tropical sunset. The alarming circumstances leading to the haze’s arrival sat at the back of my mind, yet at this moment, I couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of the result.
