ESSAY: Bread and Puppet Theater and the Dystopian Dilemma

Watching Bread and Puppet Theater’s performances of Gray Lady Cantata #9 (Vigil for Gaza) and Possibilitarian Imperative Everything Show at Goodyear Arts in November, a cynical part of me felt like I was at a museum exhibition of radical art from another age. The puppet troupe and their work is so evocative of a specific era, the antiwar movement of the 1960s, that it can feel anachronistic when viewed a quarter of the way through the 21st century. 

These gorgeous puppets moved in silent vigil while the phones in our pockets have shown us images of atrocity on a loop everyday for over a year now. (Phones, incidentally, which rely on the use of rare earth minerals mined by children suffering in another corner of the world under the relentless and dispassionate eye of global capital and generally ignored by everyone else. How many atrocities can we keep up with?) 

Watching, I had to wonder: Apart from the undeniable aesthetic excellence of the puppets themselves and the moral import of holding space for victims of war, what is the use of this performance? This is clearly agitprop, so what is the utility, the endgame? Are we supposed to march into the street and seize the means of production? Are we going to throw ourselves into the gears of the monstrous machine to make it stop, by god, make it stop? Will we leave the theatre and finally exit history once and for all, entering into the realm of Utopia? 

No. That isn’t going to happen. And depending on my mood, I’m either heartbroken or outraged or blithely unbothered by this fact — this failure of art to be revolutionary. I have been heartbroken by this failure my entire adult life. I’ve been outraged by this failure for as long as I’ve been aware that the game is rigged. I’ve been blithely, sublimely unconcerned as long as I’ve been fluent in all the techniques of numbness and alienation that we are heir to in our long slide into neo-feudalism. 

It begs the question: What does Utopia even look like in our time? Most of the people that I know (who aren’t plugging their ears and shouting “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, I can’t hear you! Everything is fine! Good even!”) have a feeling not only that things are stranger than they’ve been in our lifetimes but that the bad guys are winning. They’re running the table as a matter of fact. 

I’m a grown man in his 40s with a full-time job and I can’t afford to pay rent in this city anymore, let alone buy a house. Doctors visits for various chronic conditions are bleeding my savings. Locally, I’ve seen friends and former colleagues slip into madness and homelessness and despair. (The preferred solution to homelessness on the table currently seems to be murder by vigilantes?) 

Training camps for ever more militarized police forces are popping up all over the country and people who protest this are charged with racketeering and terrorism. When I happen into a room where a television is on I’m shocked by the nakedness of the propaganda being pumped into people’s heads day in and day out interrupted only by ads for gold coins, boner pills and consumer-grade self surveillance devices. 

In the lead up to the last presidential election my morning commute was lined with political signs designed to be grokked by the barely literate, containing bold-faced lies or simple non sequiturs.  A global war machine is running in high gear and we are so far into a decades-long project of wealth extraction into the hands of a tiny ruling elite that one wonders how there is even money left for them to steal. 

For my own sanity, I won’t go into detail here about the undeniable climate crisis that is going to wreck civilization in the next 100 years (a best-case timeline at this point). 

To state it plainly: we live in hell. Ok. And?

Shouldn’t you be writing about avant-garde film and bad productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals? I should! Everything in me wants to ignore all of this bad news. I’m scared and I don’t see a solution other than to pray that the collapse is kind to me and my loved ones. And so, on the one hand I feel gratitude for legendary groups like Bread and Puppet Theater. And on the other hand I gritted my teeth, knitted my brow and sat with my cowardice and shame and fear. 

No matter what I might have found unsatisfying about their performance, Bread and Puppet most certainly got under my skin. As a famous Russian paralegal wrote toward the beginning of the 20th century: “What is to be done?”

The very fact of dystopia suggests the possibility of its opposite, yes? Does the dialectic hold in this situation? Can we rely on, or hope for, Utopia in the midst of all this darkness? 

Hold on. Just hold on a second. 

Perhaps after that litany of horrors above we deserve a break, a moment to breathe and be unbothered. I’m OK with that. Self care, right? Let’s take a moment, breathe and check in. We can do this by returning to the real home of Utopia, the present moment. 

What are you doing right now? Well, you’re reading. That’s a good start. It’s an activity that fewer and fewer of us participate in this post-literate era. And so reading is a revolutionary, utopian act. Well done. But let’s not stop there. 

Reading, writing, walking, talking, listening, planting, cultivating, cooking, serving, laughing, dancing, singing, sighing, swooning, weeping, mourning, standing, kneeling, cursing, praying, kissing, caressing, creating, testifying, witnessing. Here we’ve found a short and far from complete list of utopian activity. 

Right after the performance by Bread and Puppet, my friend Jelly Clarkson asked me if I “liked it.” I’m not sure that’s a question I can answer. Do I find farmers markets artistically satisfying? Food banks? AA Meetings? Sewing Circles? The ayahuasca cult that all of the painters in Charlotte seem to know about but not a single one will invite me to? 

Sorry … I digress.  To discuss these things in aesthetic terms seems somehow wrong. I feel the same way about Bread and Puppet, even though theirs is ostensibly an artistic project as much as it is an exercise in utopian community action. 

Active since 1963, founded and run by Peter Schuman and his wife Elka (until her death in 2021), Bread and Puppet has always been a radical proposition. Consistently active in the anti-war movement, their large-scale puppets are iconic symbols of the protests against the Vietnam War that defined the political subculture of the 1960s. 

The group’s anti-war stance hasn’t always been appreciated, and they were asked not to participate in NYC’s Greenwich Village Halloween parade in 2001 when they planned to bring a performance protesting America’s then brand-new invasion of Afghanistan. 

The troupe has been ensconced on a small farm in Glover, Vermont since 1970, and while they have stayed active and acclaimed, there is an uneasy balance in their work between the timeless and the dated. 

Which brings me back to the question posed after their recent performance of Gray Lady Cantata #9 (Vigil for Gaza) and Possibilitarian Imperative Everything Show. Did I like it? Did I think it was good?

I confess that I was worried as the first 10-15 minutes of Vigil unfolded with slow formlessness and an almost impressive lack of any performative charisma. This felt like watching waxwork sleepwalkers, a muddy tableaux without much life apparent in it. 

Since the show’s subject matter demands a deliberate, reverent rhythm and an absolute ban on ham theatrics, I wasn’t expecting commedia dell’arte, but I did find myself concerned by the lack of urgency in the performance and structure of the piece. At first, that is. 

The logic of the vigil does ultimately become clear, operating cumulatively and developing into visual images of striking power. I do wonder if some sort of program note about what agitprop is might have been useful? 

[Note to the perplexed reader: For the sake of succinctness, the Cambridge Dictionary defines agitprop as “(the spreading of) strongly political ideas or arguments expressed especially through plays, art, books, etc.” But it’s so much more than that, so I’d suggest you explore it further to get the gist.]

A savvy and sophisticated photographer friend criticized a lack of nuance in the work. And while I don’t typically associate nuance with 15-foot-tall puppets, that’s fair enough.

The second half of the program was a broadly comic and naively charming clown show encouraging us to resist capitalism. And of course, it was goofy and kind of corny in the way that sincerity and idealism often are. But they weren’t wrong. And the final image of a dancing doorway, which we need only cross through in order to enter a better future, was one of the more effective applications of lo-fi theatrical surrealism I’ve ever encountered. An honest-to-god cipher. 

So simple and so difficult. The doorway is there, one need only find it and walk through it — and perhaps invite others to join them on the other side. 

The Bread and Puppet project, larger than any one performance, is unambiguously Utopian. Beautifully Utopian. Right now I imagine at least one reader (too clever by half) is pushing their glasses up the bridge of their nose and saying, “Utopia means, literally, no place; Utopia is impossible.” 

After giving that Poindexter a thump in the chest I would reply that it might be more accurate to say that Utopia is just as subject to flux as anything else. Any project that aims at flattening hierarchy and making a serious critique of power (yeah, I’m talking about anarchism) has to confront the problem of change. You can’t step in the same river twice, says Heraclitus from his vantage point in deep antiquity. 

Heraclitus also says, “War is the father of all.” Are Utopian projects determined exclusively by what they are against? Are they hopelessly limited to a reactionary position? Without our rage, or grief or even our discomfort with what is, can we effectively imagine what might be? 

I feel as if I’m dancing at the edge of something ugly here, and so I want to be clear: Suffering is not a net good because it leads to art or discourse or utopian imaginings. Suffering is suffering. That’s all. What I am grasping at is the question of what remains for a project like Bread and Puppet when those forces it is reacting against are gone? Or is it naive to suppose that this will ever happen? 

The hint of an active program (as opposed to reactive) in Bread and Puppet’s work has little to do with the art itself and more to do with collectivity (a hallmark of the utopian). Regardless of the subject matter addressed, the basic fact of the experience is collective creation and collective witnessing. 

There is communion at a Bread and Puppet performance (made quite literal by the sharing of homemade bread with those audience members who are hungry and not gluten-intolerant). It’s this shared experience, this collective witnessing, the performative feedback loop of pure theatre, that allows Bread and Puppet to escape the trap of time and remain relevant. 

It is my hope that in 2025 and beyond, as things that are hard get harder and simple joys threaten to ring hollow, we find ways of being present together, forms of collective witnessing that hold us accountable for ourselves and for each other. 

I think often of that dancing doorway in the Possibilitarian Imperative Everything Show. It strikes me as premature to plan on walking through that door anytime soon. However, if we make room in our lives for shared experiences, for generosity of spirit and an honest appraisal of our material conditions, we may be able to experience a miracle, an act of collective vision in which we begin to imagine, to see what that door might look like. 

In the new year, let’s forget the mad rush of reaction, of panicked activity or habituated autopilot. In 2025 let’s stop, listen and look. Maybe then we can imagine a way out of this mess, together.