Rehearsing With Gods... chronicles the great spectacle

Rehearsing With Gods — Photographs and Essays on The Bread & Puppet Theater; photographs by Ronald T. Simon and text by Marc Estrin; published by Chelsea Green Publishing Company in White River Junction in 2004; 240 pages; hardcover; $35

Reviewed by Jennifer Hersey

It is about 2 a.m. early Saturday morning. We are four young women crammed into a Toyota with two large coolers and bags of homemade dresses and necklaces for sale. We arrive in a large field in Glover, Vermont, this being the first time we’ve been here. As we unpack and set up our tent we see a man in a Bill Clinton mask doing a strip tease around an enormous bonfire to the beat of many different drummers. A girl named Alice invites us to her tea party she will hold in the woods the next day.

It was the summer of 1997, and we were off to see the great spectacle we had heard of in college coffeehouses and at Phish shows. Giant puppets, free bread, and the immolation of an effigy of the capitalist machine.

We have just arrived at our first Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus. We don’t have a clue what to expect, and even less of a clue that we are about to witness the beginning of the giant circus’ undoing. We don’t even know that we are part of the problem.

Through Ronald T. Simon’s photographs and Marc Estrin’s writing, Rehearsing With Gods takes readers through much of the history of Bread and Puppet. This book goes beyond the pageantry and behind closed doors to where the puppets are built up before coming to life.

Mr. Simon’s gorgeous photographs evoke a sense of life arising from lifeless materials. Many show puppetry in motion — wings no longer still after being strapped to the arms of a puppeteer, mass puppets with people peeking from behind, a man gently cradling a gigantic head. Even for those who never had the chance to experience Bread and Puppet, Mr. Simon’s still photographs show the magic of the theater in action.

The book is broken into eight themes: death, fiend, beast, human, world, gift, bread, and hope. And as Mr. Simon writes in the preface, it is intended not as an "objective document" but rather as an "interpretive one."

Death

"Death romps and prances, stomps and dances through our lives, slinks about our world, hunting and gathering. We turn away.

"What an oddity, this pretense," Mr. Estrin writes.

Peter Schumann slinks about Death’s world just as freely. But in Mr. Schumann’s world, with death there is subsequent resurrection. Themes that are part of life are never completely erased, not even if cut or burned or buried. Even his papier-mâché work area is laid out to look like coffins in a row, each giant figure waiting for Dr. Peter Frankenstein (as Mr. Estrin dubs him) to resurrect it. And after it has served its purpose, played its part in this passion play? It is then destroyed, returned to lifeless matter. Mr. Estrin even compares the bread oven to a crematorium, for within the sanctum of Bread and Puppet, life equals death. The best nourished people all will meet the same end.

In most of Mr. Schumann’s works, according to Mr. Estrin, evil only triumphs so long before it is destroyed and good once again holds its rightful place of power.

Fiend

"Fiend or angel — that is the question," Mr. Estrin writes. He describes a trip to Caracas when puppeteers in their typical white clothing burst out of vans and began hollering at the crowd to gather round for a performance. No one seemed interested, and in fact, people seemed rather afraid of the gay puppeteers.

"Our embarrassed hosts explained to their innocents abroad: there was a fascist party that dressed in white....A mere confusion," Mr. Estrin writes. "But Bread & Puppet itself as fiend? Say it isn’t so!"

Mr. Estrin speaks about the theater’s first parade in Plainfield and the reaction from townspeople, specifically to Uncle Fatso, a decidedly "un-American" fellow. This was in the middle of the Vietnam War, when much like today, any questioning of the government’s pro-war stance was equivalent to treason in the mind’s of flag-waving, so-called patriots.

When Mr. Schumann had the audacity to present a piece about a mother sending her son to war, the crowd responded — with any weapon at hand. Mr. Estrin credits Jules Rabin for mediating and preventing imminent violence.

What a reversal that now people of this area look forward to the singing and dancing puppets, the little chicks avoiding a giant stomping foot, Uncle Sam cavorting around on stilts, solemn veiled female figures holding babies. Even if we all feel a little guilty for our complicity. And better yet, what was once thought to be the fiend became the angel.

Beast

The beasts of Bread and Puppet underwent a transformation, according to Mr. Estrin, as the troupe moved from New York City to Plainfield to Glover. Once frightening "huge-toothed, blind, and snouted beast heads" became docile cows, albeit with human faces instead of spots, free white horses, and lovely, graceful, swooping white birds.

But "where there is freedom, there are those ready to grab it, to deny it, to kill it...."

The plays often repeat the same theme. The butchers come for the free and kill them, but the dead are avenged and resurrected, time and time again.

Then the beast became human. Though young Paula Hernandez, playing O Calf, was saved from slaughter by the hand of the butcher, played by her father, Peter Hamburger, one man couldn’t be saved.

"In a campground a quarter of a mile away, close to this very moment, a man was killed, and Our Domestic Resurrection Circus with him," Mr. Estrin writes.

Human

"He molds them energetically, as he does his bread, pummeling and slapping them into shape, fusing lump upon lump, sculpting with hand and the roughest of tools until...there they are: humans, earth-creatures, sitting, standing, lying," Mr. Estrin writes of the creation of puppets.

To Mr. Estrin the most "affecting" are the mass puppets, symbolizing the average people of the earth. They move almost imperceptibly, eclipsed by the actions of other, more individual characters. The masses are those in society who as individuals are powerless, yet as a group possess the greatest power, the power to challenge the status quo.

The puppeteers’ own personalities move the puppets to behave the way they do, Mr. Estrin writes. Rather than acting, they infuse lifeless material with humanity.

"The power transfers from puppeteer to puppet, and it is the puppet who quickly begins to call the shots," Mr. Estrin writes.

So what happens when the needs of the puppeteer are eclipsed by the puppets? Mr. Estrin tells the story of a "too-long tour" and a bunch of grumpy, exhausted puppeteers who have sacrificed to make the show go on and begin to complain.

"Peter was sitting quietly at the table, puffing on his pipe, listening. After a long pause in the conversation — some dejected angel passing over — he quietly said the only words he was to say: ‘Happiness is not important....’

"I think I grew up then and there," Mr. Estrin writes.

In the larger scheme of life, when we have so much compared to the so little others possess, when we live in veritable comfort while others suffer, when those whose actions are inherently wrong go without being held accountable, happiness seems very small.

In a discourse of humanity one cannot ignore gender and the roles associated with gender. Mr. Estrin argues that the feminist critique of Bread and Puppet as sexist, in its basic patriarchal model, is untrue and gives evidence to the contrary.

He writes that because characters representing evil are almost always male and characters representing good are almost universally female, it should be men who complain about sexism within the theater.

Yes, the theater has brought light to so-called women’s issues (thought by most feminists to be human issues), good characters are all female, and Mr. Schumann may be "androgynous" as an artist, but painting female characters as one-dimensional is and has always been inherently sexist. To do so does not allow women the full range of human expression that men are freely allowed.

That said, I do not think the theater is sexist or demeaning to women. It is Mr. Estrin’s argument that fails to explain how Bread and Puppet does allow full expression from each of its participants, including those just watching it unfold.

World

In a note written by Mr. Schumann, salvaged by Mr. Estrin, about Mozart’s "Requiem," he refers to the "guest of the world."

"‘Guests of the world’ we are," Mr. Estrin writes, "and now guests that are called to insurrection. That’s the theater’s big picture of what’s going on out there beyond puppetland."

Spirituality emerges in puppetry in many forms, and biblical imagery is used rampantly, expecially in juxtaposition. Where there is heaven....

Mr. Estrin writes of the origins of The Tunnel, and Everett Kinsey showing up with a backhoe one day to dig it. It was part of a disappearing act, but being in the tunnel did not impress Mr. Estrin much.

"The universal nightmare of being buried alive. The smell of a place you were not to be until later. The reign of Chaos and old Night," he writes. The tunnel was the polar opposite of the verdant, sunny fields above, or as Mr. Estrin puts it, an "unWorld."

Then there’s the world outside the theater. Not exemplary of the "Frying Pan World" mentioned by Mr. Estrin but still in the outside world were the residents of Glover. Some people attending the big pageants, a few bad apples, were not respectful of the landscape they were visiting. It pissed people off, naturally. What Mr. Estrin points out, however, was that it was because of the similar values held by the typical old Vermonter and the typical puppeteer that the circus continued.

"These were difficult, loving battles, not between enemies, but among secret sharers — intimate, if unconscious, friends," Mr. Estrin writes.

This, of course, became moot following the death of a man in one of the campgrounds, after which Peter and Elka Schumann voluntarily ended the super-large-crowd pageants.

Gift

"Gift, in German, means ‘poison.’ How’s that for macaronic malevolence? Yet it had to be somewhere in the language mix, the yin dot in the yang teardrop, the poisonous aspect of gifts, the curative gift of certain poisons," Mr. Estrin writes.

It is that dichotomy that defines the theater Bread and Puppet provides. It is beautiful yet painful. Disturbing yet provocative. Grotesque but hopeful.

Mr. Estrin writes of pronouncements that would be preposterous if not so badly needed. My favorite: "I demand the immediate elimination of all evil!"

And in condemning evil, there is complicity, Mr. Estrin writes. Those who do not put a stop to evil are complicit in its ongoing destruction of good.

"...I am still cautious of the most apparently humane message, or awe-inspiring image. Playing with Bread & Puppet often requires yellow hazmat gloves," he writes.

Bread

What is the purpose of the bread in Bread and Puppet? Mr. Estrin suggest a few purposes. When people are chewing, they are not talking. Instead they are given a chance to absorb the message they’ve just heard or seen.

Bread is also nourishment. "For Peter has always believed that his puppets nourish the hungry, and like sourdough rye, they fight the big white loaf of America. ‘Puppets are food,’ he says. ‘You can’t eat them, but they feed you.’"

Also, bread is basic. While in Poland puppeteers came across theater workers who worked with simple tools, lived simple lives. They invited Bread and Puppet folks to their homes for dinner. Mr. Estrin complimented a man on his shirt, which he promptly gave to him.

"Never in my life had I so felt the inhumanity of my own grasping, rich society," he writes.

The theater started to change its ways. Re-using materials rather than buying new. Finding materials that do not harm people or the environment. "The puppets started to look like the bread: brown, rough, earthy."

The emergence of cheap art mimicked the simplicity of bread. Part of "The Why Cheap Art Manifesto" follows: "Art soothes pain! Art wakes up sleepers! Art fights against war & stupidity! Art sings halleluja! Art is for kitchens! Art is like good bread! Art is like great trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!"

Hope

Mr. Estrin opens his final chapter with the story of Pandora opening her box, liberating either gifts or evils, depending on the version of the story, and leaving only hope on Earth.

Mr. Schumann recommended Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope to Mr. Estrin.

"It’s not a book you actually read. You live with it and see what happens," he writes. "This cornucopia of imagination flows from Bloch’s radical notion that ‘not-yet’ represents the structure of reality. Being is not what already is, but many possibilities ever in the process of emerging."

The concept of hope is intrinsic to Mr. Schumann’s vision of what Bread and Puppet should be. It is about "emerging possibilities."

Mr. Estrin asks throughout the book, why are the people in the audience clapping and smiling? Maybe we just don’t get it, or it is just so colorful and cheerful that despite the message we feel we must applaud? Or does it have more to do with the very existence of a Bread and Puppet in a world that wears big shoes and stomps on baby chicks?

We do get it. Through gaily painted flags, a raucous unruly band, and washerwomen and garbagemen still dancing, despite it all, we see hope.