Published on July 14, 2010

The chief gods appear at the end of The Return of Ulysses as the Lubberland chorus sings from the musician’s gallery in the Dirt Floor Theater. Photos by Joseph Gresser GLOVER — In producing The Return of Ulysses, a seventeenth-century opera by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, Peter Schumann has taken his Lubberland National Dance Company in a radically new direction.  Instead of presenting pieces of group choreography based on a political theme, the Lubberland dance company retells the final scenes of Homer’s Odyssey to words and music from one of the first operas ever composed.

Lubblerland is an imaginary country where a lazy person can enjoy a life of plenty with no work.  Peter Schumann, the founder and director of Bread and Puppet Theater, put together a set of sarcastic solo dances several years ago and declared them to be the national dances of Lubberland.

A year or two afterward, Mr. Schumann established the Lubberland National Dance Company and created group pieces that harked back to his early years as a choreographer focused on making dances that used ordinary movement rather than formalized dance steps.

These pieces were forthrightly political, with titles like “The-sweeping-away-of-the-miserable-government dance.”

Bread and Puppet was invited by the Montreal Baroque Festival to create a puppet show to go along with a concert of the opera in June.  Professional musicians stood to the side of the performance space while Bread and Puppet acted out the story.  The two groups offered an abridged version of the lengthy opera, one that still lasted two and a half hours.

Claude Gingras, a reviewer for the Montreal newspaper La Presse, disliked the combination of puppetry and high culture.  Bread and Puppet’s use An old man stands where a moment before the hero Ulysses was seen. He bows to Minerva, who hovers above him, in thanks for the disguise she has provided. of cardboard waves to indicate the ocean and similarly constructed clouds to portray the heavens struck Mr. Gingras as disrespectful to Monteverdi’s work, and more appropriate to children’s theater.

When Mr. Schumann decided to perform the opera at the theater’s home base in Glover, he made further cuts, reducing the length of the show to about an hour.  Faced with the loss of the professional orchestra and singers, he replaced them with company members who played and sang short sections of the music in Italian and English.

The small brass band and chorus sang and played in a style far removed from that of Monteverdi’s day.  While its performance might seem crude in comparison to the Italian master’s original, Bread and Puppet’s version of the score bore the same relation to Monteverdi’s music as cardboard waves and clouds do to nature.

While Mr. Gingras may not have enjoyed it, the piece, as performed Friday night, July 9, was enthralling.  The company simplified the story, eliminating a host of secondary characters and moving the story forward briskly, with the narrative, music and puppetry in perfect balance.

The performance began in front of the company’s Dirt Floor Theater with a dumb show version of the opera’s prelude.  A menagerie of creatures in fancy dress presented signs listing the opera’s themes:  love, time and human frailty.

After the ship carrying Ulysses home from the Trojan War was shipwrecked by an angry Neptune, and all but the hero lost at sea, Mr. Schumann invited the audience inside, with a few tart words about the array of gods created by the Greeks to justify the destruction of Troy.

Once in Ithaca, Ulysses wandered through a forest created by dancers holding branches.  A headless winged Minerva, floating among the clouds, disguised Ulysses as an old man and he set out to settle scores with the crowd of suitors who each hoped to claim Penelope, his wife, and with her his kingdom.

The suitors appeared behind a table as their gnarled hands came into view, followed by their heads and cardboard bodies painted in white tuxedos.

Penelope, danced by Mr. Schumann, agreed to marry whichever man could bend and shoot Ulysses’ bow.  All the suitors tried and failed, but when Penelope’s serving woman offered the bow to the old man who suddenly appeared in the crowd, there was another transformation, accompanied by a stirring cry of “Minerva, Minerva,” from soloist Greg Corbina.

A crowd of dancers looks on as the restored Ulysses demonstrates his deadly prowess with the bow. Ulysses, performed by Mara Gahan, made a second dramatic transformation and stood once more as himself, while the serving woman was seen as the disguised goddess.  After dispatching the suitors, who died amid gouts of blood-red cloth streamers.  The lovers were reunited and their actions blessed by Jove and Juno, the king and queen of the gods.

While Monteverdi was satisfied to leave his opera there, Mr. Schumann, had a final trick up his sleeve.  In his finale, Jove underwent a final sly transformation and a third, humble couple appeared to set the world to rights.

The Return of Ulysses will be performed Friday nights at 8 p.m. for the rest of July.