BRATTLEBORO — Some theatrical revivals show us what things were like in the past. Others vividly speak to our lives today. First produced 50 years ago, Fire does both.
On March 24, at 7:30 p.m., Bread & Puppet Theater will be coming to the Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery in Brattleboro to perform one its very first productions, Fire.
As Jon Mack, the director of Hooker-Dunham Theater, says, “Fire is a re-mounting of a show that was done some many years ago about Vietnam which, sadly, one might say, still eerily resonates with what's happening now.”
Mack said he believes it's important that Bread & Puppet brings to the fore such painfully enduring issues.
“I'm very much looking forward to the performance,” he says. “And they're all camping out at my house after the show; in order to move people, this must be how they do a show - •like gypsies sans caravan. I'm delighted to host the cast.”
The author of Fire, Peter Schumann, writes that his work was dedicated to “three Americans who immolated themselves in protest against the war in Vietnam.”
The play is slow and mute. Preceded by a cantastoria, in which a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images, Fire is performed with life-size puppets that resemble their manipulators. It tell the story of seven days in a Vietnamese community, which is incinerated by fire bombs, followed by the self-immolation of a woman.
Linda Elbow, who has worked with Bread & Puppet since the early 1970s, believes that Fire has something to tell us about many different periods.
“Fire was first made in response to Vietnam but was later revised in reaction to Israel and Gaza, and now more recently in response to America's involvement in the Mideast. Bread & Puppet has created a work that seems to have lasting appeal.”
Bread & Puppet is world-famous for its giant puppets, street performances, and politically radical theater. John Bell has written that the theater company has “made puppet theater which consistently and strikingly combines a variety of elements into its productions: puppets of all kinds and sizes, masks, sculptural costumes, paintings, musical instruments, acting, dance, and even buildings and landscapes.”
While the puppet part of its name may be pretty obvious, bread is refers to Bread & Puppet's practice of sharing its own fresh bread, served free with aioli, a homemade garlic mayonnaise, with the audience of each performance.The name also derives from the company's central principle that art should be as basic to life as bread.
Bread & Puppet is a familiar visitor to the Brattleboro area through its larger-than-life performances at the biannual Puppets in the Mountains. “That festival is produced by Eric Bass of the amazing Sandglass in Putney, and we will be coming back this summer,” says Elbow. “The show we will be doing at Hooker-Dunham is smaller in scale than those.”
Now based on a large farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, Bread & Puppet Theater was founded on New York City's Lower East Side in 1963 by German born artist-dancer Schumann, who remains as the company's artistic director.
The concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets, first rod-puppets and hand puppets for children's shows, grew bigger and bigger.
Elbow says that Schumann “was at first primarily a choreographer, as well an artist and a musician. It was after meeting up with the writer Grace Paley that Peter made political issues central to his work. Paley encouraged him to become more engaged with social issues. Peter always had a political awareness, but Paley, you might say, blew it out into his work. I believe it was originally her idea of doing parades and engaging these issues with puppets.”
For the next decade, giant puppets figured prominently in anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations. But the theater company also put on indoor performances which often could be both simpler and more complex. Fire was one of these smaller-scale works.
In 1970, after an invitation from Vermont's Goddard College to be theater-in-residence, Bread & Puppet moved to the Northeast Kingdom and, in 1975, to an old dairy farm in Glover.
“The company wanted to get out of the city, so Goddard's offer was very welcome,” says Elbow. “We still have a strong relationship with Goddard. For instance, Peter just spoke at school's commencement.”
Soon afterward, this residency the company moved to the farm in Glover, where Schumann's wife Elka had family. In Glover, the company produced its celebrated annual outdoor festival of music, art, puppetry and pageantry, “Our Domestic Resurrection Circus,” until 1998. Since then, a smaller version, albeit with giant puppets, continues on Sundays in July and August. In addition, the company continues touring and workshopping in the rest of the year in New England and around the globe.
Fire has a special place in Bread & Puppet's history. In 1968, the company presented the show to critical acclaim at the Nancy Theater festival in France. This launched the theater into international prominence and helped secure more than a decade of seasonal touring in Europe and beyond.
Schumann has written, “puppet theater is the theater of all means.”
He contends that puppets and masks should be played in the street where they are louder than the traffic.
“They don't teach problems, but they scream and dance and display life in its clearest terms,” he adds. He says puppet theater is of action rather than dialogue. “The action is reduced to the simplest dance-like and specialized gestures,” Schumann wrote. “A puppet may be a hand only, or it may be a complicated body of many heads, hands, rods and fabric. We have two types of puppet shows: good ones and bad ones, but all of them are for good and against evil.”
Elbow elaborates, “Clearly our shows have a leftist message. But I feel we never tell people what to think. We hope to show them different ideas through presentations. Consequently, our puppets are archetypes rather than specific people. For instance, we never have had apuppet of Nixon or Obama. Our puppets represent things like the good guy, the bad guy, devils, the fat man, as well as the garbage man and the welfare mother, who represent the rest of us. Keeping our works archetypal helps make a show like Fire just as applicable today as when it was first written.
“People tell us that we are just preaching to the choir. To some degree that is true. But the choir needs support also. But such is hardly the case all the time. Our performances can have quite different reactions depending on where we perform.
“At one performance I was selling posters and a man came up to me and grabbed me roughly by the throat and threateningly asked me, 'What's this all about?' The same show in Poland in the 1980s had people coming up in tears trying to give money and asking how they could help us. More recently, at a circus in Yugoslavia, no one laughed at one of our comic plays.”
Bread & Puppet is a self-supporting company: it gets no government grants, by choice; it don't apply for any.
“We sustain ourselves by performing, which means we have to tour a lot,” Elbow says. “People send us small donations all the time, and we are also supported by two major donors.” On top of that, Bread & Puppet makes money from selling posters and other ephemera associated with its plays for people who want to take home a bit of Bread & Puppet.”
Now on the eve of its 50th anniversary, Elbow says it is time to take stock of what has been accomplished, and what lies ahead.
“Peter keeps writing new works, so that we almost never know what we are going to do in the next season,” says Elbow.
Yet, she adds, Bread & Puppet remains “dedicated to an art form that is homemade, and which reflects on and addresses the concerns of the world and celebrates its beauty, that has made the theater possible and what it is.”