PUTNEY — Bread and Puppet Theater returns to Next Stage, 15 Kimball Hill, on Saturday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m., with a new play, Diagonal Man: Theory and Praxis.
“Diagonals are created from the leaning power of hurt verticals,” Peter Schumann, founder and director of Bread and Puppet Theater, wrote in an artist's statement. “We inhabitants of Western modernity are no strangers to verticality, from the architecture of our cities, to the 'ladder(s) of success' we're asked to scale, to the incessant wakefulness required of us, postponing the horizontal pleasures of sleep.
“Bread and Puppet's Diagonal Man presents the diagonal as a potent and promising opposition to the dominating verticality of our culture. Puppeteers long ago realized that the most aesthetically radical movements for puppets are diagonals, because these movements cannot be sustained by human actors or dancers for more than a moment.”
Diagonal Man brings all the bewildering, beguiling, and downright funny possibilities and implications of diagonality to life with song, dance, magic, mechanism, and stunning cardboard and paper maché puppets painted in Schumann's exuberant, slapdash expressionist style.
After the performance, Bread and Puppet will serve its famous free sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread and Puppet's “Cheap Art” - books, posters, postcards, pamphlets, and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press - will be for sale.
The Bread and Puppet Practitioners-of-the-Pursuit-of-What String Band will welcome the public.