Bread and Puppet Theater

BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER. Founded by Peter Schumann in 1963 and launched with shows for children of the Lower East Side, the theater came to play a large and prominent role in antiwar demonstrations with large paper mâché puppets on display. After shifting to Vermont in 1974, it assumed a large regional role in a variety of ways related to leftwing causes.

In Vermont, the German-born Peter Schumann (b. 1934) joined with Elka Leigh Scott (1935-2021), the Russian-born granddaughter of famed leftwing anti-imperialist scholar and back-to-the-land ecologist Scott Nearing and his wife Helen Nearing. Elka and her family fled Russia for Connecticut, following the German invasion of 1941, but returned to Europe after the World War II, living in Berlin until returning to Connecticut in 1949. As a teen, she attended the Putney Academy in Vermont, where her grandfather served on the faculty. She later attended Bryn Mawr and then took up studies in Munich, where she met the young artist, Peter Schumann. Together they moved to New York, became active in radical theater, and had five children.

Following the move to Vermont’s “Northern Kingdom,” they consolidated their new status with her father’s purchase of the Glover Farm. In Glover, they enlarged their repertoire of puppet plays, including adaptations of Brecht, a great favorite, and toured the state in a school bus, making a special effort to perform before underserved populations of young people. Gathering more youngsters including children of professionals from southern Vermont, they held summer-long training camps and launched a soon-famous annual event titled “Our Domestic Resurrection Circus.” The New York Times compared it to Woodstock, drawing crowds of up to 40,000. After a fight broke out in 1998, resulting in a death, this magnum event disappeared from their repertoire, replaced by smaller summer shows and parades in nearby towns. (Fresh home-baked bread was frequently given to spectators after a show, hence the ensemble’s name.)

In 1968, Schumann participated in a “radical theatre festival” held in San Francisco with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino, their left and counter-cultural collaborators for many years. A retrospective of Schumann’s visual art (including several huge canvases designed as puppet show backdrops, others as stand-alone paintings and posters) was exhibited at the Queens Museum in New York.

While Bread and Puppet toured and created new regional shows nationally and internationally over fifty years, it also sustained lower-profile activities in Glover, including daily bread baking and “cheap art” production of banners and posters, with its cultural activity woven into the everyday life and chores of the farm itself, funded in part by a cattle and maple-sugar business. The Bread and Puppet Press, managed by Elka, offered pamphlets, broadsheets and leaflets on issues of culture, war and ecology. Peter Schumann wrote and illustrated many of the pamphlets, and with his troupe he shared Bread and Puppet ideas and practices in workshops around the United States and abroad. The Bread and Puppet continued into at least the third decade of the twenty-first century as one of the oldest non-profit theater groups in the United States.

Brecht, Stefan. The Bread and Puppet Theater. NewYork: Metheun, 1974.

Dennison, George. An Existing Better World: Notes on the Bread & Puppet Theater. New York: Autonomedia, 2000.

Simon, Ronald T. and Marc Estrin. Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2000.

Documentary film, AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet (2001) by Tamar Schumann and Deedee Halleck.

Bread & Puppet Theater Website. https://breadandpuppet.org/#