Two Pageants: Gates of Hell & Men With Teeth
Produced by Robin Lloyd
Audience Level: Elementary through Adult
Gates of Hell is a magnificent virtuoso performance by the Bread and Puppet Theater troupe on the grassy amphitheater and hills of their farm in Glover, Vermont. Involving several hundred performers, this last Pageant (1998) portrays the corrupting force of capitalism on humanity, told through fragments of a poem by Bertolt Brecht, which are assembled and crucified on a burning pyre.
"This pageant is about the citizenry who get attacked and sacrificed and resurrected. Out of this population comes the butcher who is professional and obedient, himself a sheep or calf, and also the slaughterer of the calf - the real Nazi and also the proper citizen doing what he is told." Peter Schumann, Director of Bread and Puppet
(29 minutes) Produced and Directed by Robin Lloyd
Audience Level: High School through Adult
The gods - Wind, Progress, Hope, Phobia, and Terminator - convene to preside over the sacrifice of the people of Sarajevo, Bosnia, in this morality play on the struggle of humanity against fascism.
Images from the Bread and Puppet Pageant of 1993 are interwoven with comments by Peter Schumann, director, who suggests that the population in this city represents the plight of modern man. He says, "The god Terminator is terminating us. We are in the grasp of capitalism in the most terrible way. It is the ones who suffer the most who realize it the most."
Broken Off Letter: A Yugoslav Journal
(30 minutes) Taped by Robin Lloyd and Dee Dee Halleck
Based on letters by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic to her daughter, this Bread and Puppet performance in a Vermont pine forest depicts the horror of rape and war. Vermont composer Eric Nielson provides a score combining the modal styles of Eastern European folk and dissonant classical music, a fitting background for Bread and Puppet Director Peter Schumann's meditation on themes of separation, rape and flight.
Columbus and the New World Order
(54 minutes) Taped by Robin Lloyd script by Greg Guma
Audience Level: Elementary through Adult
In response to the Columbus Quincentennial (1992), Bread and Puppet Theater produced plays that deconstructed the mythical life of the man who "discovered" America. First performed in Vermont, the plays - called the Inside and Outside Story -later toured internationally. The Outside Story turns Christopher Columbus into "Uncle Fatso," who conquers the indigenous inhabitants, leading to a terrifying New World Order. The Inside Story explores his life through the lens of history, linking his biography with contemporary issues such as racism and the Gulf War.