The famous Bread & Puppet Theater troupe will be in Franklin County this week, feeding its audience on sourdough bread and innovative puppetry in a show called “The Basic Bye-bye Show.”
Inspired by the apocalyptic woodcuts of Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, and daily news, this show will be performed in the Ashfield Community Hall on Wednesday, March 21, at 7 p.m., at 521 Main St. (Route 116) in Ashfield.
In Greenfield, it will be performed on Sunday, March 25, at 6 p.m. at Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center, 289 Main St. Admission for either performance is $10 to $25, on a sliding scale, with no one turned away for lack of funds.
Bread & Puppet (B&P) founder and director Peter Schumann says “‘The Basic Bye-bye Show’ is based on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet.” He says the show also bids good-bye to capitalism “in order to welcome the 1,000 alternatives to this rotten system.”
In the puppet show, fantasies unfold in gray, black and white inside a small fabric stage filled with words. These scenes develop in contrast to the “basic bye-byes to various brutal unnecessities of our current politics,” says a news release about the show.
When reached by phone, Bread & Puppet founder Peter Schumman said this show has been revised in response to the mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and the reaction to it in America.
Founded in 1963, at the start of the Vietnam War protests, Bread & Puppet’s shows are political, with puppets made of paper-mache, cloth and cardboard.
Schumann was a sculptor, dancer and a baker who had emigrated from Germany. The “bread” in Bread & Puppet comes from the troupe’s tradition of serving sourdough rye bread with aioli at the end of each performance.
On his website, Schumann writes: “We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity.”