ARTS

Ready for Bread and Puppet?

Jesse Carew

You don't need to make a pilgrimage to Glover this year, you don't need to fight the crowds for a nugget of mealy bread and luke-warm agua. Chances are, Bread and Puppet will be coming your way via school bus this year or the next.

I caught them in Northampton last week. The cast, composed of smaller puppets and a limited handful of devoted undergrads, was decidedly mediocre. The audience, devoid of sunburns, sex in a bag, and liberal doses of combustible greenery, were emphatically underenthused. Blame it on the weather, midterms, or the Padres, but the Gravy had definitely lost it's wavy.

Since '62, Pete Schuman has led his celebration of low-budget symbolism and protest in the hills of Glover, Vermont. The days I watched him and his friends parading 30-foot puppets of Mother Earth, personified industry, and happy animals through a natural amphitheater 15 years ago leave some vivid images: my first pot brownie, mud baths with decrepit hippie-folk, nudity in the sunshine.

Aside from this painterly bliss, Schuman's ball had a charisma; call it hope, call it arrogance, call it: Momentum. Colors were bright, faces were spaced, hippies partied-it's no myth. When our generation took the torch we ran from these "burnouts." Good for us, but we're holding the damn thing upside down.

Life was risky then: passenger planes and heroin, buses toting runaways careening down Route 66 on their last legs. Protesting was a method of validation, not an occupation. Protest in itself just doesn't shine. It's not attractive. When Schuman's company took the stage last week his message was simple and bleak: "Don't try this at home."

There was a man cloaked in black, swaying slowly in the silence. He made vague motions as if he were in pain. Then the music came in: cymbals made of garbage can lids clashed together in atonal discord, like Stomp with a hangover. The chorus droned unintelligibly in the background. When the skit was over, I looked around at my "peers": a few hundred students and professors in various shades of brown and green clothing. I began to applaud erratically.

I suppose they were all too moved or whatever so I started whistling. They started to rumble and clap. I used the diversion to slip outside and smoke something. Caught up in the hippie vibe, I found a plastic pipe and started practicing my circular breathing. I fell into a trance and before I knew it a whole procession started marching out the door and straight for me.

In my altered state I thought that they had finally given up the ghost and decided to have fun on this glorious Wednesday night. There was a ragged assembly of buglers and a huge norse-man beat a tattered marching drum with an up-beat ragtime slap. I started running and dancing all around and within them and screamed loudly at the moon.

It wasn't until we had crossed the entire field and the band played "Taps" that I realized, having left my glasses back on the porch, that no one was dancing. In fact, some people were crying. Some poor girl asked if I could give her a hug. Reluctantly, I declined in order to see what these brilliant entertainers were up to.

I went up to a young man with red beard hair named Jason at the center of the depression collective who seemed to be Schuman's right-hand man. He was wielding a shovel and making a pitiful attempt at "breaking earth." I tried to give him a hand and he got fresh. "It's symbolic!" he screamed in my ear, the way uptight artists often do. "We're burying Mother Earth." On that note I careened off into the sticks for some mind bending reconnaisance training and found myself in a bed of briars so thick that I tore my sock.

You may wonder what it was they were protesting against. Honestly, I've lost track of all the issues. They were saying something about the earth dying-the usual. The only thing that really stuck with me throughout the whole thing was one line during a half-hour monologue that Schuman gave that night.

"Even my own protest," he chanted, while his tired eyes scanned the assembly, "they use against us." At sixty-five-after thirty-five years of work-he has finally achieved cult status. There he stood on that stage, shining just as brightly as ever, surrounded by silent reverence, waiting impatiently for someone else to quit watching and light their own damn torch.

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Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 7, October 30, 1998

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