Master of puppets

For the first summer in a quarter-century, the Domestic Resurrection Circus will not spring to life in the fields of Vermont. But Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater has no plans to stop raising hell.

by Nat Winthrop

When 41-year-old Michael Sarazin was beaten to death at a campground near the Bread and Puppet Theater's Vermont farm last August, Peter Schumann knew something had to change. Sarazin had apparently been attending the Domestic Resurrection Circus, an elaborate outdoor pageant that Schumann's legendary company had organized each summer since the mid 1970s. In recent years, the weekend festival -- which featured Schumann's giant puppets, a ragtag band, a series of skits both funny and solemn, and the ritual burning of a giant puppet representing many of the world's evils -- had begun drawing as many as 20,000 to 30,000 people. And not all those people necessarily shared Schumann's dedication to pacifism, egalitarianism, and social justice.

In 1997, Schumann and his collaborators passed out fliers announcing: "We're getting increasingly more and more complaints about drugs and alcohol at the Circus. Please bear in mind: we are a modest little puppet theater and all we want to do is to change the world and save it from going down the drain. . . . Seriously, the circus is a family event, and drugs and alcohol jeopardize its continuation. Don't bring drugs and alcohol to the circus. Boycott the drug dealers and drug and alcohol sellers."

Schumann's wife, Elka, says the event had grown so large that "the same weekend could be a wonderful experience for thousands and a horrible experience for others. . . . We managed our part -- with great effort and by building more outhouses and recruiting more volunteers. We reached a pretty amazing efficiency in running it." But, as Schumann wrote in a letter to "friends and neighbors" after Sarazin's death, "the spectator crowd grew, and finally outgrew our capacities." The killing, he said, "makes the continuation of the event impossible."

Yet the demise of the Domestic Resurrection Circus does not mean that Bread and Puppet will be cutting back. Ever the mischievous contrarian, Schumann seems determined to use this apparent setback as a springboard to revitalize some of the political, cultural, and educational pursuits that have taken a back seat to the summer spectacle in recent years.

A Bread and Puppet troupe recently made its first Midwestern tour in more than 10 years, visiting theaters, schools, nursing homes, and churches. Another troupe led by Schumann returned from Cuba early this year, where it was the subject of a Cuban television special. And a series of weekly performances called "Humdrum Glorification Caboodles" began June 13 and will be held Sundays throughout the summer. Other performances in Vermont and beyond will continue into the fall, including an autumn trip to Poland.

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The Domestic Resurrection Circus, which charged no admission, did no advertising, and relied on an army of volunteer performers, was the ultimate expression of Schumann's philosophy. He has always harbored a deep and abiding distrust of all things commercial and technological. This includes all corporations, most foundations, the mass media, and popular culture. Bread and Puppet Theater subscribes to a live-off-the-land subsistence ethic, rarely accepting foundation grants and instead relying on small donations, performance fees, and sales of prints, pamphlets, and calendars.

"He never, ever, had any interest in or regard for pop culture," explains Elka Schumann -- including commercial theater, music, film, and television. "He's critical of art done that's meant to be liked." Over the years, Schumann periodically came to feel that Bread and Puppet pageants had become too riddled with pop-culture references, and would steer them back in directions Elka calls "slow, dark, aesthetic, cryptic, lugubrious."

The resulting work is steeped in timeless moral and religious themes: good versus evil, people versus nature, the persistence of life-affirming human instincts in the face of floods, pestilence, and death. Contemporary socio-political themes permeate Schumann's performances as well: each Bread and Puppet pageant centers on a topical "Rotten Idea," ranging from rampant materialism to political corruption to US intervention overseas (whether in Vietnam, Nicaragua, or Kosovo).

Schumann, who is 65, learned about rotten political ideas firsthand: he was born in Lueben, Germany, where he noticed from an early age that "everyone was fearful of being spied on; children were forbidden to hear adults talking." Fear of the Nazis was soon supplanted by fear of Allied bombing raids and of the advancing Russian army that overran and burned his village in 1944. Schumann's family fled north on the last train out, going into exile near the Baltic Sea, where they waited out the war in a rural farmhouse.

The famous German puppeteer Max Jacob, a family friend, became a mentor to young Schumann, according to Stefan Brecht, who wrote a 1600-page tome on Bread and Puppet Theater in 1988. Jacob, Brecht wrote, held up "the appealing figure of the simple man of the people wandering across the land, entertainer of children, free of the cares of respectable people, but welcomed by them, as artist, as entertainer, and as man."

After the war, Schumann began following that dream. He attended two art schools, dropped out, and became involved in sculpture and dance. He made papier-mâché masks for dancers to wear while performing. He and several friends traveled around Europe, doing street theater and avant-garde dance performances, "trying to make sense of our art." It was in the artist-friendly city of Munich that Schumann recruited Elka Leigh Scott -- a Fulbright exchange student from Bryn Mawr -- to take part in one of his dance performances.

Four years, one wedding, and two children later, in 1961, the young family arrived in the United States at the invitation of Elka's parents. They never had any intention of staying, Schumann has said, "but my left foot got stuck in the sidewalk." They landed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the Beat era, at about the same time that Bob Dylan arrived from Minnesota. Protest movements were being hatched, and fomentation and experimentation in the arts was rampant. It was a stimulating climate for someone with Schumann's artistic and political sensibilities.

Yet it was in Vermont, at the Putney School -- Elka's alma mater -- that Bread and Puppet was conceived. When Elka accepted a position as a substitute teacher at the school in 1962, Peter volunteered to lead a series of puppetry workshops. He had not worked in the medium since high school, Elka recalls, but everything just clicked: "When he came back to the art form, he saw the potential of puppet theater -- poetry, philosophy, politics, music -- the theater of all means . . . a huger, broader, more-ancient, and all-inclusive art form" that lent itself to spectacle.

When the Schumanns returned to New York, their puppet-theater productions caught on. The name Bread and Puppet was coined -- bread being substantial and nourishing, the way art ought to be. They were soon recruited by anti-war activists to use giant puppets in protest parades.

"There was a desire to express our alarm and horror" over the US role in Vietnam, remembers Elka. She says that "Peter's vision of working with large groups with masks" melded perfectly with the "eagerness of large groups of people to participate. . . . What resulted was very spectacular. It gave his art a purpose. Every artist wants to feel his or her art is needed, not just put up on a wall like a pretty face."

By 1970, the financial and other strains of city life -- including finding performance and storage spaces for the huge puppets -- had taken their toll. The Schumanns jumped at an invitation from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, where they maintained a theater-in-residence for four years. Then Elka's parents bought a 260-acre farm in northern Vermont and invited her and Peter for a visit. They never left.

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This summer, the first since the Schumanns' move to northern Vermont that Bread and Puppet will not host the Domestic Resurrection Circus, Schumann is focusing on his Humdrum Glorification Caboodles. The Caboodles, he explains, will be "an evolving, somewhat unpredictable series of changing bits and pieces, to include circuses, cantatas, pageants in various shapes and sizes," along with "really humdrum silly stuff" aimed primarily at kids. "How it turns out in reality remains to be seen," says Schumann with a chuckle. "Things usually turn out different than you want."

He also plans to continue exposing what he sees as the outrages of the moment. Asked earlier this month about the situation in the former Yugoslavia, Schumann expressed righteous indignation, calling the NATO action "totally devastating" and "shamelessly illegal." A recent skit titled "Kosovo," part of the modest Cardboard Circus that kicked off this year's Bread and Puppet season June 6, features a Mr. Clean (Slobodan Milosevic) and a Mr. Good (NATO). Mr. Good bombs the hell out of Mr. Clean's country as Mr. Clean throws (read: "cleanses") virtually every last Kosovar out. After it's all over, Mr. Clean and Mr. Good go to the country club together to play golf.

"It's not that we push issues," insists Schumann. "It's just that we want to communicate what we're excited about." He says that his leftist themes have prompted parents to yank their kids out of his workshops, and many of Bread and Puppet's sponsors are nervous about offending parents and local residents.

Nevertheless, Schumann believes he serves a vital function as the "corrupter of smooth goings-on." The bombing may be over, but there's little danger that he'll run out of violence, militarism, or hypocrisy to protest. "[President Clinton] tells Columbine High School students, `We need to use words instead of weapons.' And then look at what he does," he says. "It's no wonder the kids blow up schools."

The Bread and Puppet Museum, located on Route 122 in Glover, Vermont, just south of the I-91 Barton exit, is open daily through foliage season from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Humdrum Glorification Caboodles will be held every Sunday at 3 p.m. through August at the Bread and Puppet farm. Call (802) 525-3031 for more information.

Nat Winthrop is a freelance writer from Montpelier, Vermont. He is the former publisher of Vermont Times and the Vanguard Press.