Bread & Puppet Theater to Return To NYC With Political Puppet Theater

After two pandemic years, Bread & Puppet Theater, the acclaimed 58-year-old avant garde company, returns to New York's Theater for the New City to present two urgently-needed political puppet shows. Crystal Field, executive Artistic Director of Theater for the New City, has been presenting Bread & Puppet's work in the former meat market and beloved downtown venue for decades. She will host Bread & Puppet Theater's The Persians December 9-12 and the company's latest installment of the iconic Our Domestic Resurrection Circus December 16-19. Limited tickets are available at theaterforthenewcity.net.

Revitalizing Aeschylus' nearly 2,500-year-old epic, Bread & Puppet's The Persians brings together musicians, composers, dancers, builders and puppeteers from all six decades of the company's history. With giant puppets and billowing plastic painted by B&P director, Peter Schumann, a cymbal-playing dance chorus of local volunteer performers, and extracts from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, the company asks, "What grief grieves the city?"

When asked why he chose this moment to take on Aeschylus' tragedy about the trauma of war, Peter Schumann responds, "When Athens commissioned Aeschylus to write the official celebration piece for the Greeks' miraculous victory over the vastly superior Persian Empire invasion force, they must have expected just that: a glorification of national prowess and skill. What they got instead is the opposite: heartrending compassion for the slain enemy, lamentation for the despairing mothers and widows of the slain warriors. Can our own permanently warring military industrial empire learn from this?"

The following week Bread & Puppet will present Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a rollicking spectacle of protest and celebration. Flag wavers, cardboard clowns, prancing blue horses, and Bread & Puppet's Doing-The-Best-We-Can Brass Band are put into action to address the urgent stories and questions of the day. The show, says director Peter Schumann, is "in response to our totally unresurrected capitalist situation, not only the hundreds of thousands of unnecessarily sacrificed pandemic victims but our culture's unwillingness to recognize Mother Earth's revolt against our civilization. Since we earthlings do not live up to our earthling obligations, we need resurrection circuses to yell against our own stupidity."

After each show, Bread & Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread & Puppet's "Cheap Art" - books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press - will be for sale.

PERFORMANCE DETAILS:

Theater for the New City Executive Artistic Director Crystal Field present:

Bread & Puppet Theater's The Persians

December 9-12, 2021

Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8pm; Saturday and Sunday at 3pm

Bread & Puppet Theater's Our Domestic Resurrection Circus

December 16-19, 2021

Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8pm; Saturday and Sunday at 3pm

Tickets $18, Students/Seniors/Children $12 available at theaterforthenewcity.net

Theater for the New City: 155 First Avenue, New York, NY 10003

All attendees 12 and older are required to show proof of at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Face masks required.