Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 8 Article 32 Issue 2 Spring 1977 Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater Barry Goldensohn Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Goldensohn, Barry. "Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater." The Iowa Review 8.2 (1977): 71-82. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2206 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. With disgust and contempt, Knowing the blood which the poet said Flowed with the earthly rhythm of desire a ... Was really river of disease no And the moon could longer Discover itself in the white flesh Because the body had gone Black in the crotch, And the mind itself a mere shadow of idea ... He opened the book again and again, Contemptuous, wanting to tear out The pages, wanting to hold the print, to His voice, the ugly mirror, Until the lyric and the rot Became indistinguishable, And the singing and the dying Became the same breath, under which He wished the poet the same fate, The same miserable fate. CRITICISM / BARRY GOLDENSOHN Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater was The Bread and Puppet Theater deeply involved with the civil rights is and anti-war protest movements and marked by their political moralism concern in two important respects: its with domestic issues, the home This is front, and its primitivism of technique and morality. primitivism are very clear in one of their earliest pieces, The King Story. You seated a which is on either side. A before large red cloth supported by poles head with a crown rises from behind and small, roughly modeled puppet a a announces that he is the King of country threatened by Dragon. He a does not know what to do. A White Knight in horned helmet, and with to an enormous fist and sword offers kill the Dragon. The King asks his all the The Advisers and People and they counsel against using Knight. 71 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org a King decides to, in spite of them, and in slow dream-like sequence the Knight kills the Dragon, and then the King, Advisers, and People in order. As the Knight stands alone, seemingly triumphant, Death emerges from screen in a a behind the mask that is half skull, half helmet, with body of in a rags. He wrestles the Knight slow dance and finally kills him. In this drastically simple moral and political context, Uncle Sam is transformed an enormous a a into Uncle Fatso, puppet with bloated face and single fist carries a a that cigar like bomb, the emblem of greed and ruthless power. these concerns a Underlying moral and political is religious vision that as its main resurrection are chooses symbols and redemption. These made not Man impersonal and public, emblems of personal salvation. The Dead is an a a Rises early example of this theme. In darkened loft, small, dim spot before a screen. An of light appears gray painted fabric attendant, barely visible in black robes, kneels at the side. A tall white puppet, the Woman, enters slowly circles the stage and the light. The attendant whispers a a to through megaphone, and rings bell distinguish the "speakers." WHERE ARE YOU GOING? (Bell) IAM GOING TO THE RIVER. (Bell) WHY ARE YOU GOING? (Bell ) THE RIVER IS COLD. (Bell) WHERE IS THE RIVER? (Bell) THE RIVER IS FAR AWAY. woman The attendant breathes heavily into the megaphone while the walks around the circle of light. and abstracted in With these few beginning words and actions, stylized a manner, we have been carried into world of profound inwardness. The power and the suddenness of the artifice?disconnected speakers engaging an the absence of and the in interior dialogue, oversized puppets, color, of the the action in a dream physical helplessness puppet figures?place realm that has many features of the inner lives of children, another aspect one that is a clue to the dramatic force of the Bread of primitivism, and the resurrection of the dead man as a and Puppet. The primitive morality, in the reward for the devotion of the woman, is keeping with technique. Woman this is not and Despite the inwardness, the of play individualized, work is still on the nature of the re the emphasis throughout the public for ligious issues, the implications public morality. use a and an in The of Bread is part of the public ritual of communion You are at an Easter have been tegral part of the theater. sitting Play, you enormous a witness to the Passion and the puppets which grew for the event in a before the Cross. The have great lie collapsed heap puppeteers 72 crawled out, shrunken after the event to their normal size. They pass through the audience handing out chunks of bread. It is not the usual mush a not but dark, heavy bread, made of hand ground rye, flour, and it in a requires strong teeth. You sit there communal ritual tearing at it one murderously. Is there only myth and ritual? The puppeteer who hands me the bread is a friend. I is a nice whisper: "Mayra, what Jewish girl like you doing here?" are "What you doing here?" am From what I defending myself with bad tasting jokes? This event is different the at to quite from audience role Riverside Church, listening the B Minor or at we are Mass, hearing vespers the Camaldoli Hermitage: a sharing chaw of the seasonal god. In this theater the bread is a direct assault on aesthetic distance. as an In the setting of the Easter Play, bread is offered echo of the Eucharist and one is thrust into the role of the surprised communicant, but in its is more The is an os other pieces function modest. bread offering, it an tentatiously so, and therefore has unavoidable ceremonial flavor. is is Something shared, and the audience jarred out of passivity by the act a of eating together. Schumann intends the bread to be reminder that you come to the theater not just for entertainment, which is for the skin, but also for vital sustenance, which is for the stomach. That he should assign a this meaning reveals the habits of mind of confirmed allegorist, since it is, after all, gratuitous. Since he leaves out sustenance for the head and a an heart, it also suggests that he is primitive and anti-sentimentalist. are all created like in The puppets by Schumann, almost everything else over the theater. He makes them of celastic clay molds, and they vary in size from six inches to over 20 feet. The torso and limbs are cloth, and the expressiveness of the puppets is in the molded heads and hands. Schumann an are says that "Puppet theater is extension of sculpture," and his masks means. use the They the past boldly, and suggest African, pre-Columbian and Asiatic masks, Easter Island Heads, Chinese Temple sculpture, Lehm are bruck, Grosz; the dragons mostly Oriental, but the most wonderful set seem of monsters, large yellow heads with small monsters in their mouths, right out of Bosch. most The puppets create the first and striking impression of this theater, the miraculous sense of the static mask in motion, where the few words come inwardness of a through with the possession by great force?through inner movement the face of the sleeper into the of the dream. But Schu are mann's puppets quite unlike the masks of Attic drama. The voice that is not the are. One rings through them individual: only masks responds to to a since are the puppet, not person revealed through words, the words the but a narrator off to the side. seldom spoken by puppets, by 73 move a The puppets with dream-like Tightness that is adapted to their ones move size. The large slowly, occasionally breaking the pace with are not startling and often terrifying suddenness. We dealing with pompous a sense solemnity, but with of motion that the subconscious recognizes. to can Visually it is similar film, which condense time and action, alternate scenes, and shift focus with the subjective freedom of the dream.1 (Think of scenes us how chase let experience simultaneously the desperate scramble of flight and implacable pursuit. ) Likewise, the puppets move with a sense not of but of those distortions to an sense unreality proper inward of reality, for their size and motion have the air of dream. Thus this theater can deal utterly unselfconsciously with the fabulous: THERE ISA DEAD MAN LYING IN THE RIVER. (Bell) WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE DEAD MAN? (Bell) IWILL TIE THE MAN TO THE BACK OF THE RIVER AND TAKE HIM TO MY HOUSE. (Bell) (From The Dead Man Rises) seems more In this context nothing natural than the resurrection that fol to a lows. In Ordet, Carl Dreyer tries force resurrection out of the fabulous into the we and casual world of plots and motives where explain magic as a a away violation of confidence, sleight of hand, and whatever power it on has in Ordet depends entirely its outrageousness, whereas the power of on our The Dead Man Rises depends initial acceptance of the moony world where resurrection is normal.