The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus

A small brass orchestra. Tables of booklets and postcards, some priced half off after being left in the rain. An Emceewalking around the audience, handing out programs, holding a papier-mâché top hat for donations, repeatedly encouraging everyone to sit closer. A grassy stage with a backdrop depicting twin suns and a cluster of inscrutable figures born aloft by a single set of wings, draped in front of a repainted school bus. On October 2nd, 2024, the Bread and Puppet Theater visited Bowling Green Ohio on tour, presenting The Beginning after the End of Humanity Circus on the lawn behind Bowling Green State University’s Wolfe Center for the Arts.

After some introductions, the show began, a series of vignettes that used a variety of masks and puppets, each loudly and presentationally announced. In one of the first, a figure labeled “Empire” was attacked by a trio of grim reapers before being defibrillated by a set of figures labeled “Lockheed Martin,” “Amazon,” “Boeing,” “Nestle,” and “Monsanto.” However, some sort of flying pig managed to deal a blowto Empire that the corporations could not heal. This sketch set the tone for many that would follow, all enthusiastically received by the audience. One notable scene presented The World’s Most Useful Billionaire, a colossal papier-mâché figure which was attacked by said pig and then devoured by tigers. What struck me at that moment was that, although the intent seemed transgressive, the cheers from the audience revealed that no transgression had occurred. I realized that even if a billionaire had been present, the display would have come across as a reenactment of ad-nauseam twitter discourse, not a serious confrontation. Likewise, when the cast recounted the chain of command that led to the July 2024 death of Muhammed Bhar, pointing to the voters who elected the politicians who funded the military who ordered a dog to attack him, my immediate reaction was not anger, dismay or shame, but that I already knew my congressman was a war criminal. Although the style was confrontational and activistic, nobody seemed offended, shocked, or even surprised. The performance also featured a stage-struck chicken (or turkey?) dancing to Edith Piaf’s “Milord,” a flock of migratory birds meant as a celebration of human migration, and it closed with a story of the Jenin Horse, and a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Robert Brustein opens_The Theatre of Revolt_ by drawing a distinction between the “theatre of communion…where traditional myths were enacted before an audience of believers against the background of a shifting but still coherent universe”1 and revolt, “where myths of rebellion are enacted…in a flux of vacancy, bafflement, and accident.”2 In the theatre of revolt, “[n]o longer the spokesman for the audience, or its paid entertainer, the dramatist becomes its adversary.” Although the Bread and Puppet performance was rebellious against a system, the audience was not under attack. In “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup,” Scott Alexander argues that when pundits criticize groups of which they are a part, they don’t actually mean themselves or their friends, therefore making their “humble self-criticism” insincere3. Likewise, “the voters” who indirectly killed Muhammed Bhar meant someone else, not the audience present, even if some members of the audience may have voted for politicians who voted to fund Israel’s military operations.

Brustein goes on to say that “[t]he theatre of revolt…is the temple of a priest without a God, without an orthodoxy, without even much of a congregation.”4 I would argue that, literal metaphysics aside, the performance established an orthodoxy, one that was enthusiastically embraced by its congregation. Ultimately, the performance was a celebration of shared values, both responding to and reinforcing the cultural identity of the audience. Rather than propagandistic, it was communal. As stories from the news were built into cultural myths, the audience’s cultural identity coalesced as carriers of these myths. One such myth was the story of Crystal Mason, which was told to the audience as puppets enacted key moments. In this myth, Mason was sentenced to prison for attempting to vote in 2016, got her conviction overturned, and is currently fighting to have the overturning upheld. The myth that was performed made no mention of her legal ineligibility to vote because of a prior conviction of tax evasion. Thus, the story of a black woman accused of voter fraud over a misunderstanding transformed into a myth of a black woman persecuted for attempting to vote in the first place. This myth shaped the audience’s collective relationship to their country: I would argue that these two versions of the story warrant different responses, and by invoking in the audience the latter, the company of the show gave the audience an identity they would not receive elsewhere, setting them apart from the world but closer to each other. This performance was a part of the Theatre of Communion, bringing its audience together, a conduit for shared understanding and identity, separate from certain outside institutions, but not separate from its pre-show self.

The performance contained one vignette in which a performer announced that the goats had the garlic, which meant there would be bread and garlic aioli after the performance ended. This is a tradition as old as Bread and Puppet Theater itself: the Company’s website tells of how at the beginning of its history, the cast “would distribute [founder Peter] Schumann’s bread to the audience who would slowly chew the coarse sourdough as the puppet performance ensued.”5 Over the years, this tradition has transformed from a practical to a symbolic feeding: when I got to the front of the line, I received a sliver of bread about an inch square. Thus, the Communion was complete.

1. Brustein 4

2. Ibid

3. Alexander

4. Brustein 16

5. Bread and Puppet

Works Cited

Alexander, Scott. “I Can Tolerate Anything except the Outgroup.” Slate Star Codex, October 2014. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/.

Bread and Puppet Board of Directors. “About B & P’s 50 Year History.” Bread and Puppet Theater, n.d. https://breadandpuppet.org/about-b-ps-50-year-history.

Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama. Little, Brown, 1964.