Stage

...He is to carry Christ to the heathen...

...Setting up shop on killing ground, Bread and Puppet is life-affirming...

...Columbus's trees bear a strange fruit...

...The Inside Story was presented at The Painted Bride Art Center, the city's most imaginative venue for music, dance, and performance art...

...It is played in two parts—The Inside Story and The Outside Story—which have little to do with the hidden and the surface accounts of Columbus's adventures...

...Columbus, in his new image, is a natural for familiar Bread and Puppet themes: the horrors of war, capitalistic greed, environmental desecration, the conquest of native peoples...

...and blunt statements—spoken or printed on banners—proclaiming the social and economic sins against which the productions struggle...

...Although the polemical element is central to what Bread and Puppet is trying to do, the primary quality of its work is festive...

...In the case of Bread and Puppet, however, my discomfort grows out of the fact that it is so much more forceful in what it does than in what it says...

...When Bread and Puppet plays inside, the evening traditionally opens with a free preshow on the street, which includes a lively band and stilt walkers...

...10038 productions—raise the image of the crucified Christ, but they do so by renailing him to the cross, the continuing crucifixion on the new-world stage...

...The title echoes President George Bush's post-Desert Storm slogan, and the action of The Inside Story is punctuated by an off-stage voice describing the technical and lethal properties of the weapons used in that campaign...

...The Inside Story, as a program note says, is "the story of his fateful name: Christopher, the Christbearer, and Columbus, the Dove, bringer of peace or at least the peculiar peace of subjugation and outright genocide...

...he Outside Story seems less unified than the Inside one, but that is because it makes use of the natural setting, a great number of volunteers, and the giant figures for which Bread and Puppet is famous...

...Once the new order is established, the crew members—wearing the thug-like masks that are often used in Bread and Puppet Have you renewed your Associate membership...

...The Outside Story may have been about an outrage on James Bay, but in itself it was a celebration on the Miquon hillside...

...The Outside Story took place on the grounds of the Miquon School, an experimental school which was having a birthday of its own—its sixtieth...

...Friends of mine, whose children (Miquon schoolers) declined to perform, became children themselves in their delight in being part of a massive production that had come together in only a few days...

...After Columbus's election (he wears an all-purpose American-hero head that looks as much like George Washington as it does Columbus), he is taken to worship before the cross, and the Christ figure is taken down and placed on his back...

...I must admit that I am probably at fault for wanting complexity in a complex world, because the genre does not have room for a Columbus who has both the imagination to sail the ocean and the failure of imagination in bringing the worst of the old world with him...

...How much more impressive is the scene in which Columbus presents his plan ("His Vision of the World" to the Spanish court, great flat figures which seem to change expression as they are tipped one way or another, unable or unwilling to accept him until Queen Isabella—a three-dimensional figure—enters and gives the journey her blessing...

...even the irony of the weapons' descriptions is self-defeating because the satiric point is made quickly and finally buried under the weight of repetition...

...This quality can be seen in two extra-dramatic devices...

...GERALD WEALES 22:19 June 1992 Commonweal...

...This is explanation, explication...

...This leads to a sense of fun that pervades the work, making puppet villains almost likable—comic, at least...

...Benefactors $1,000 Supporters $500 Patrons $250 Charter $125 Sustaining $50 •••*••• Commonweal Associates 15 Dutch Street NX N.Y...

...The other ritual, which puts the Bread in the company name, is the passing out of warm bread, newly baked in an improvised oven, which customarily brings outside productions to a close in a love feast...

...The joyful aspect of the group is most evident in the obvious pleasure of the hard-working volunteers...

...Despite my sympathy with the Bread and Puppet positions, I am uncomfortable in the face of directness that sometimes seems simple-minded...

...Peter Schumann's political puppetry has always been an uneasy mixture of highly imaginative presentation through masks, puppet figures, processions, flags, and mechanical devices...

...19 June 1992:21 It is the revisionist Columbus that we get from Bread and Puppet, the colonialist who brings civilization (i.e., destruction) to the indigenous people, who brings order to the new world on the assumption that none exists there...

...Although the struggle over the James Bay project has taken some interesting turns recently (Governor Mario Cuomo rejected it), which Bread and Puppet cannot or has not incorporated into its presentation, the theme here is destruction...

...It was raining the night I saw The Inside Story, so the preshow had moved inside the Painted Bride art gallery where a dainty young woman high up on stilts, kicked spiritedly to raggedy jazz...

...the titles designate where the parts are performed...

...In this part of the story, Columbus and his crew (now in suits and ties) operate in the contemporary world, continuing the five-hundred-year-old invasion by building Hydro-Quebec on James Bay, destroying native habitat...

...Bread and Puppet is allied to agitprop, cartoon, demonstration, forms of politics/art that necessarily keep the messages aggressively simple...

...The two anniversaries have come together in Christopher Columbus: A New World Order, a traveling production which I saw in Philadelphia early in May...

...An elaborate machine is raised to which, one after another, the tree branch horns are attached and then pulled away, carrying the covering with them and exposing huddled, frightened figures—flats once again—that are eventually knocked over, left sprawling...

...There are other highly effective images, like the tree which shakes in trepidation as its treasures are removed to welcome Columbus, only to be replaced by hanging figures as performers playing the Indians slip out of their masks and robes, leaving the empty figures waving on the branches...

...The most effective image is a parade of caribou—variations on the old two-man vaudeville horse with tree branches for horns—which ambles prettily down a hillside, only to be dehorned by Indians who have been co-opted by the thug-businessmen-bureaucrats...

...Or not the right kind of order...