Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater

Rating:
Summary: Important, thoughtful, beautiful work. Ah!
Review: This is a simply breathtaking book, a wonderful and sorely needed piece of work. It captures in one volume a sample of the beauty and intelligence of the Bread & Puppet Theater which has not been recorded before. This radical puppet theater troupe, directed by the venerated Peter Schumann, is among the most important in the postwar theater; it is influenced by Brecht and hippie culture, but its work is unlike anything else before or since, and its brilliance has not yet been chronicled, much less sufficiently appreciated by criticism.

You can use it as a one-stop introduction to the Bread & Puppet Theater -- something which has long been needed, for the radical puppeteers have been among the most important artists of the last half-century but also the least known (at least outside radical politics and the Northeastern U.S.). And you can, and should, read it to reflect on the beauty of Bread & Puppet even if you already know the theater well. Ronald Simon's photos are stunning examples of spontaneous photography, capturing the essential feeling of being around Bread & Puppet, and are beautifully reproduced here at a decent size. Marc Estrin's essays on clusters of little topics -- World, Bread, Fiend, Human -- capture some lovely details and meditate intelligently on the life and aims of the theater. Read George Dennison's book (An Existing Better World) as well, but this is the place your Bread & Puppet reading should begin.