Bread and Puppet Theater brings its political circus show to Connecticut

The legendary Vermont political performance troupe Bread and Puppet Theater returns to Connecticut with its “The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus.”

Bread and Puppet presents socially relevant theater using a range of puppetry styles, pageantry, ritualistic staging techniques, speeches and broadsides, signage and an earthy natural energy.

Two performances are schedule in Connecticut, with the first at the Open Farm House in Redding at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday and outside the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center for Literary Activism at 77 Forest St. in Hartford at 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann described “The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus” as involving “tigers teaching the congress of cowards how to jump over billionaires and acquire the courage to not pay for the atrocities of the latest genocide; the proverbial sheep of the system refusing to be sheep and committing revolution against the system; and the blue horses of the peace and harmony terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population and then galloping over the ruins of the truth industry.”

Bread and Puppet began in the 1960s in New York City, where their giant puppets were a striking visual element of protest marches of that era. In the 1970s, Bread and Puppet moved to Vermont and eventually settled on farmland in the town of Glover. For many years, large summer festivals were held on the property but for the past few decades, they have scaled down to a summer performance series, community gatherings and a museum of puppets and other items from the hundreds of shows they have done over the years.

Bread and Puppet Theater tours in the fall. The Redding and Hartford performances are happening at the end of the current tour, which has brought the troupe to New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh and many other cities.

The company has regularly performed in Middletown and Storrs in recent years but has not played in Hartford in a long time. One of the most memorable Bread and Puppet performances in Connecticut was on New Haven Green for the first International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 1996, with Schumann doing a solo puppet performance indoors at the same festival. In April 2022, Bread and Puppet performed its modern adaptation of Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy “The Persians” at the University of Connecticut, as well as some street pageantry and a lecture by Schumann, who turned 90 earlier this year.

The Oct. 12 performance at the Stowe Center has a suggested donation of $10 to $25, with “no one turned away for lack of funds.” For more information on Bread and Puppet Theater, go to breadandpuppet.org .