BELLOWS FALLS — Bread and Puppet Theater presents The Birdcatcher in Hell at Bellows Falls Opera House on Thursday, May 29, at 7 p.m.
Done as kyÅgen, or comic interlude in the Japanese Noh cycle, this play was created in 1971 at Goddard College in response to President Nixon's pardon of Lt. William Calley, the only American soldier convicted over 1968's My Lai Massacre.
The text also features passages of slaughter and mayhem from Homer's “Iliad.”
Now, 43 years after its first performance, several of the original performers are taking part in the effort along with the Bread and Puppeteers. Lila Winstead, with community help, reprinted the many costumes and banners from the original masonite cuts.
This reconstruction effort also touches on contemorary issues with regard to torture and war crimes.
The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City's Lower East Side. In addition to rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood.
More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew larger.
Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street. During the Vietnam War, Bread and Puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people.
In 1974 Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom. The 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Their Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two-day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.
The company earns its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad, and from sales of Bread and Puppet Press' posters and publications.
The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company to extensive outdoor pageants that require the participation of many volunteers.
Today, Bread and Puppet is one of the nation's most venerable nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies.