The Bread and Puppet Theater (often known simply as Bread & Puppet) is a politically radical puppet theater, active since the 1960s, currently based in Glover, Vermont. Its founder and director is Peter Schumann.
The name Bread & Puppet derives from the theater's practice of sharing its own fresh bread, served for free with aioli, with the audience of each performance as a means of creating community, and from its central principle that art should be as basic to life as bread. Some have heard echoes of the Roman phrase "bread and circuses" or the labor slogan "Bread and Roses" in the theater's name as well, though these are not often mentioned in Bread & Puppet's own explanations of its name.
The Bread and Puppet Theater participates in parades including Fourth of July celebrations, notably in Cabot, Vermont, with many effigies including a satirical Uncle Sam on stilts.
Read more about Bread And Puppet Theater: History, Causes, Bread & Puppet Press, Critics' Comments, Reference in Popular Media
Famous quotes containing the words bread and, bread, puppet and/or theater:
“Union ... brothers ... Marx ... capital ... bread and butter ... love. It was all Greek to me.”
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“Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
—Bible: New Testament (KJ)
“The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“Since people no longer attend church, theater remains as the only public service, and literature as the only private devotion.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)