Vermont's Bread & Puppet Company Comes To Contemporary Theater Company

Bread & Puppet goes to The Contemporary Theater Company on Wednesday, March 23 at 7 pm in Wakefield, RI with Finished Waiting, a new show created this winter by B&P director, Peter Schumann and the storied Vermont troupe of puppeteers, carpenters, bus drivers, musicians, dancers, agitators and bread-bakers - many of whom do all of the above in the process of inventing Bread & Puppet's aesthetically iconic and politically plainspoken shows and bringing them to audiences far and wide.

Finished Waiting is a show for this moment of political, social, ecological and epidemiological rupture and uncertainty, a moment in which many feel the seduction of a stance of waiting: waiting for the pandemic to be over, for better leaders to be elected, for actions to be taken by the powerful to respond to ecological catastrophe, for families to be reunited or seemingly eternal wars to end.

What do we do and where do we go when we're finished waiting? What transformations might be possible in our lives and in our politics if we stopped waiting for them to change, or for others to change first? How is it possible to recognize the moment in which we can set waiting aside and set out toward something - and, as importantly, how can we recognize the moment in which we can, at last, lay aside cherished innocences or bootless hopes, see what is for what it is, and act accordingly? How can it become possible for us to arise together and promote the arising of new worlds of collective possibility through collective uprising?

Bread & Puppet promotes such practices of rising in the provocative terms of "Domestic Resurrection" - under the banner of which aesthetic and spiritual sublimity are not at odds with political stridency and the simple, sustaining rhythms of household chores.

In Finished Waiting, Bread & Puppet invites audiences throughout the Northeast to harken to these practices of uprising, and take heart from them - as we all participate in the satisfaction of another, equally fundamental kind of waiting: the waiting for spring's arrival after a long winter. With this show, Bread & Puppet seems to call on us to recognize how nature itself shows us what is possible - what can arise - when we abandon waiting and embrace transformation.

According to Schumann the show will star "the clock and its customers, skies, cities, mountains, forward dancers, backward dancers, a stop officer, and an eye divinity who teaches seeing to non-suspecting eyes."

After the performance Bread & Puppet will serve its free sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread & Puppet's "Cheap Art" - books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press - will be for sale.