Abstract
In House of War, his masterful history of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century, James Carroll traces the development of the power of the Pentagon and the conflicted rise of American hegemonic ideology, in a quest to discover what happened “when the impersonal forces of mass bureaucracy … were joined to the critical mass of nuclear power.”1 Carroll traces this history by focusing on certain key events: the development of aerial bombardment in World War Two as a method of mass destruction; the extension of this philosophy into the use of nuclear weapons; the cold war and its repressive ideological consequences; the Vietnam War and the success of antiwar street demonstrations and the rise of peaceful opposition to that war; the 1970s Central American wars, and the rise of a sanctuary movement to protect refugees from that conflict in the United States; the success of the nuclear freeze movement and its articulation of an antinuclear future; and finally the paroxysms of George Bush’s “war on terrorism” and its concomitant invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As I read Carroll’s book I was struck again and again by how the pivotal events of the past century, which Carroll describes in terms of both personal and global significance, were also pivotal moments in the work of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater.
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Notes
James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006) xiv.
Peter Schumann, Resistance to the Worthlessness of the Machine Operated Details of Life, Resistance woodcut series (Glover, VT: Bread and Puppet Theater, 1998).
For a specific instance of this see Robin Lloyd, dir., Bread and Puppet Pageant 93: The Convention of the Gods. Green Valley Media, 1994.
Ibid. 320; Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994) 135.
See Peter Schumann, The Radicality of the Puppet Theater, The Drama Review 35.4 (Winter 1991): 75–76.
See Peter Schumann, “Puppetry and Politics,” in Bread and Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith fom Central America, ed. Susan Green (Burlington, VT: Green Valley Film and Art, 1985) 12
For a concise record of Bread and Puppet’s work in these and other years, see Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, 2 vols. (New York: Methuen, 1988).
See San Francisco Mime Troupe, Radical Theater Festival (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Mime Troupe, 1969): 5.
See Scott Nearing and Helen Nearing, Living the Good Life (New York: Schocken, 1990).
See John Bell, “The Nineteenth Annual Domestic Resurrection Circus,” Theatre 18.3 (1987): 35–42; and “The End of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus: Bread and Puppet and Counterculture Performance in the 1990s,” Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects, ed. John Bell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) 52–70.
Davison Budhoo, “IMF/World Bank Wreak Havoc on Third World,” in Fifty Years Is Enough: The Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ed. Kevin Danaher (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994) 20.
Davison Budhoo, Enough Is Enough (New York: Apex Press, 1990).
For a description and the text of this show, see Peter Schumann, “The Foot,” Theatre 22.3 (1991): 4–6
John Bell, “Bread and Puppets Street Theater Picture Stories,” Theatre 22.3 (1991): 7–8.
See especially Susan Davis, Parades and Power (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986).
John Bell, “Fight against the End of the World,” Theater Week Magazine February 6, 1982: 20–27; Brecht vol. 2, 631–644.
For an example of this form, see John Bell, “The Bread and Puppet Theater in Nicaragua,” New Theatre Quarterly 5.17 (1989): 8–22.
William Anderson, Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1990).
H. Brown and J. Seitz, “With the Bread and Puppet Theatre: An Interview with Peter Schumann (1968),” in The Drama Review: Thirty Years of Commentary on the Avant-Garde, ed. Brooks McNamara and Jill Dolan (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986) 146.
Grace Paley, “Feelings in the Presence of the Sight and Sound of the Bread and Puppet Theater,” in Bread and Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith from Central America, Comp. Susan Green (Burlington, VT: Green Valley Film and Art, 1985) 7.
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© 2008 John Bell
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Bell, J. (2008). Beyond the Cold War: Bread and Puppet Theater at the End of the Century. In: American Puppet Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613768_11
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