PUTNEY — Bread & Puppet Theater returns to Next Stage in Putney, Saturday, March 24, with a new play, The Basic Bye-bye Show, which it calls a poem on transformation inspired by Dürer's apocalyptic woodcuts, Brahms' 4 Serious Songs, and the daily news.
In The Basic Bye-bye Show, a series of “quiet object fantasies” unfolds in black, white, and grey inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words - “Resist,” “Bread,” “Yes,” “Sky,” “Riot,” “Byebye.”
Outside, an orchestra of nonsense instruments arises, spins, and recedes. A birch forest grows. Sculpted clouds produce hands, chairs, and rain. The storm passes. The episodes that make up The Basic Bye-bye Show develop “in abstract counterpoint to periodic handkerchief-assisted 'basic bye-byes' to various brutal unnecessities of our current politics,” according to a news release.
In the news release, B&P Director Peter Schumann said “The Basic Bye-bye Show is based on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet - which is why our show proclaims the Possibilitarian's basic bye-bye to capitalism in order to welcome the 1,000 alternatives to this rotten system."
After the performance, Bread and Puppet will serve its famous free sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread and Puppet's “Cheap Art” - books, posters, postcards, pamphlets, and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press - will be for sale.
The Bread and Puppet Practitioners-of-the-Pursuit-of-What String Band will welcome the public.