The apocalypse never stops. A month after “The End Is Nigh” wrapped its run at The Foundry and the “ThotBot Implantation Center” art installation shut down at Bow Market, The Bread & Puppet Theater returns to Somerville with “The End of the World Never Minding Show.”
The 63-year-old Vermont political theater troupe comes to Arts at the Armory on April 22-23 with what it calls “an urgently needed new puppet show” – words many thought they’d never hear, but capturing a Trumpian dystopia that needs barely a touch of Bread & Puppet surrealism to be any more bizarre. The show, the troupe said Friday, stages an “upside-down situation, a revolt orchestra, screaming choirs and a reckoning with the catastrophe of logic.”
Seems familiar. Somerville artist Rebecca Kopycinski said her recurring, interactive “Thotbot” was inspired by the politics of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when she asked herself “What if Donald Trump won?” Liars and Believers, a Cambridge theater and clown troupe, crafted “The End Is Nigh” as a game show starring the horsemen of a contemporary apocalypse: disease, famine and war being the constants.
The game is designed to torture its contestants. Artistic director Jason Slavick, who said he is upfront about his “political and social goals,” described how the show came about in the aftermath of Trump winning (and the world losing): “The impulse to make this play really came out of despair. The only thing to do is laugh about it.”
Bread & Puppets director Peter Schumann is more elliptical in explaining “The End of the World Never Minding Show,” though the meaning is clear:
“Fears chase the populations across the face of the earth. Humanity’s humdrum is now outrageous and no longer composed of beloved details. The rats in charge of spreading the plague are ordered to repurpose human freedom and democracy into guns, bombs and starvation. Our own futuristic Not-Yet is impatient and unready.”
Like Slavick, Schumann doesn’t know what to do with the horrors of disease, famine and war – all creating refugees with fewer and fewer places to find sanctuary – except make fun in fantastical ways and imagine a happy outcome. As with all Bread & Puppet shows, the event is musical and strange, filled with dance, slapstick and circus and featuring puppet giant and small. It’s performance art as street theater.
“We must take our cardboard provocations into the revolting streets of life, with help from our papier-mâché divinities, to succeed and succeed,” Schumann said.
The Bread & Puppet nonprofit was founded by Schumann in 1963 in New York City’s Lower East Side, but since the early 1970s has operated out of a farm in Glover, Vermont, from which it ventures forth in tireless touring, including to nontraditional venues such as churches, schools and outdoor sites such as Cambridge Common. Like the activist street bands who come to Honk! in Somerville every fall, Bread & Puppet marches in a lot of parades.
It regularly tours Europe and Canada as well as the United States, the troupe said, and has recently visited El Salvador, Haiti, Russia and Korea.
After every show, troupe members serve sourdough rye bread with aioli and sell “Cheap Art” such as books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from its own Bread & Puppet Press. The sales help subsidize the travels and free or low-cost tickets: Though shows at the Armory are officially $22, no one is turned away for lack of funds. More information about the troupe is here.
“The End of the World Never Minding Show” on April 22 and April 23 at Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Ave., Spring Hill, Somerville. $22 or name your own price.
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