Despite Flaws, Troupe Delivers Powerful Message

By Sandy MacDonald, Globe Correspondent

A kind of intentional amateurishness is at the heart of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater, which has concretized and poeticized the concerns of the activist left for 43 years. Schumann's fat cats and timeless mourners saw us through the Vietnam War. It's fitting that they should again be mobilized, resurrected from their barn/museum in bucolic Glover, Vt., and called up for active duty.

Still, as a theatrical experience, the group's latest outing falls flat. To begin with, the setting Cambridge YMCA's neoclassical theater is not an ideal venue for Bread and Puppet, which prefers the free flow of nature or the streets. Here, a certain static quality is built in. One of the high points of the show actually occurs before it starts, when the Cambridge-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band convenes on the sidewalk to offer provocative revisions of old standards, such as "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," directed at the Bush administration. Even though it's essentially a pickup band, this is the Bread and Puppet we've come to know and cherish. Once the action moves to the stage, the show starts with a discomfiting frisson: the sight of the 72-year-old Schumann suddenly lurching onstage on 12-foot stilts, dressed as Uncle Sam. It's a staggering physical feat, and a taunt of sorts, as if to say, "I'm still here."

Schumann is, if anything, too present, serving not just as visionary but as conductor, choreographer, dance captain, and, occasionally, noodge. At one point on opening night, he bustled onstage to move one of the volunteer actors who was blocking the central action, performed by the company's handful of traveling principals, some of whom are strong presences (all are uncredited). The predominance of volunteers, alas, gave the proceedings the feel of a kindergarten pageant; had they been directed to look awkward and ill at ease, they could not have done any better.

The abstracted, list-style structure of the opening segment, "Passion of the Correct Moment" (choppy episodes titled "the correct teacher," "the correct method," "the correct news," etc.), is also problematic. Any buildup of emotional impact is squandered in this series of neo-vaudeville skits. Part 2, "The National Circus," continues a similar format, with each "chapter" ("FEMA," "Ancient History," "Modern History," for example) followed by an ineffectual "appropriate dance."

Of these tableaux, two stand out: the tuxedoed old gents of the FEMA bureaucracy literally throwing up their hands at the challenge of a roiling ooze (actors thrashing under black plastic), and the battle scenes of "Ancient History," in which two tyrants trade boasts ("I made their blood flow down the hills") against a background of chanted Latin. A slow-motion battle, waged with fly swatters, plungers, golf putters, and the like, ends with the two killing each other amid a sea of corpses. It's an indelible image, piercing the ages: All these millennia of advancing civilization, and yet our methods of conflict resolution remain unevolved.

Whatever the flaws of its current incarnation, Bread and Puppet continues to serve a vital role as cultural conscience. Every performance ends with a communion of sorts: slices of Schumann's dense rye bread because, as he explains in a manifesto, "All art is ashamed, angry, and desolate because of its impotence in the face of reality. . . . To put bread and puppets together in 1963 seemed like a correct first step in the fight for the immediate elimination of all evil."

You have to admire the scope of his vision, even if it's imperfectly conveyed in this latest offering.

©2005 The Boston Globe