FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington is excited to once again welcome the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater to the Emery Community Arts Center for a performance at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 28.
The theater company will be presenting a new play, “The Basic Bye-Bye Show,” a manifesto on transformation inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts, birch branches lost during an ice storm, and the daily news.
One of the longest-running, nonprofit, self-supporting theater companies in the U.S., the Bread and Puppet Theater uses performance to protest the most urgent political issues of our time.
In “The Basic Bye-Bye Show,” a series of quiet object fantasies unfolds in black, white and gray inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words. 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 show’s episodes develop in abstract counterpoint to various brutal non-necessities of our current politics.
According to Peter Schumann, director, the 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 of our planet. Schumann founded the theater company in 1963, on New York City’s Lower East Side. In 1974, it moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where a 140-year-old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets.
After the performance, Bread and Puppet will serve its famous free sourdough rye bread with aioli.
Admission is by donation, $10-$25, with a sliding scale for seniors and students. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Tickets will be on sale in the Emery Community Arts Center lobby starting at 6 p.m. on the night of the performance. Advance tickets are available at Up Front and Pleasant Gourmet, 15 Front St., Farmington.
Bread and Puppet’s “Cheap Art,” including books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press, will be for sale at the performance.
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